The Black Hive @ M4BL COP DEMANDS
COP30 STATEMENT
Global Black Climate Leaders Call on COP30 to Deliver Historic Action for People of African Descent, End Fossil Fuels, and Advance True Climate Justice.
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
OUR DEMANDS:
- Endorse and enact the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty at the country, state, and local levels.
- Stop expansion and financing of all fossil-fuel infrastructure. Immediately enact a fair phase-out of existing fossil fuels, using data collected by the Global Registry of Fossil Fuels.
- Invest in renewable solutions and financing of a just transition for the Global Black Diaspora.
- Govern all actions through the Free, Prior, and Informed Consent (FPIC) framework.
CONTEXT:
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) delivered a grave warning to the world: Global greenhouse gas emissions must peak by 2025 if we want to keep warming below 1.5 degrees Celsius. However, the world’s oil and gas fields and coal mines are still being used, and new ones are being opened; they all contain enough carbon to push the world past 1.5ºC many times over. We are currently on track to produce enough fossil-fuel emissions to exceed this 1.5ºC carbon budget by 2030.
Black communities across the globe are hit first and worst by climate devastation while receiving relatively little in global resources for adaptation and mitigation. The genesis of the climate crisis and its inequities are intimately tied to the evils of slavery, colonialism, and racial apartheid in all of its forms. The Global North and colonial powers responsible for these injustices are the same ones that have benefited from proliferation of fossil fuels, and thus, bear the most responsibility to divest from fossil fuels and invest in protection from, resistance to, and adaptation in the face of climate change.
The world’s wealthiest countries have repeatedly broken their promise under the Paris Agreement to deliver $100 billion in climate financing for countries in the Global South. This failure will overwhelmingly affect all Black lives, across the Global Black Diaspora, on the frontlines of climate change. Moreover, the U.S. is the lowest overall contributor of climate financing in the world.
Last year, at COP26, nations made tangible commitments to swiftly phase out coal consumption of coal; end direct international public financing for unabated coal, oil, and gas by the end of 2022; and prioritize clean energy financing.
Russia’s unjustified invasion of Ukraine has already caused G7 leaders to break the commitments made at COP26 by supporting public financing of liquid natural gas, ramping up domestic fossil-fuel production, and treating the African continent as a replacement supplier.
The European Union and the U.S. have a vested interest in creating energy independence through massive investment in green energy. Further investment in fossil-fuel production only continues to place us at the mercy of volatile fossil-fuel markets controlled by the whims of petrostate dictators.
The U.S. pays $649 billion per year to subsidize the fossil-fuel industry, and it continues to poison Black lives and communities in which the most extractive and polluting industries are built. If not curtailed, U.S. oil and gas expansion will impede the world’s ability to manage a climate‐safe, equitable decline of oil and gas production.
The Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty* calls for solidarity with 1). non-proliferation, 2). a fair phase-out, and 3). a just transition toward equitable, accessible, clean energy.
OUR DEMANDS:
- Defund and divest from the U.S. and international military industrial complex, and invest in a green, just transition.
- End U.S. occupation of military bases and colonies around the world. Address military pollution by paying for cleanup during the entire pollution life cycle and for the welfare of affected residents.
- Ensure full, mandatory accounting of military emissions to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC).
- End all ongoing, unnecessary wars of aggression and exploitation across the globe. Relieve tensions among the U.S., China, and other world powers by focusing cooperation on building a demilitarized, just transition for the world.
- Accept climate refugees with open arms, care, and support.
- Divest from carceral climate policies and policing, and invest in alternative emergency care systems.
CONTEXT:
Due to pressure from the U.S. and other major powers, military emissions reporting is currently voluntary under the Paris Agreement—resulting in a glaring gap in the UNFCC’s ability to accurately track whether countries are meeting their emissions targets.
Fossil-fuel interests materially benefit from international conflicts by using national militaries and private militias to defend their expansion and clamp down on civil society. War is always a mantle to clamp down on human rights, civil society, and protest.
Demilitarization must also include decarceration, immigrant support, and defunding of policing. Military spending increases always result in more militarized police forces that violently defend fossil-fuel infrastructure while brutalizing and criminalizing environmental human-rights defenders around the world. Particularly within the U.S., which houses the largest incarcerated population in the world, prisons are sites of both ongoing environmental degradation and death during climate disasters such as extreme heat and floods. Police are provided with military-grade equipment to use in Black communities and against peaceful protesters who have been harmed by state-sanctioned violence and pollution in their communities. The U.S. unpaid incarcerated population is also a source of labor to fight wildfires. We demand the removal of all barriers for the formerly incarcerated to find meaningful, safe, clean, and green work to support in fighting climate disasters moving forward.
OUR DEMANDS:
- Make a significant and proportional fiscal transfer of resources and infrastructure, and cancel racialized debt accrual in response to the development of a colonialist economy in the U.S. and across the Global Black Diaspora.
- Debt cancellation and wealth transfer from all stakeholders must explicitly address the loss and damage experienced by Black, Indigenous, and frontline communities globally and in the U.S.
- Loss and damages must be addressed within a framework of reparations by the UN. Global governance bodies must address the loss of lives, culture, livelihoods, and ecosystems that is already occurring across the world. They must do this through a collective commitment to providing reparations for the loss and damage incurred in the Global South and within Black communities in the U.S., who represents the original uncompensated labor force for American capital.
CONTEXT:
At COP19, loss and damage was officially recognized after years of advocacy by small island states, and has been institutionalized through multiple mechanisms, including the inaugural Warsaw International Mechanism, which has made little progress in addressing both economic and non-economic loss and damage on the ground.
The Santiago Network was envisioned “to catalyze technical expertise of relevant organizations [and appropriate entities] for the implementation of relevant approaches . . . to address loss and damage [at all levels] within developing countries that are particularly vulnerable to the adverse effects of climate change.” And parties agreed to operationalize and fund the network.
At COP26, Glasgow Climate Pact Section 6.73 established a Glasgow Dialogue to “discuss the arrangements for the funding of activities to avert, minimize and address loss and damage associated with the adverse impacts of climate change to take place in the first sessional period each year of the Subsidiary Body for Implementation, concluding at its sixtieth session (June 2024).”
Those who have historically profited from the proliferation of fossil fuels and other actions causing emissions that have led to a climate crisis, like the UK and the U.S., continue to avoid accountability, interfere with, and resist the creation and implementation of a platform that adequately addresses the demands for reparations and redistribution to Indigenous peoples and the Global South.
The economic costs of loss and damage in developing countries alone have been projected to be between $290 billion and $580 billion USD by 2030.
