Following the official UN synthesis reports by leading global climate monitoring bodies, including the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) and the UN Environment Programme (UNEP), the UN Secretary-General António Guterres formally stated that “humanity has missed the 1.5 °C goal.” The target to limit global warming to 1.5 °C above pre-industrial levels emerged in the Paris Agreement in 2015, and since then national leaders have been urged to cut emissions heavily. Since we are aiming at a “moving target”, the goal is now to cut emissions so that temperature overshoot is as small as possible, avoiding tipping points such as the transformation of the Amazonian forest into savannah, as Guterres said in his latest interview before COP30, to be held in Belém, Brazil, from 10 to 21 November 2025.

Aiming for pre-industrial levels of average temperatures in a heavily urbanised, industrialised and high-tech society built on extraction presents an impossible paradox. The UNEP Emissions Gap Report 2024 states that emission cuts of 42 per cent are needed by 2030 and 57 per cent by 2035 to get on track for 1.5 °C, while the report also states that global greenhouse gas emissions have risen from an average of 0.8 per cent pre-COVID to 1.3 per cent in 2023. The US backed off the Paris Agreement, China has not been sufficiently committed, and Europe, while committed, has failed to reach the target. Guterres urges national leaders and attendees of COP30 to commit to radical changes in their economies.

The interview with Guterres was conducted by global environment editor Jonathan Watts and Wajã Xipai, an Indigenous journalist from Amazonia, who said he feels the forest as his own body, and his body connected to every other body. Guterres agrees that “Indigenous communities are our defenders of nature, of the planet” and notes that the areas these communities control are the most biodiverse and actively sequester carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere. Indebtedness to these communities and the nature they protect is what Guterres aims to signal to world leaders, including Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. While promoting the idea of interconnectedness and introducing nature into cities, the urban perspective remains fundamentally different from that of Indigenous peoples living directly within and from the environments they inhabit. 

With dark scenarios now unfolding, what can be expected from events like COP30, if the steps remain incremental rather than radical or globally enforced, and therefore insufficient to meet self-imposed limits? It is dangerous to fall into indifference, acknowledging the failure and impossibility of common global endeavours or reverting society to pre-industrial conditions.