Delegations from Brazil and around the world brought grassroots pressure to COP30 and presented the Children's climate declaration to Brazilian officials
The sun was high by mid-morning on 15 November when the Great People's March surged through Belém, a river human diversity and noise cutting across the city at the end of the first week of the COP30 summit. Despite the high humidiy and the heat, over 70.000 people took the streets of Parà's capital carrying banners against political paralysis to tackle climate change.
One of the noumerous colereful blocs was represented by the red of Caritas with 64 representatives, including 24 Brazilian regional and diocesan Caritas teams and representatives from France, the United States, Paraguay, Germany, Canada, Colombia, Chile, Peru, Caritas Internationalis and SELACC (Caritas Latin America and the Caribbean).
For a network usually more associated with charity work than street protest, the mobilisation was strongly symbolic, and undoubtly well organised. Indi Gouveia of Caritas Brasil, who lives in Brasilia and spent the past year preparing local groups for COP30 and the People's Summit, said that mobilising such a large delegation across a country of continental scale wasn't easy, but the motivation to come from every corner of Brazil was stronger than the distance.
"We came from the Amazon, from the Northeast, from river communities and urban peripheries, because what is happening to the climate is happening first to the people we accompany."
Indi Gouveia, Caritas Brasil
Indi also said: "Caritas Brasil has been working for months on the agenda inside the official spaces and the parallel ones, but today the street was the place to show that preserving the Amazon is not a debate, it is survival."
Alongside her walked Walter Prysthon of Secours Catholique-Caritas France, who has followed the grassroots organising behind the People's Summit for the past two years, said the march in Belém was not just symbolic: "We are not only the 70,000 people in the streets here," he said. "People around the world are rising for climate justice. We came from France to make sure negotiators hear us. There is no more time to lose. They must listen to the peoples."
When asked whether he believed negotiators would take notice, Prysthon did not hesitate:
"I hope they heard the noise we made and saw the beauty of all our colours. They may be overwhelmed inside the talks, but the pressure outside must reach them. They must advance in adaptation policies that leave no one behind."
Walter Prysthon, Secours Catholique-Caritas France
Caritas representatives were far from alone on the march, which drew Indigenous organisations, fishing communities, environmental defenders, trade unions, feminist groups, and families displaced by extreme weather. But their presence added a distinctly transnational thread running from the Amazon to the Andes, from the Caribbean to Europe.
Catherine Mella Quiroz of Caritas Chile said taking part in Belém felt like stepping into a wider struggle experienced daily across Latin America. She explained why her organisation insists on framing the climate crisis as a matter of dignity, not just policy.
"When people's knowledge, land, traditions and agriculture are ignored or destroyed, their dignity is violated," she said. "In Chile we have sacrifice zones, places where families end up living in very precarious conditions, where traditions vanish because of climate impacts. We are asking for urgent action so that no one is left behind: not the campesino, not the Indigenous communities, not the families losing their homes."
She described a country already feeling the full force of the crisis.
"Chile meets seven of the nine vulnerability indicators of the UN climate convention," she said. "We have long heatwaves, strong winds feeding wildfires, rising seas, melting glaciers. People are living the impacts now not in 2050."
Catherine Mella Quiroz, Caritas Chile
If the march was the loudest moment of the week for Caritas delegations, the following day was also very important. As the People's Summit concluded on 16 November, its final recommendations, compiled from months of organising and contributions from more than 1,100 civil society groups, were handed to senior Brazilian government officials and to COP30 president André Corrêa do Lago.
On the same day, children from the Cúpula das Infâncias, the Children's Summit, co-organised by Caritas Brasil and Caritas Norte 2, gave their own declaration, in which they describe the beauty of nature and the disruption of the global warming that is making many parts of the globe inhabitable. The climate change is robbing them of education, safe housing and health and, in some areas, of the simple right to play.
"We want a world of beauty and peace for us and for all living creatures"
Children's declaration for COP30
If leaders cannot listen to the children, then, who they will listen to?
By Susan Dabbous Caritas Internationalis Editorial and Media Officer