Between the Pavilions and People: A Reflection on COP30

By Akriti Sharma

I was not prepared for how overwhelming my first day at COP was going to feel.

Walking through the pavilions in Belém, I felt the sheer scale of global climate governance. Screens, slogans, side events, overlapping negotiations, colorful pins, giveaways,  grocery bags! Some spaces loud and overshadowing, others quiet and resolute, but all coexisting in the same crowded space, negotiating different futures on the same planet. What struck me most, however, was not the size of COP, but the imbalance embedded within it. Some delegations arrived with teams of lawyers and communication experts, while others carried exhaustion, lived experience and urgency. Representation appeared diverse, but participation felt deeply uneven, yet this is precisely where decisions about a ‘just transition’ are being made.

COP30 made headlines for initiating a process to develop a Just Transition Mechanism. The mechanism promises international cooperation, capacity development and support for equitable transitions to low carbon economics, with details continuing to be refined over the coming years. On paper, this is historic and it is precisely why sustained attention is necessary. Because as I moved through the pavilions, one question followed me everywhere: who is this transition actually for?

This question becomes especially important when we consider what often remains unspoken. What is the cost of the minerals required to move from fossil fuel to electric vehicles? Who extracts them, under what conditions? and who is ultimately benefitting? Too often, green transitions are discussed as inevitable for a sustainable future, while their extractive foundations remain conveniently obscured. These dynamics risk shifting burdens downward and reproducing the very histories of exploitation that a just transition wants to leave behind.

Inside negotiation rooms, language was precise and carefully negotiated down to commas. Outside these rooms, conversations with other attendees sounded different. Frustration, excitement, eyerolls, fear and the quiet weight of being unheard lingered in the halls. I gravitated toward South-to-South conversations hosted by different groups about natural resources, land management, agriculture and Indigenous sovereignty: issues that shape daily life but rarely dominate glossy summaries. Being present in these spaces, simply as a PhD candidate from a North American university, was also a reminder of the privilege embedded in having access to COP at all.

As a researcher studying slow onset climate disasters and adaptation in South Asia, I spend a lot of time thinking about knowledge hierarchies: why is satellite data privileged over lived experience? Why are farmers’ expertise flattened in these spaces? and why are informal realities pushed outside formal decision-making? At COP, those hierarchies were global. Who speaks, who is heard and whose knowledge counts followed familiar patterns.

COP clarified for me that a just transition is not simply a framework or a checklist, it is a question of power. Who writes the rules?  Who gets to imagine the future? And who absorbs the consequences? A just transition must be global, but it must also be grounded. It cannot begin only in negotiation rooms, far from the places climate change is already reshaping. Belém reminded me that the work ahead is not just about decarbonizing economies, it is about democratizing the process itself.

Towards the end of our week, a few members of my delegation and I wandered into a ‘free-zone’ event hosted by local groups. Amazonian artists performed under a sky thick with humidity and celebration. People from everywhere danced together. It felt worlds away from negotiation rooms and closer to the point. It reminded me what we are fighting for: the right of every community, across the Amazons, the Himalayas, the Sundarbans, to live with dignity, safety and joy. Not as beneficiaries of climate policy, but as architects of it.

Akriti Sharma is a PhD Candidate at the Friedman School of Nutrition and Science Policy, studying how communities in South Asia experience and adapt to climate stressors. Her dissertation explores how communities in Bangladesh and Nepal perceive and respond to rising soil salinity and increasing heatwave exposure, respectively.