Fossil Fuel Lobbyists At CRAP30 Outnumber All Individual National Delegations Except For Brazil

More than 1,600 fossil fuel lobbyists have been granted access to the Cop30 climate negotiations in Belém, significantly outnumbering every single country’s delegation apart from the host Brazil, new analysis has found. One in every 25 participants at this year’s UN climate summit is a fossil fuel lobbyist, according to the analysis by the Kick Big Polluters Out (KBPO) coalition, raising serious questions about the corporate capture and credibility of the annual Cop negotiations.

This year’s tally represents a 12% rise from last year’s climate talks in Baku, Azerbaijan, and is the largest concentration of fossil fuel lobbyists at Cop since KBPO first began exposing industry participation in 2021. The overall number is smaller this year than at Cop29 in Baku (1,773) and Cop28 in Dubai (2,456), but the proportion is higher this year as the Belém summit is less well-attended.

It brings the total number of fossil fuel lobbyists given access to the UN climate summits to 7,000 over the past five years, a period marked by a rise in catastrophic extreme weather, disinformation and oil and gas profits. “Another Cop, same playbook. This is corporate capture, not climate governance,” said Lien Vandamme, senior campaigner on human rights and climate change at the Center for International Environmental Law (CIEL).

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Several big polluters from the global north invited fossil fuel representatives to join their official delegations including France, which brought 22 industry delegates including the CEO of TotalEnergies, and Norway, whose group included six senior executives from its national oil and gas giant Equinor. Overall, only Brazil, with 3,805 delegates, has a bigger presence than oil, gas and coal interests. But the true extent of fossil fuel influence is likely to be higher, as more than half of all country delegation members at Cop30 withheld or obscured details of their affiliations, according to a separate analysis by Transparency International. Russia, Tanzania, South Africa and Mexico are among the countries that did not disclose the affiliation of any official delegates.

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https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/nov/14/fossil-fuel-lobbyists-cop30