The Answer Is Us: What Belém Taught Me About the Politics of Story
- alvaradopaula0
- Nov 20, 2025
- 8 min read
Updated: 1 day ago
By Paula Alvarado
Category: Climate and Communications
Written in Belém, November 2025
I came to Belém with a particular kind of watchfulness. After years of working in international climate and Indigenous rights spaces — attending COPs, supporting organisations through negotiations, designing communications strategies for the most consequential policy moments of the last decade — I know how easy it is for these gatherings to produce language that feels significant and deliver outcomes that are not. I have learned not to mistake the energy of the space for the substance of the decisions.
And yet. Belém surprised me.
Not because the final text delivered everything that was needed — it did not. Not because the official outcomes matched the scale of the moment — they fell short on fossil fuels, on deforestation, on the direct climate finance that frontline communities urgently need. But because something happened in this city, over these two weeks, that I have not seen in the same way at any previous COP. The people who have the most at stake — and the most to say — refused to be kept outside the rooms where decisions are made. And the communications strategies that emerged to support them were, in some cases, genuinely new.
I want to write about that. Because it is what I came here thinking about, and it is what I am leaving still thinking about.
The campaign that named the moment
Before COP30 opened, a campaign had been building for over a year in the Brazilian Amazon. “The Answer Is Us” — launched in June 2024 by the Coordination of Indigenous Organizations of the Brazilian Amazon (COIAB), then joined by APIB and the Global Alliance of Territorial Communities — was not a communications campaign in the conventional sense. It was a political assertion.
The campaign’s demands were concrete: recognition of Indigenous territorial rights as climate policy, zero deforestation, an end to fossil fuels and extractive mining on Indigenous lands, direct access to climate finance without bureaucratic intermediaries, and — perhaps most significantly — real participation in decision-making at COP30, not the performative presence that has characterised so many previous summits.
The name itself was a communications act. It did something that most climate campaign messaging fails to do: it placed the solution, not the crisis, at the centre. It did not say ‘we are suffering’ or ‘we are vulnerable’ or even ‘we are essential.’ It said: we are the answer. That is a fundamentally different claim, and it changes what the campaign asks of its audience. It does not ask for sympathy or charity. It asks for recognition of authority.
As someone who thinks carefully about the politics of language in communications — about whose voice is centred, what frame is chosen, and what a piece of writing or a campaign image actually does in the world — this struck me as important. The climate movement has spent years trying to escape the trap of doom, sacrifice, and fatalism that research consistently shows undermines action. “The Answer Is Us” did not just escape it. It inverted the frame entirely.
What happened in the streets
On the first day of COP30, Indigenous Peoples blocked the main entrance to the negotiations. On their own land, in their own region, they were demanding recognition of their territories, protection from industrial expansion, and the right to determine their future. Civil society delegates formed a human chain around them. The security response was tense. The images circulated globally within hours.
I walked through Belém that morning with a particular kind of emotion that I find hard to name cleanly. There was grief in it — at the fact that this scene was still necessary, that people whose knowledge and governance of the Amazon is irreplaceable still had to physically force their way into the space where decisions about their future were being made. There was also something that felt like recognition: these movements know how to use a COP host city as a communications environment. They understand that the story being told outside the Blue Zone shapes what is possible inside it.
The People’s Summit, running in parallel at the Federal University of Pará, drew 25,000 accredited participants from more than 65 countries — the largest People’s Summit ever held. The Global Climate March brought tens of thousands into the streets of Belém. The Funeral dos Combustíveis Fósseis — a symbolic funeral procession with coffins for oil and gas — was both a piece of political theatre and a genuine act of mourning for what continued inaction is costing. These were not sideshows. They were the political context within which the negotiations had to take place, and they shaped what was possible in the rooms.
What the official process delivered — and did not
The Belém Package — the set of 29 decisions adopted by 195 Parties — contained real advances. The Just Transition Work Programme delivered the most robust rights language ever adopted at a COP, with explicit protections for Indigenous Peoples and references to Free, Prior and Informed Consent. At least three COP documents explicitly recognised Indigenous rights: the Global Mutirão affirmed their land rights and traditional knowledge; the mitigation work programme highlighted their role in sustainable forest management; and the just transition mechanism addressed rights for Indigenous Peoples in voluntary isolation. A pledge of $1.8 billion was made to secure land rights for Indigenous and Afro-descendant communities. Brazil demarcated ten Indigenous territories during the summit. These are not nothing.
And yet. No roadmap on fossil fuels made it into the final text, despite more than 80 countries calling for one. No roadmap on deforestation, despite more than 90 calling for it. Transition minerals — whose extraction disproportionately affects Indigenous peoples and local communities — were dropped from the Just Transition text entirely. The participation of over 5,000 Indigenous people in Belém in various capacities, with fewer than 1,000 having access to the Blue Zone where negotiations took place, and many of those in rooms without real decision-making power, produced the damning summary that has stayed with me since: “This was a COP where we were visible but not empowered.”
Visibility without power is a communications problem as much as a political one. It is the result of a system designed to include the imagery of participation while limiting its substance. Understanding how that system works — and how to change it — is part of what GroundWork exists to do.
The communications challenge I keep coming back to
For years, the dominant frame in climate communications has been built around three failure modes: sacrifice (what we must give up), lack of agency (the problem is too large for any individual or community to affect), and fatalism (it may already be too late). Research by Futerra and others has documented the impact of this framing in detail: it produces anxiety, disengagement, and — most corrosively — a form of learned helplessness that makes meaningful action feel futile. A global survey conducted by Ipsos for Futerra found that one in five people under 35 believe it is already too late to act on climate change. The fatalism is not fringe. It is mainstream.
What struck me about the most effective communications at COP30 — and particularly around “The Answer Is Us” — was the deliberate refusal of all three of those frames. The campaign did not ask audiences to sacrifice or despair. It asked them to recognise that the solutions already exist, in the knowledge systems, governance structures, and territorial relationships of the communities who have been protecting forests and ecosystems for generations. The problem, the campaign argued, is not a lack of solutions. It is a lack of recognition.
That is a different kind of message than most climate communications produce. It is specific about who holds the answer, rather than vague about what the answer might be. It places agency with communities rather than corporations or governments. And it creates a clear ask: not to donate, not to march (though both can follow), but to acknowledge authority.
I watched that message travel. I watched it reach people who are professionally cynical about campaign language and move them. I watched it create coalitions across movements that do not always find common ground easily. The communications worked because the politics were real. The campaign was not designed by consultants to appeal to an audience. It was designed by the movement to name a reality.
What this means for the work we do
I co-lead GroundWork: Policy Briefings for Action alongside Philippa Bayley. GroundWork exists precisely in this space — the space between the complexity of international climate and biodiversity negotiations and the capacity of Indigenous leaders, local communities, and their allies to understand and influence them. It is a political intelligence programme. Its premise is that the problem is not a lack of commitment or courage on the part of the movements doing this work. It is a lack of access to the kind of specific, timely, usable information about how these processes work and where influence is actually possible.
Belém reinforced for me why that work matters. The people doing the most important advocacy at COP30 — the ones who were in the negotiating rooms, reading texts, making interventions, building coalitions across delegations — were doing something extraordinarily demanding. They were navigating technical processes that take years to learn, in a second or third language, in a political environment that was actively hostile to their most important demands, on behalf of communities who could not be in the room. The quality of their preparation, their understanding of the process, and their ability to communicate clearly and quickly with each other and with their organisations back home was the difference between influence and visibility.
Communications — in the fullest sense of the word — was the infrastructure of that work. Not the press releases or the social media posts, though those matter too. The briefings circulated before sessions. The informal translations of what a particular text amendment actually meant in practice. The rapid synthesis of a day’s negotiations into something an organisation’s leadership could act on the same evening. The ability to connect what was happening in the UNFCCC process to what communities were experiencing on the ground in the Amazon, in Central Africa, in Southeast Asia.
This is what GroundWork tries to support. And this COP reminded me, with force, how much it is needed.
What I am carrying out of Belém
The warmth of Belém itself — its people, its rivers, its Amazonian light — made the gaps in the outcome text harder to accept. You cannot stand in this place, among these peoples, and feel comfortable with a COP that produced real language on rights while failing to create any enforceable pathway away from the fossil fuels that are destroying the ecosystems these communities depend on.
And yet I am not leaving in despair. I am leaving with a clearer sense of what the communications work in this space actually requires, and with renewed conviction that it is possible.
What COP30 showed, in the streets and in the sessions where it was done well, is that the most effective climate communications starts with a clear answer to the question ‘who is the expert here?’ The communities protecting the world’s forests and territories are not the backdrop to the climate story. They are the protagonists. The knowledge they carry — about how to govern territories, how to sustain ecosystems, how to build governance that outlasts the people who designed it — is not supplementary to climate solutions. It is central to them.
Communications that understands this — and builds from it, rather than around it — is the communications that will carry this movement forward. Not after the next COP, but in the months between now and then, in the policy spaces where the detailed work of implementation happens, and in the relationships between movements, institutions, and communities that determine whether the language in the final text ever becomes real.
The answer is us. That is not a slogan. It is a description of what I saw in Belém.
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