Belém, Brazil — [20th November 2025] — As world leaders gather in the Amazon at COP30, The Black Hive at The Movement for Black Lives (M4BL) demands that COP30 prioritize the specific and complex climate injustices, including environmental racism, shouldered by Global Afro Descendant communities at this critical moment. 

For the first time in UN climate history, negotiations include draft language explicitly naming people of African descent as communities whose rights, leadership, and protection must be recognized in climate policy. This recognition is long overdue—and it must be strengthened, not negotiated away or subjected to specious rhetoric that doesn’t lead to actionable initiatives. 

As COP30 convenes in Brazil—the nation with the largest population of Afro Descendants in the world outside of the African continent—this action is especially significant. Moreover, an estimated 200 million people of African descent reside in the Western Hemisphere, including the United States, Latin America, North America, and the Caribbean. In Brazil, more than half the population identifies as Black, so the call for inclusion and rights-based decisions and representation is more than symbolic. It is necessary to ensure justice for Black people everywhere.

The Charter of the United Nations itself names human rights as one of its four core pillars, and the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights states in Article 2 that “Everyone is entitled to all rights and freedoms set forth in the Declaration, without distinction of any kind such as race, color, sex, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth, or other status. As the 30th Conference of Parties convenes through the United Nations itself, we again affirm that Afro-descendant rights are human rights.” We align with the United Nations Permanent Forum on People of African Descent as it calls for climate action rooted in “human rights, climate justice and racial equity,” per its statement issued from Geneva on November 13, 2025, in anticipation of COP30.

Across the diaspora—from U.S. Gulf South communities facing petrochemical build-out, to Afro-Brazilian and Quilombola communities defending land and life in the Amazon, to the Pacific Afro Descendant communities of Colombia and Ecuador, to coastal and urban communities in the Caribbean—Global Afro Descendant people are living at the deadly intersection of climate change, colonialism, extractivism, and imperialism. They are also being subjected to governmental and economic systems that prioritize infinite growth on a finite planet, at the expense of people and the planet itself. 

Here at the COP30 in Belém, these dynamics are playing out in real time, as at least 1,600 fossil-fuel lobbyists are given access to global democracy while Global Afro Descendant people are denied entrance, badges, participation, agency, and their human rights. Instead of securing the support of governments that reside over our communities and nations, we are subjected to campaigns of erasure and invisibilization. 

We demand that the UNFCCC’s explicit recognition of people of Global African Descendants reflect and strengthen the existing global commitments already set by the UN Decade for People of African Descent and the Permanent Forum. This recognition must translate into real, practical access and decision-making power that guarantees the exercise of our human rights at every stage of these proceedings.

Today, we call on all Parties to:

1. Enshrine explicit and durable protection for Global Afro Descendants across all present and future COP30 decisions. This COP must agree to strong language explicitly naming people of African descent as communities whose rights, leadership, and protection must be recognized in all decision-making.

2. Deliver a full, fair, and funded phase-out of fossil fuels by 2030. Black communities globally remain on the frontline of refineries, petrochemical zones, and extraction sites, and we demand: (a) an immediate end to new fossil-fuel leases, permits, and infrastructure; (b) a global fossil-fuel non-proliferation treaty; (c) an end to all subsidies, insurance, and financing for fossil fuels; and (d) a massive investment in equitable, community-owned renewable energy.

3. Make polluters, not our communities, pay. Those who cause climate destruction must bear its cost. Multinational corporations, financial institutions, and fossil-fuel industries rather than everyday people must pay for the harms they inflict.

4. Fund a real, community-controlled Just Transition. A Just Transition must be shaped and led by Black, Indigenous, and frontline communities across the diaspora—not imposed from the top down. This requires: (a) direct investment in worker transition, economic diversification, and community self-determination; (b) constitutional and statutory rights to clean air, water, land, and environmental justice; and (c) investment in food sovereignty, ecological restoration, and community capacity.

5. Advance climate reparations and expand Loss & Damage funding. Climate reparations are a structural necessity. We demand: (a) full capitalization of the Loss and Damage Fund; (b) direct grants (not loans or insurance schemes) to Black and frontline communities; (c) cancellation of external debt for Black-majority countries; and (e) protection and legal status for climate-displaced people.

6. End the global military-industrial complex’s climate harm. Militarism accelerates climate injustice, and climate injustice, in turn, accelerates militarism. We call for demilitarization, full accounting of military emissions, and conversion of militarized lands to community use. Additionally, we call on all nations to interdict any and all instances of ecocide in Africa, throughout the African diaspora, and the world over, including but not limited to Palestine, the Sudan, and the Gulf South region of the United States. 

7. Enforce the International Court of Justice July 2025 Advisory Opinion. We affirm that demands and policy prescriptions without consequences are futile and irrelevant. To this end, we call on the UNFCCC to explicitly recognize the July 2025 Advisory Opinion of the International Court of Justice that stipulates all nation-states have a legal obligation to reduce emissions and protect the climate system from further harm pursuant to international law. Further, nation-states that fail to adhere to these obligations can be held legally accountable and directed to allocate reparations to those impacted. This opinion has significant meaning for Global Afro Descendant communities that have been treated as energy and economic sacrifice zones for decades and centuries. 

Our Message to Global Negotiators

We will not accept a COP30 outcome that sidelines Global Afro Descendants and their communities.

We will not accept a COP30 outcome that protects fossil-fuel interests over our lives and planet.

We will not accept climate governance that refuses to name and repair racialized climate harm.

Signed,

The Black Hive at the Movement for Black Lives