What I Saw Outside the Blue Zone in Belém
I am Thais Mantovani, co-founder of EcoUniversidade, and for the past six years I have also been working with Local Futures, helping to strengthen the localization movement in Brazil and supporting grassroots initiatives that defend territory, rebuild food systems and imagine ecological futures from the ground up.
I went to COP30 in Belém not only to follow the global negotiations, but to understand how people, communities and movements were shaping climate action outside the official structures.
Like everyone else attending the conference, I began inside the formal zones. The Blue Zone is the center of official COP30 negotiations, the space where governments and corporations shape the agreements that dominate the headlines. The Green Zone is designed for civil society, a place for public exhibitions, side events and dialogue. I moved through both, expecting to find the heart of the summit somewhere between ministries, pavilions and sponsored panels.
But very quickly I realized that the real climate leadership in Belém was happening elsewhere. The most powerful debates, the clearest analyses and the most grounded proposals were unfolding outside both zones. They were happening in community centers, university auditoriums, cultural spaces, quilombola (Afro-Brazilian rural communities) territories, riverside gatherings and the streets of a city that had opened itself to the world. These spaces had nothing to do with badges or accreditation. They had everything to do with life.
Outside the official structures, Belém was alive with gatherings that no accreditation badge could contain, making the first COP in a long time to have such vibrant social participation. I moved between circles of Indigenous women, youth from the favelas (Brazilian urban peripheries), Black movements from across Brazil and the diaspora, riverine leaders, quilombolas, agroecology networks and international allies. Each space had its own rhythm, its own protocols, its own way of thinking and organizing. Yet they all shared a clarity that I did not see inside the Blue Zone.
In these gatherings, people were not being consulted. They were building strategies. The conversations were not about carbon markets or corporate alliances. They were about land, food, safety, violence, memory, culture, healing, economic sovereignty and the structural forces driving planetary destabilization. Everyone knew the real cause of climate change is not “humanity” as the headlines claim, but a global economic system built on extraction, inequality and corporate power.
Walking through Belém during COP30 was like walking through overlapping worlds. In one university building, Indigenous leaders were debating territory protection, demarcation, forest governance and the need to stop fossil fuel expansion in the Amazon. In another, youth from the favelas were discussing heat islands, floods, policing, mobility, food access and the everyday violence that climate policy usually ignores. Nearby, Black movements were analyzing the relationship between racial injustice, land dispossession, global trade, energy poverty and the climate crisis. Farmers from different regions were sharing seeds, techniques, community agreements and their demand for real incentives for local organic production.
These were not side events. They were the center of climate politics in Belém.
In the middle of these diverse gatherings, the People’s Summit stood out as one of the clearest expressions of collective power. It was not the center of my reflections, yet it offered a striking example of how social participation took root in Belém. Over five thousand people and two hundred boats filled the Guamá River in the Barqueata. More than twenty five thousand formally registered for debates, dialogues and assemblies. Seventeen thousand attended plenaries at UFPA (Federal University of Pará). Ninety six organizations composed the political commission, and thirteen hundred movements and collectives endorsed a shared platform. They demanded the end of fossil fuels, support for local agroecological farmers, Indigenous territorial rights and a break from the corporate rule that has shaped climate policy for decades. The Summit reflected what I heard in every other space I visited. People are not waiting to be included in climate negotiations. They are organizing themselves, defining their priorities and naming the real drivers of the crisis.
The march, which was organized by the People's Summit, proved this. Seventy thousand people from every corner of the world crossed the streets of Belém together. Indigenous women in ritual clothing walking beside youth from Nairobi. Farmers from Pará beside activists from India’s social movements. Quilombolas beside Pacific Island climate defenders. Together they carried signs demanding an end to fossil fuels, calling for Indigenous territorial rights, for protection of forests and waters, for support to small farmers, for a transition that dismantles the corporate empire instead of feeding it. The march was not a protest. It was a statement of planetary unity rooted in lived experience.
What struck me most was how these movements were not improvising. Many of them had been organizing for months or years. They arrived with proposals, political documents, demands shaped by assemblies, and collective analyses of what needs to change. While governments inside the COP discussed emissions trajectories, these groups were confronting the deeper question: how to dismantle the economic structures that create emissions in the first place, in other words pathways for systems change.
In every gathering, I heard the same frustration. Governments keep bending to corporate pressure. The same companies responsible for extraction, contamination, land grabbing, data-center expansion, monocultures, mining and fossil fuel operations were present inside the negotiations, influencing the agenda and framing fake solutions that protect their interests. There was almost no space inside for Indigenous land defense or for community-led agroecology, but there was space for financial firms selling offsets and digital surveillance technologies presented as climate tools.
Outside the Blue Zone, the conversations were entirely different. People spoke about building climate action through community strength rather than corporate partnerships. They talked about rebuilding food systems, restoring forests with local knowledge, defending sacred territories, creating networks of solidarity, strengthening public services and transforming the global economic model. They talked about life.
Now that COP30 has ended, what stays with me is not what was negotiated but what was lived. Belém became a meeting ground for people who have been resisting, healing, planting, rebuilding and imagining alternatives long before the COP arrived. Their gatherings were the real climate summit. Their demands were the clearest. Their visions were the most grounded in reality.
If there is any hope for climate justice, it is not in the Blue Zone. It is in the circles of Indigenous elders drawing maps of ancestral territory. It is in the conversations of favela youth imagining safer, greener cities. It is in the chants of Black movements connecting racial justice to planetary health. It is in the hands of farmers holding seeds that carry centuries of knowledge. It is in the collective intelligence that I witnessed in Belém, in every gathering where people planned how to confront the structures that governments still avoid naming.
These movements spoke with unity and precision. The question now is whether the world will choose to listen to them.
Photos by Thais Mantovani.
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Author: Thais Mantovani
So grateful to get these news. Something visible to you. It helps me understand how needed we are, each one in our own capacity. How do I find all these beautiful elders and networks? Can you help to unite all of the honest efforts, and win the local fights? To have support from scientists and ecologists globally, instead of people starting from scratch every time a new threat comes from corporations?
And to strengthen the international court of justice, by getting compensations from local governments and companies. I believe that all this stolen land and resources will be given back , because the earth will demand it by showing us the absolute dependence on biodiversity and forest. Bless you you are amazing. Thank you