Fossil fuel lobbyists outnumber all Cop30 delegations except Brazil, report says

Security personnel ask an Indigenous group for permission to enter a car outside the Cop30 venue on Friday. Permission was granted. Indigenous activists have blockaded the summit centre demanding that the Brazilian government halt all development projects in the Amazon, including mining, logging, oil drilling and the building of a new railway for transporting mining and agricultural products. Photo: AP/Fernando Llano

More than 1,600 fossil fuel lobbyists have been granted access to the Cop30 climate negotiations in Belém, significantly outnumbering every single country’s delegation apart from the host Brazil, new analysis has found.

One in every 25 participants at this year’s UN climate summit is a fossil fuel lobbyist, according to the analysis by the Kick Big Polluters Out (KBPO) coalition, raising serious questions about the corporate capture and credibility of the annual Cop negotiations.

This year’s tally represents a 12% rise from last year’s climate talks in Baku, Azerbaijan, and is the largest concentration of fossil fuel lobbyists at Cop since KBPO first began exposing industry participation in 2021. 

The overall number is smaller this year than at Cop29 in Baku (1,773) and Cop28 in Dubai (2,456), but the proportion is higher this year as the Belém summit is less well-attended.

It brings the total number of fossil fuel lobbyists given access to the UN climate summits to 7,000 over the past five years, a period marked by a rise in catastrophic extreme weather, disinformation and oil and gas profits.

Lien Vandamme, senior campaigner on human rights and climate change at the Center for International Environmental Law (CIEL), said:

Another Cop, same playbook. This is corporate capture, not climate governance.

The annual climate talks opened in Belém on Monday, with Brazil’s president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva disavowing disinformation and declaring that it would be the “Cop of truth”.

Yet the fossil fuel industry, which has a long history of spreading misinformation and disinformation while blocking meaningful climate action, received almost 60% more passes to Cop30 than the 10 most climate-vulnerable nations combined (1,061), according to analysis by KBPO, an international coalition of 450 organizations.

Climate breakdown is escalating

In the lead-up to Cop30, hundreds of people were killed after two powerful typhoons wreaked havoc less than a week apart in the Philippines — a country that has been hit by 21 significant storms this year alone. 

Fossil fuel-affiliated lobbyists outnumber official delegates from the Philippines by nearly 50 to 1, and Iran, where severe drought could force the government to evacuate the capital Tehran, by 44 to 1.

Meanwhile, it’s expected to cost Jamaica billions of dollars and years to recover from Hurricane Melissa, a category 5 storm turbocharged by global heating, yet fossil fuel lobbyists outnumbered the island nation’s delegation by 40 to 1.

In July, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) ruled that continued fossil fuel expansion, extraction, consumption and subsidies may constitute an internationally wrongful act.

The findings come as 2025 is set to be among the hottest years on record, yet states are failing to regulate polluting corporations and cut subsidies, with nearly $250bn earmarked for new oil and gas projects since Cop29.

“From the halls of the UNFCCC to our lands and territories, fossil fuel corporations are wrecking our communities and environment. Yet the red carpet is rolled out for thousands of lobbyists to roam the corridors,” said Nerisha Baldevu from Friends of the Earth Africa.

- The Guardian