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By Claire Lhermitte
I’m Claire Lhermitte, 27 years old, French, and I campaign with the association ‘Light Generation’ against the war in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. This war is largely fuelled by our global consumption of its minerals, particularly those used for the energy transition. It is this reality that pushed me to travel by sailboat to COP30 in Belém, Brazil.
During the first week, I took part in the People’s Summit, a counter-summit organised by more than 1,200 organisations from around the world. Because counter-summits could not be organised for three years, NGOs, trade unions, students, farmers, and Indigenous communities worked for two years on drafting a collective declaration.
Taking part in this process proved to me that, despite the diversity of struggles, we share the same diagnoses and largely the same solutions. The text calls for peoples’ self-determination, agroecology, an end to extractivism, and an ecological transition grounded in historical justice. It represents the voice of global civil society for the planet. It was officially handed over, during a large assembly of more than 10,000 people, to the COP30 president and director, as well as to the Brazilian Minister for Ecological Transition. They promised to carry it into the official negotiations.
I ended that week with an immense demonstration in the streets of Belém where 70,000 people organised in processions, dressed in the colours of their organisations. A giant planet, a massive serpent, floated, singing Indigenous, internationalist, and farmers’ songs. Activists denouncing the war in Gaza and U.S. imperialism in the Caribbean marched alongside representatives of Indigenous peoples in traditional dress. All colours were present, painting the diversity of the guardians of the Earth.
Even before entering the official COP zone, one first victory was obvious: COP30 provided the rationale for organizing the counter-summit, which united global civil society around a shared vision of future actions. More than ever, local and international struggles are connected.
In the second week, I entered the Blue Zone, the official COP. When Indigenous people are not forcibly entering it, or when the West Africa pavilion is not burning, the atmosphere there is radically different. Representatives of Global South states meet companies, banks, and Global North governments to negotiate funding for the conservation of their natural areas and for access to “critical” minerals, which implies the destruction of their lands, forests, and rivers.
This logic hit me head-on in the DRC pavilion. When I interviewed him, the discourse of the representative of the Congolese Ministry of Ecological Transition was perfectly polished: the Congo would be the solution to the climate crisis, thanks to its forests, peatlands, water, and minerals. The DRC would not pollute, but held the keys to the global transition. When I asked whether the massive mining risked destroying precisely these climate assets, he did not deny the impact. He replied that these resources were there to be used. What struck me was what was missing from his answer: no mention of local communities, polluted rivers, fragmented forests, or armed conflicts linked to mining. Destruction within his own country was presented as acceptable collateral damage.
I then relayed these remarks to an activist from LUCHA, a non-violent movement fighting corruption in the DRC, himself a victim of the war in Goma. His response was brutally clear: behind every “protected” forest, every peatland treated as a “carbon stock,” every “critical” mineral, there are destroyed villages, displaced populations, and a war fuelled by international demand.
In the Blue Zone, we organised an action to denounce the war in the DRC. But we were forbidden to name the states responsible for the conflict. So we denounced a war… without saying where it was taking place, or who was involved. How can we speak of a just transition if we cannot speak of the wars it fuels?
This censorship sometimes made me feel like an alien as if I were the only one who knew that mines pollute waterways, soils, and ecosystems. At a conference on mining transparency, a boss of a mining company explained that the carbon impact of the machines used in his mines was published on his website. I asked whether the IPCC calculated the climate impact of mining based solely on those data. There was no response, even though I know that the answer is partly true.
Yet not everything was in vain. Thanks to our work with ENAR, the European Union has begun to recognise that a just transition must include racialised people, diasporas, and structural discrimination. Our exchanges with MEP Lena Schilling made it possible to go beyond simple inclusion and raise the question of reparations and structural transformations.
The daily debriefings, sitting on the floor in the COP corridors with Climate Action Network and YOUNGO, also allowed me to understand other real advances of this COP. I can therefore try to explain concretely what they can change in everyone’s lives.
First major gain: The just transition is now a central framework of climate negotiations. Communities affected by energy or industrial projects can now rely on this framework to challenge destructive projects; trade unions and NGOs have a recognised language to demand social protections, retraining, and economic guarantees. This framework does not yet automatically protect people, but it politically arms those who are fighting.
COP30 strengthens the political recognition of Indigenous peoples as key actors in ecosystem protection. This serves as a legal basis for litigation, strengthens territorial claims, and offers international visibility to struggles that are often criminalised. Even symbolically, this recognition creates leverage. It makes the total erasure of Indigenous peoples more difficult in the future.
For populations already facing droughts, floods, or irreversible losses, the consolidation of adaptation and loss-and-damage pillars is essential. It strengthens political recognition of vital needs and legitimises demands for debt-free financing. The amounts remain insufficient, but the principle is now difficult to call into question.
Without naming it explicitly, COP30 also indirectly strengthened the right to live in a healthy environment by mentioning in its texts impacts on health, affected communities, and the intention to respect human rights and Indigenous rights. For example, the just transition recognises that the transition must not worsen living conditions; adaptation and loss & damage recognise that certain environmental harms are already destroying lives. In the Blue Zone, some NGOs nevertheless tried to push a more demanding discourse on mining.
But my frustration remains deep: in the texts, the rare protections obtained concern almost exclusively Indigenous peoples, whereas many communities affected by mining extraction are not recognised as such. Then, on the eve of the closing, under diplomatic pressure from China, all references to mining were removed. By erasing any explicit reference to mining, ecocides are allowed to continue without a framework of justice, without protection for affected communities or human rights defenders, in one of the most violent sectors in the world for activists.
The transition is moving forward, but at the cost of injustices that are bound to worsen, since the other texts produced by this and previous COPs rely on a fivefold increase in mining activity. Even though women were recognised at COP30 as being particularly exposed to the effects of climate change, by removing all references to mining from the just transition text, the COP makes invisible the specific violence experienced by women around mining projects, such as sexual violence. I cannot avoid recalling, at those moments, that in eastern DRC there is more than one rape and/or genital mutilation of women every five minutes.
In the closing session, Colombia also denounced the undemocratic functioning of COP30, where the presidency makes last-minute changes, notably the removal of any reference to a fossil fuel phase-out. It announced the organisation of an international summit in April to build, outside the blocked COP framework, a concrete roadmap for a fossil fuel exit, with willing countries, social movements, and Indigenous peoples. I will attend this summit with Congolese activists to defend a transition based on sufficiency, circular economy, reparability, and the repair of colonial injustices. At the very least, we must ensure that states refuse minerals from war zones to fuel the energy transition.
I leave with a strengthened conviction: as long as the ecological transition refuses to confront extractivism, armed conflicts, and power relations inherited from colonialism, it will be neither just nor sustainable. I will continue to fight so that the climate is not saved at the price of Congolese blood nor that of all the other victims of this blind transition.