Banners of various G20 leaders are displayed along a Johannesburg freeway, in Johannesburg, South Africa, November 20, 2025
WORLD leaders from the Group of 20 rich and developing economies broke with tradition and adopted a declaration at the start of their summit in South Africa on Saturday despite opposition from the United States.
The US is boycotting the two-day talks in a diplomatic rift with the host country and had put pressure on South Africa not to adopt a leaders’ declaration in the absence of a US delegation, South African officials said.
Vincent Magwenya, the spokesperson for South African President Cyril Ramaphosa, said that a leaders’ declaration was adopted unanimously by the other members at the start of the talks in Johannesburg.
Declarations are usually adopted at the end of G20 summits.
The 122-point declaration urged more global action on issues that specifically affect poor countries, like climate-related disasters and sovereign debt levels, and was promoted by the hosts as a victory for the first G20 summit to be held in Africa.
…
While President Ramaphosa’s spokesperson said the declaration was unanimous, Argentina said it did not endorse it.
Indigenous activists participate in a climate protest during the COP30 U.N. Climate Summit, November 17, 2025, in Belem, Brazil
CLIMATE activists slammed the lack of a meaningful deal as the United Nations Cop30 climate talks in Belem, Brazil, came to a close on Saturday.
The negotiators pledged more funding for countries to adapt to extreme weather. But the catch-all agreement doesn’t include explicit details to phase out fossil fuels or strengthen countries’ inadequate emissions-cutting plans, which dozens of nations demanded.
After the deal was approved, Cop30 president Andre Correa do Lago said that the tough discussions will continue under Brazil’s leadership until the next annual conference “even if they are not reflected in this text we just approved.”
UN secretary-general Antonio Guterres said the deal shows “that nations can still come together to confront the defining challenges no country can solve alone.”
He said: “I cannot pretend that Cop30 has delivered everything that is needed. The gap between where we are and what science demands remains dangerously wide.”
Amnesty International slammed the deal, accusing the leaders of placing “profit over people” and saying it lacked “accountability and transparency.”
Amnesty said that “the final document avoided any mention of fossil fuels, the primary driver of climate change, failing to build on or even to reaffirm the commitment to ‘transition away’ from fossil fuels agreed upon in Cop28.
“A record number of fossil fuel lobbyists at Cop30 showed who had the real access, leaving humanity, especially those already the most marginalised, to suffer the deadly consequences of their plans to continue fossil fuel expansion and to be the ones to pump the last barrel of oil,” said Amnesty climate justice adviser Ann Harrison.
The Elders group of former world leaders said: “Cop30 didn’t deliver the results needed. Major emitters have blocked a roadmap to phase out fossil fuels.”
Orcas discuss Donald Trump and the killer apes’ concept of democracy. Front Orca warns that Trump is crashing his country’s economy and that everything he does he does for the fantastically wealthy.Donald Trump urges you to be a Climate Science denier like him. He says that he makes millions and millions for destroying the planet, Burn, Baby, Burn and Flood, Baby, Flood.Nigel Farage urges you to ignore facts and reality and be a climate science denier like him and his Deputy Richard Tice. He says that Reform UK has received £Millions and £Millions from the fossil fuel industry to promote climate denial and destroy the planet.
The UK has announced much harsher rules for asylum seekers including the prospect of more deportations for those whose applications fail. The US is trebling the size of its deportation force. The EU is doubling its border budgets. And in the coming decades, hundreds of millions of people might be displaced by ecological changes.
In the face of this challenge, those countries which are most responsible for climate change have two options. Either they can share resources more equitably, and fund adaptation plans on a massive scale. Or they can prevent others from accessing resources and liveable land through physical and regulatory walls, enforced through mass deportation.
Recent events show that, faced with this choice, many governments are choosing not to share resources to anywhere near the extend needed, and are instead building higher walls.
Climate change is already making life unliveable in some parts of the world. According to a 2020 report from thinktank the Institute for Economics and Peace (IEP), 2.6 billion people face high or extreme water stress. By 2040, this may jump to 5.4 billion. Droughts, heatwaves, floods, cyclones, food shortages and related conflicts will force millions from their homes.
Most of these people will move internally within nations, but this too is likely to mean more walls and borders. In very unequal countries, internal migration has already triggered security-driven responses, with a rise in gated communities and other segregated living arrangements to keep the poorer away from the wealthy.
Many other climate migrants will be pushed to travel internationally. It’s likely their motivation will be characterised by many as economic rather than due to climate change. But it’s misleading to separate “economic” from “climate” migrants. When drought kills crops in Somalia or floods wash away farmland in Pakistan, the loss of income is inseparable from the climate shocks that caused it.
Even before the worst impacts hit, climate change is already woven into the economic pressures that push people to move – shrinking harvests, emptying wells and ruining livelihoods. The most severe climate-driven displacement is still ahead, but it has already begun.
Importantly, these pressures come with inequalities in causing climate change and bearing the costs. The richest 1% of the world’s population produces as much carbon as the poorest two-thirds, according to a study of global emissions in 2019 by Oxfam. Northern Europe and the US alone account for 92% of historical emissions.
Those who have contributed the least to climate change are the worst affected and often have the fewest resources to adapt, forcing many people to migrate.
More walls, more deportations
In this context, governments of wealthier countries are massively increasing spending on migration policing. In the US, proposed funding levels are extraordinary.
Recent legislation allocates nearly US$30 billion (£22 billion) to the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency (Ice) for enforcement and deportation operations – roughly three times its current budget.
The US has also authorised US$45 billion for new detention centres – a 265% increase, more than the entire defence budget of Italy – and US$46.6 billion for additional border walls. Under this plan, Ice would become the largest US law enforcement agency, three times the size of the FBI.
Donald Trump’s policies can be easily labelled as the excess of one would-be autocrat, but this is a global trend across the political spectrum, albeit implemented with more acceptable language by the centre-left.
Introducing the UK Labour government’s new asylum and returns policy, Prime Minister Keir Starmer said: “We need an approach with a stronger deterrent effect and rules that are robustly enforced.” But previously-supportive MPs from his own party have warned this will mean “Ice-style raids” to deport asylum seekers.
The European Commission’s 2028–34 budget proposal earmarks €25.2 billion (£21.7 billion) for border management and €12 billion for migration, plus €11.9 billion for the Frontex border agency – more than double its current resources.
All this effectively triples current migration and border spending. In 2024, the EU ordered 453,000 non-EU nationals to leave, and actually deported 110,000 of them.
This is part of a much wider pattern, with borders today being far more militarised than at the end of the cold war. After decades of globalisation, states are now reterritorialising, building armoured fortifications against unwanted flows.
In the past two decades, more than 70 new international barriers have gone up, including Poland’s barbed-wire fence with Belarus, Greece’s steel wall on the Turkish border, Turkey’s stone wall on its Iranian border, and the new sections of the infamous wall between the US and Mexico.
Israel has built an “iron wall” around Gaza and border fences through much of the West Bank. Supposedly built to prevent Palestinians moving into Israel, these barriers have become a clear example of migration control tied to power grabs for land and resources.
A crossroads for human rights
Resource-driven migration pressures are rising just as the world is hardening its borders. In July 2025, the International Court of Justice declared that countries have a legal responsibility to address and compensate for climate change – and can be held accountable for their emissions. It is another signal that as humanity, we are at a crossroads.
The world can either prioritise universal human rights by sharing resources. Or it can attempt to protect a small, wealthy minority through walls, mass deportations and border violence on an unprecedented scale.
Keir Starmer refuses to be outcnuted by Nigel Farage’s chasing the racist bigot vote.Climate science denier Nigel Farage explains that it’s simple to blame asylum-seekers or Muslims for everything.
More than 160 governments are nominally signed up to the global methane pledge. Photograph: Orjan F Ellingvag/Corbis/Getty Images
Analysis published at Cop30 summit shows adhering to pledges offer world hope of avoiding climate breakdown
Sticking to three key climate promises – on renewables, energy efficiency and methane – would avoid nearly 1C of global heating and give the world hope of avoiding climate breakdown, analysis published at the Cop30 climate summit suggests.
Governments have already agreed to triple the amount of renewable energy generated by 2030, double global energy efficiency by then, and make substantial cuts to methane emissions.
If they follow through on these promises – still a big if, even though countries are meeting for climate crisis talks in Brazil this week – it would be a “gamechanger”, shaving 0.9C from projected temperature rises this century, according to the Climate Action Tracker coalition.
Achieving all of these measures, among G20 countries alone, would reduce global greenhouse gas emissions by 18bn tonnes in 2035 – enough to cut the rate of global heating by a third in the next decade, and halve it by 2040.
Bill Hare, chief executive of Climate Analytics, one of the organisations behind the report, said: “If [governments] achieve this by 2035, it would be a gamechanger, quickly slowing the rate of warming in the next decade and lowering global warming this century from 2.6C to about 1.7C.”
Orcas comment on killer apes destroying the planet by continuing to burn fossil fuels.Donald Trump urges you to be a Climate Science denier like him. He says that he makes millions and millions for destroying the planet, Burn, Baby, Burn and Flood, Baby, Flood.Nigel Farage urges you to ignore facts and reality and be a climate science denier like him and his Deputy Richard Tice. He says that Reform UK has received £Millions and £Millions from the fossil fuel industry to promote climate denial and destroy the planet.
A projection urges leaders to “get serious” about drawing down fossil fuel emissions in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil ahead of the United Nations Climate Change Conference on November 5, 2025. (Photo by Fabio Teixeira/Anadolu via Getty Images)
“We need to make sure that any and all plans towards a fossil fuel-free future are built with community and frontline needs at the heart, and implemented in a way that does not leave vulnerable communities behind.”
Despite concerns over the presence of hundreds of corporate lobbyists peddling “false solutions” at the United NationsClimate Change Conference in Belém, Brazil, campaigners on Monday expressed optimism about the “remarkable speed” with which global support has grown at the summit for a Transition Away From Fossil Fuels Roadmap.
Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva opened the Leader’s Summit on November 6 with a call for the TAFF Roadmap, which would build on the 2023 conference’s (COP28) promise to “transition away from fossil fuels” in a “just, orderly, and equitable manner.”
He urged leaders to map out how their countries will “overcome dependence on fossil fuels,” reverse deforestation, and mobilize resources to achieve those goals, as the presidencies of this year’s conference (COP30) and last year’s released a Baku to Belém Roadmap with a plan to mobilize $1.3 trillion per year in climate finance for developing countries.
350.org found on Monday that within nine days, support for the TAFF Roadmap grew from one to 62 countries.
Suluafi Brianna Fruean, a 350.org Pacific Council elder, acknowledged that a call for “a transition away from fossil fuels is not a new concept for the Pacific, it’s a demand we’ve made at every COP and every room we’ve been in.”
Still, she said, “the growing support for a roadmap to this reality is a sign that the age of fossil fuels is over. We need to make sure that any and all plans towards a fossil fuel-free future are built with community and frontline needs at the heart, and implemented in a way that does not leave vulnerable communities behind.”
“The presidency calls on developing countries to lead, prioritize public, grant-based, concessional finance to protect the world’s most vulnerable, and break the vicious debt cycle. However, it misses the urgency to simplify direct access to finance for communities, especially Indigenous peoples.”
350.org analyzed public statements and written inputs from countries and country groups to the COP30 presidency, and released its analysis of the conference’s momentum as the Brazil presidency released its “consultation text.”
That document lays out options for a final agreement at COP30, including “the ingredients for a highly ambitious outcome,” said 350.org.
Options in the text include establishing a three-year program to implement Article 9.1 in the Paris Agreement, which requires wealthy countries to finance adaptation and a transition away from fossil fuels for the Global South; tripling adaptation finance; and implementing Article 3.5 of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, which requires parties to support an economic system that leads “to sustainable economic growth and development in all parties… thus enabling them better to address the problems of climate change.”
“Finance is the engine of climate action. The presidency calls on developing countries to lead, prioritize public, grant-based, concessional finance to protect the world’s most vulnerable, and break the vicious debt cycle,” said Fanny Petitbon, France team lead for 350.org. “However, it misses the urgency to simplify direct access to finance for communities, especially Indigenous peoples, who hold solutions on the ground yet face enormous barriers to securing the funds needed to scale them up.”
A second package of options is set to be released in the coming days and “will cover the more technical negotiating areas,” according to the World Wildlife Fund (WWF).
Andreas Sieber, associate director of policy and campaigns at 350.org, credited Lula with injecting “real momentum into a global roadmap to move away from fossil fuels.”
But Sieber noted that Brazil recently gave its state-owned oil and gas company, Petrobras, license to drill a well in the Amazon rainforest, and Brazil is still one of the top 10 producers of crude oil globally.
“Lula spoke powerfully about justice and cooperation in a divided world, highlighting the need to get rid of fossil fuels and accelerate the energy transition,” Sieber toldArgus Media after the Leaders’ Summit. “But he cannot be both a champion of climate justice and one of the world’s biggest oil expanders.”
350.org added that in a TAFF Roadmap, “finance, technology transfer, and capacity-building must be central pillars—not peripheral details—if the transition is to lift up communities rather than deepen inequality.”
WWF also applauded the “momentum” at COP30, and urged “decisive political leadership” in order to “get back on track to the 1.5°C Paris Agreement temperature limit.”
Manuel Pulgar-Vidal, WWF global climate and energy lead, and the president of COP20, said that “COP30 could make history by agreeing on roadmaps for both a transition away from fossil fuels and to combat deforestation. It must also respond to the emissions gap in national climate plans, and make advances on finance, including to help countries adapt to climate change.”
Donald Trump urges you to be a Climate Science denier like him. He says that he makes millions and millions for destroying the planet, Burn, Baby, Burn and Flood, Baby, Flood.Nigel Farage urges you to ignore facts and reality and be a climate science denier like him and his Deputy Richard Tice. He says that Reform UK has received £Millions and £Millions from the fossil fuel industry to promote climate denial and destroy the planet.Orcas comment on killer apes destroying the planet by continuing to burn fossil fuels.
Banners of various G20 leaders are displayed along a Johannesburg freeway, in Johannesburg, South Africa, November 20, 2025
