On eve of UN climate talks in Brazil, a call for less talking and more doing

BELEM, Brazil (AP) — For 30 years, world leaders and diplomats have gathered at United Nations negotiating sessions to try to curb climate change, but Earth's temperature continues to rise and extreme weather worsens.

BELEM, Brazil (AP) — For 30 years, world leaders and diplomats have gathered at United Nations negotiating sessions to try to curb climate change, but Earth’s temperature continues to rise and extreme weather worsens.

So this month, they’re hoping for fewer promises and more action.

Past pledges from nearly 200 nations have fallen far short and new plans submitted this year barely speed up pollution-fighting efforts, experts say. And if the numbers aren’t sobering enough for world leaders when they kick off the action Thursday, there’s the setting: Belem, a relatively poor city on the edge of a weakened Amazon.

Unlike past climate negotiations — and especially the one 10 years ago that forged the landmark Paris climate agreement — this annual U.N. conference isn’t primarily aimed at producing a grand deal or statement over its two weeks. Organizers and analysts frame this Conference of Parties — known less formally as COP30 — as the “implementation COP.”

“This is really going to be much more about what are we doing on the ground,” said former U.N. climate chief Christiana Figueres, who helped shepherd the 2015 Paris agreement aimed at limiting warming.

Figueres and many of more than three dozen experts interviewed by The Associated Press said negotiators have already pinned down the goal. What’s needed now is more money and political will for countries to put decades of words and promises into action and policy to reduce heat-trapping gases and stop deforestation. Only that will put the brakes on global warming as it careens toward a level the world has agreed is too dangerous, they say.

Adapting to a warmer world and saving forests

In Belem, diplomats, activists, scientists and business leaders will discuss new national climate-fighting plans, the need to save trees that absorb carbon pollution, how communities can adapt to warming and how to financially help developing nations hit hardest by climate change.