
08/10/2025
It has been a long time since a speech by Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva gathered as many compliments inside and outside of Brazil as his opening speech at the United Nations General Assembly did. The Brazilian president with the most UN appearances, as he is now in his third term, was lauded as a statesman. Yet what does being a statesman mean in a world in collapse? What is the profile of a statesman when we’ve already blown the chance to limit global heating to 1.5 degrees Celsius and we are living with worse and worse heat waves and more and more extreme weather events? What sort of statesman does the planet need when the Amazon is rapidly and dangerously approaching the point of no return?
It is true that Lula’s speech was strong, solidly built and inspired. He made an important statement against the genocide perpetrated by Israel in Gaza and took correct positions on several points, emphatically defending multilateralism. However, Lula devoted less than three minutes of his 18-minute speech to the threat placing humankind at risk of extinction, as indicated by the Climate Observatory. With less than 40 days until COP30, the first held in the Amazon, there was nothing more than a perfunctory mention of the climate collapse from the host country’s president.
So, a speech like Lula’s, one using subjects, verbs and predicates and grounded in the truth, is a relief because the world once again makes sense. Yet we are not in times that demand the bare minimum. If we keep demanding nothing more than the minimum, the planet will keep heating faster and faster and, soon, we won’t have any of the options currently on the table, between a harsh planet and a planet hostile to humankind. So, it isn’t enough to be grounded in truth, in humanitarian principles, and in common sense. We must also be grounded in action.
Read the editorial written by Eliane Brum on sumauma.com/en