Belém is not another backdrop. It is a scene change. COP30 arrives in the Amazon with a promise that refuses to be vague: a transition that is fair, fast and final.
For years, climate summits have dealt in poetry and painstaking footnotes. This time the centre of gravity has moved from whether to when—and who pays. If you run a board or a budget, that shift is your brief. The reputationally safe horizon is no longer 2050. It is 2026.
Two fronts define the moment. First, forests are being treated as infrastructure, not charity. Finance is moving from gala pledges to contracts with trustees, triggers and verification—money flowing to ecosystems that actually store carbon and stabilise rainfall.
Second, a broad coalition is edging from ‘transition away’ rhetoric towards time-bound limits on fossil subsidies and, in places, production. Together, these currents redraw the risk map. Offsetting your way through a glossy brochure will not wash when capital is rewriting term sheets and policymakers are sharpening phase-out pencils.
Plans, not hope notes
The practical work begins with electricity. AI, electrification and on-shoring are lifting demand just as grids are congested. That makes siting, interconnects and heat reuse strategic, not cosmetic. If your 2030 target depends on power you cannot physically connect to, you have a hope note, not a plan. Move from annual certificates to 24/7 matched supply: feasible, secure, local power. Permits are the new moat. Treat them as such: map timelines, pre-permit land, engage communities early.
Next comes capital discipline. Investors will ask for dated, financed decarbonisation—process heat, fleets, buildings, supply contracts—sequenced against credible policy timetables. The right posture is dull and rigorous: ring-fence transition spend; publish milestones; link incentives to delivered efficiency, not announcements. If costs worry you, reframe the question. Resilience procurement beats volatility. Long-tenor power and heat contracts buy predictability the market will not hand you during a crunch.
Scope three—the value-chain emissions outside your own operations and purchased power (from suppliers’ manufacturing and logistics to customers’ use of your products and end-of-life)—will decide whether programmes endure. Standards are tightening; those emissions will not remain a rounding error.
Prepare vendors for mandatory data sharing and aligned targets, then make it easy: standard clauses, pooled tools, common baselines. Swap ‘please report’ for ‘this is the template, this is the cadence, these are the consequences’. Teams that professionalise supplier enablement will bank efficiency and goodwill before the stragglers have formed a taskforce.
Fairness—often waved through as rhetoric—has operational content. It means financing terms that bring emerging-market suppliers into the tent, not penalise them for geography. It means paying for outcomes, not absolution: heat recovered, leaks avoided, forests kept standing with independent measurement. It means recognising that communities around your sites and along your chains will determine your permit speed and your licence to operate. If you would not read your plan aloud at a town-hall meeting, it is not fair enough.
The pivot
Governance must also get braver. Audit committees should test transition plans like financial controls. Risk functions should treat grid connection and permit lead times as headline risks, not footnotes. Remuneration should reward megawatt-hours contracted and emissions avoided, not press releases. Marketing should follow, not lead. Communications can celebrate progress; they should not substitute for it.
For governments, the brief is similar. Move beyond strategy slides to delivery systems: faster permitting, modernised grids, coherent signals for industry. Treat forest-positive finance as national infrastructure and make it investable. That is how you reduce risk premia and keep jobs local. The public will judge not the flourish of the pledge but the speed of the connection and the stability of the bill.
Most firms are not choosing the timetable; they are adapting to one. Use scenarios with real dates: a subsidy sunset here, a stricter procurement rule there, a local constraint that bites sooner than it is fixed. Map exposure: which products, plants or clients become uneconomic under a plausible energy-price path by 2028? Then publish your glidepath—step-downs, substitutions, new partners. You do not need omniscience. You do need visible intent and credible steps.
Belém is a pivot from poetry to timetables. The companies—and places—that can show, by mid-2026, a financed, permissioned, physically grounded plan will win by default: permits, contracts, talent. Leadership now is dated and costed. Publish a transition plan you would defend in public—and start shipping milestones. Relevance belongs to those who move first and prove it.
Photo: Dreamstime.
