No more copping out of climate conferences for Brazil

In 2018, after Jair Bolsonaro won the Brazilian general election, then-President Michel Temer withdrew Brazil’s bid to host the following year’s UN Climate Conference (COP25) at the president-elect’s request. 

Four years later, after Mr. Bolsonaro’s recent electoral defeat, Brazil returned to the spotlight in global climate debates with President-elect Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s attendance at COP27 in Egypt.

There, Lula met with foreign authorities and gave an impressive speech that symbolically launched Brazil as a candidate to host COP30 in the Amazon. While his participation in the summit was praised by the international community, it deeply angered the government. Mr. Bolsonaro, who never went to a COP, reportedly called Lula a “usurper,” accusing him of posing as the president.

This prompted many to look at Brazil’s participation in the climate change summit primarily as a story of a lame-duck president and domestic political competition. 

Undoubtedly, the success of Lula’s participation owes a lot to the twilight of the Bolsonaro administration, which would mean a much-awaited change in deforestation policies. A somewhat less intuitive but highly significant factor in this success has to do with the nature of contemporary climate governance and the growing importance of actors beyond national governments in this milieu. 

Brazil has a curious tradition in climate summits: it consistently registers among the largest official delegations. In Glasgow last year, Brazil brought the largest delegation, with 478 people. This year in Sharm el-Sheikh, it came second, with 574 members. 

Only a small share of these are government officials who effectively represent Brazil in negotiations at the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change. For the most part, “delegates” are actually observers at official negotiations, lobbying governments and organizing side events to share experiences and get their points across.

The decades-long tradition of including observers in official delegations fostered the development of...