The United Nations has urged its staff to limit attendance at the Cop30 climate summit in Brazil in November due to high accommodation prices, while government delegations are still scrambling to find rooms within their budgets.
The move comes as delegations grow increasingly concerned about the cost of accommodation in the coastal Amazon city of Belem hosting Cop30. Brazil said it was working to increase the number of available hotel beds, but soaring prices for accommodation have stoked calls from some governments to relocate the conference, which Brazilian officials have rejected.
“In view of the capacity constraints in Belem, I would like to kindly request that heads of the United Nations system, specialized agencies and other relevant organizations review the size of their delegations at Cop30 and reduce numbers where possible,” the UN climate secretariat’s executive secretary, Simon Stiell, said in a document published on the UN website.
In a statement, Brazil’s Cop30 presidency said it had reaffirmed its commitment to securing 15 single rooms for poorer countries at reduced rates.
Nearly every government in the world will gather at the annual UN summit to negotiate efforts to curb climate change. But developing countries have warned that they cannot afford Belem’s accommodation prices, which have soared amid a shortage of rooms.
Media organisations and civil society groups have also said they will have to reduce or abandon their coverage of the conference due to the costs of accommodation.
Organisers have been warned they risk hosting “the least inclusive Cop ever” if solutions to the accommodation crisis are not found.
At a meeting of countries’ representatives and UN officials last month, the UN asked Brazil to subsidise hotel prices to ensure rooms for $100 a day for delegates from the world’s poorest countries and $400-$500 a day for other countries, according to an official summary of that meeting.
Miriam Belchior, executive secretary to Brazilian president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s chief of staff, told journalists after the meeting that Brazil was already bearing significant costs for hosting Cop30 and could not provide further subsidies.
Countries’ representatives and UN officials are due to meet again this week to discuss the accommodation situation for Cop30.
