Climate at the Edge, Democracy on the Line: The Stakes in Belem
In Belem, Brazil, where the mouth of the Amazon meets the Atlantic, the world has once again gathered to plan our survival.
At the 30th iteration of the United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP30), delegates in linen suits convene beneath a soaring tropical canopy; Indigenous protestors chant outside, demanding more than token participation. The rainforest burns; rivers shrink. The science, now centuries in the making, could not be clearer. And yet politics grows darker.
For the first time in the COP process, the agenda has formally recognized the crisis of information integrity. Nations have signed a “Declaration on Information Integrity on Climate Change,” pledging to combat misinformation and disinformation about climate science and action.
This bureaucratic gesture is also a profound admission: the climate crisis is not only atmospheric, it is epistemological. We are losing not only the planet’s balance, but our collective sense of what is real.
The timing of this admission matters.
In the United States, the language of fascism — once reserved for history books and European nightmares — is now evoked with uneasy familiarity. As historians at University of California, Berkeley noted last fall, “we are watching the preconditions of authoritarianism being rehearsed in real time.”
So when delegates hail Belem as the “COP of truth,” they do so against a broader backdrop: the climate agenda and the democratic agenda are now entangled.
It is tempting to imagine that climate collapse and political extremism are separate phenomena — that one belongs to carbon and chemistry, the other to rhetoric and power. But here in Belem, the threads converge.
Climate collapse has always been, at its core, a crisis of power: who extracts, who profits, who bears the costs. In moments of ecological stress — famine, flood, displacement — societies grow brittle. Strong-men gain traction. They promise order amid disorder, belonging amid fear. “Only I can fix it,” they say, as the forests smolder behind them.
Brazil itself knows this story. Just two years ago, supporters of Jair Bolsonaro stormed Brasília in imitation of Washington’s Jan. 6th. The images looked eerily familiar. These movements are not coincidences but contagions, bound together by the digital bloodstream of disinformation and resentment.
Inside the conference halls, the conversation often turns to numbers: 1.5°C, 2050, gigatons, offsets. But the subtext is existential. The question is not only whether humanity can curb its emissions, but whether democracy itself can withstand the social shocks of the Anthropocene. Can open societies, with their fragile, deliberative machinery, respond quickly enough to a planetary emergency? Or will fear, fatigue, propaganda drive citizens to embrace the false comfort of the strong-man?
The answer, in part, depends on what happens in places like Belem. If COP30 succeeds — not in producing another communiqué but in reinforcing that truth and justice still matter — it will mark a small victory for democracy’s immune system. If it fails, it will be one more sign that the authoritarian imagination, like climate change itself, is a self-reinforcing feedback loop.
In the end, the twin crises of climate and of democracy demand the same remedy: collective action grounded in shared reality. The rainforest cannot be saved by decree, and the planet cannot be saved by denial. At COP30, the world is being asked to remember that truth is not a luxury; it is the atmosphere we breathe — invisible, indispensable, and now dangerously thin.
The adoption of the Declaration on Information Integrity marks a pivotal moment. For the first time, the COP process has placed the integrity of information alongside mitigation, adaptation and finance.
Such inclusion reflects a growing awareness: climate delay is not simply a technical problem, it is a communication problem, a trust problem, a democracy problem.
Meanwhile, in the United States, the historical preconditions of fascism — economic precarity, polarization, institutional erosion, digital echo chambers — are manifest.
The entryism of disinformation, the weaponization of “truth”, the erosion of pluralism— these are not distant European nightmares, but domestic ones as well.
And there is a convergence: climate breakdown fuels instability, and instability fuels authoritarianism. As floods displace millions, as fires engulf forests, as heat waves rage, the narratives of scarcity and fear become potent fodder. Authoritarians flourish in crisis by offering singular solutions, by channeling anger into scapegoats and silencing dissent. The forests burn, and the strong-man promises to protect you — from the flame, from the migrant, from the “chaos”.
Yet the flip side remains true: democracy and climate action are co-dependent. A society that cannot access reliable information, that cannot trust science, that cannot hold power accountable, cannot address a crisis that is both global and generational. The Declaration adopted at COP30 is a recognition that information is infrastructure. Without trust, mitigation becomes meaningless notes; adaptation becomes a gamble.
And here is the rub: the United States is a battleground in this fight. When information integrity fails, democracy falters; when democracy falters, climate action falters. The U.S., the world’s greatest historic emitter, is now also at risk of retreat when it should lead. The rise of nationalist, authoritarian narratives in the U.S. is not incidental to climate delay — it is central.
This moment demands more than awareness; it demands action. The world cannot afford to treat climate change as simply a technical challenge — because it is a political and moral one. And the world cannot afford to treat authoritarianism as a side show — because it is fundamentally woven into how power responds to crisis. If we delay, we risk both climate collapse and democratic collapse.
Governments must fund information-integrity initiatives, strengthen independent journalism, protect scientists from harassment, audit algorithmic platforms, uphold transparency. Civil society must mobilize, not only to reduce emissions and protect forests, but to safeguard democratic norms, demand accountability, expose disinformation. Individuals must vote, critique, resist cynicism — because the ballot box, like the atmosphere, is not a guarantee.
This week in Belem is not a symbolic moment; it is a pivot. If leaders walk away with business-as-usual, the next decade may well be the stage on which we see both the Amazon burned and the constitution shredded. But if they seize this moment, and if citizens follow, we might just witness the dawn of a new era: one in which climate justice and democratic renewal walk hand-in-hand.