How Cop30 can advance a new template for South-South climate leadership

Prof. Syed Munir Khasru

South China Morning Post
November 10, 2025

https://www.scmp.com/opinion/world-opinion/article/3331989/how-cop30-can-advance-new-template-south-south-climate-leadership

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At Cop30, the first UN climate summit held in the heart of the Amazon, the stage is set for a fundamental reframing of climate diplomacy.

For too long, the Global South has been cast as a passive aid recipient, a problem to be managed rather than a partner in solutions. But as delegates gather in Brazil’s gateway to the world’s largest rainforest, they will confront a different reality: a tropical belt that holds the keys to our climate future and a generation of evidence showing that South-led innovation, monitoring and policy can deliver results that the North’s capital and technology transfers alone cannot.

The numbers tell a story of both crisis and capability. The tropics lost 6.7 million hectares of primary rainforest last year, a record driven largely by fires, equivalent to erasing the forest cover of a small country in a single year. Yet Brazil’s satellite systems recorded an 11 per cent decline in Amazon deforestation between August last year and this July, proving that rapid policy shifts and improved enforcement can bend the curve.

The Amazon is also a massive carbon sink, estimated to hold 90 billion to 140 billion tonnes of carbon, making its protection not philanthropic window-dressing but a hard requirement for any credible global carbon budget.

What links the Amazon to Southeast Asia is more than shared geography. Both regions sit at the confluence of extraordinary biodiversity, carbon-dense landscapes and relentless pressure from agribusiness, mining and infrastructure development. Forests cover just 31 per cent of the world’s land, and nearly half are found in tropical countries.

This is not a burden to be compensated for but a strategic asset, if the political, financial and technical architecture can be reimagined to support local stewardship rather than extract value.

Brazil’s pioneering satellite monitoring systems, Prodes and Deter, operated by the National Institute for Space Research, which provide near real-time deforestation alerts, are not just used domestically but also increasingly referenced abroad, and the approach has been adapted in other tropical forest regions. This is South-to-South technology transfer at its most practical: not charity, but peer learning and the building of institutional capacity.

Better data creates the political space for enforcement and accountability, from local prosecutions to international pressure. Cop30 can amplify these pathways by formalising technical cooperation agreements that enable members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (Asean) to integrate satellite surveillance with community monitoring and indigenous land rights enforcement.

Indonesia’s experience offers a cautionary counterpoint. The country’s 2011 forest moratorium, designed to halt new logging licences on primary forests and peatlands, showed both the potential and limits of such bans. Independent evaluations found the moratorium slowed the licence-driven conversion of such land to other uses but also left critical gaps, such as exemptions for existing concessions, not including secondary forests and a lack of enforcement in remote areas.

The lesson is not that forest bans fail but that they work only when paired with economic alternatives for affected communities, transparent governance and sustained political will. Asean’s community forestry movements and nascent bioeconomy initiatives provide a foundation to build on, but they require finance and policy support that multilateral institutions are poorly designed to deliver.

The adaptation finance gap remains the unspoken scandal of climate diplomacy. The United Nations estimates the global adaptation need at US$187 billion to US$359 billion a year while funds received remain a mere fraction of this. Worse, what flows is often conditional, slow-moving and disconnected from locally defined priorities.

Cop30, following Brazil’s G20 presidency last year, offers a rare moment of political continuity that the Global South can leverage to demand not just more money but smarter money: finance that supports bioeconomies, indigenous rights, community-led conservation and green value chains without imposing the North’s templates.

New instruments, such as the loss and damage fund and Santiago Network for technical assistance, are steps forward, but they risk becoming symbolic unless backed by a reformed multilateral architecture. An Amazon-Asean compact, linking forest protection, monitoring interoperability and bioeconomy investment across Latin America and Southeast Asia, could model what responsive, non-conditional finance looks like in practice.

Such a compact might include joint satellite monitoring, pooled technical assistance, a shared investment vehicle for sustainable supply chains and a South-led carbon credits framework with safeguards for rights and biodiversity.

The political challenge is credibility. Any Amazon-Asean compact must be anchored in transparent standards, informed consent from indigenous and local communities, and measurable outcomes.

The combination of proven monitoring tools, hard lessons from policy experiments and the moral weight of hosting Cop30 in the Amazon gives the Global South a rare convergence of technical capability and political urgency.

This is not about charity or compensation. It is about recognising that the countries holding the world’s remaining tropical forests have developed the institutional knowledge, monitoring infrastructure and community governance systems essential to any credible climate strategy. They are not asking for permission; they are offering a partnership.

If Cop30 can nudge finance and technology institutions towards more just, bottom-up models in which forests are assets for inclusive growth, not liabilities to be offset, the summit will have done more than showcase an ecosystem. It will have advanced a new template for South-South climate leadership: practical, plural and rooted in an ecological stewardship that benefits people as well as carbon budgets.

The building blocks exist in both regions. The question is whether Cop30 can catalyse the political will to ensure collaboration across continents is concrete.