Why are we gathering in Brazil to talk climate? Why now?

This October, climate and tax justice movements will gather in Brazil for A Climate for Change: Towards Just Taxation for Climate Finance. The two-day conference at UNICAMP (13–14 October 2025) comes at a pivotal moment: just weeks before COP30 in Belém and in the first year of negotiations towards a UN tax convention. It is an opportunity to connect two agendas too often treated in isolation — climate and taxation — and to show why bridging them is essential for a just transition.

A missing link in climate finance

Every year, countries lose around US $500 billion to cross-border tax abuse by multinational corporations and superrich individuals. That is money that should be funding hospitals, schools, renewable energy, and climate resilience — but instead is siphoned away into tax havens and hidden behind financial secrecy.

Outdated global tax rules — shaped with little input from most countries — together with the grip of corporate interests, strip governments of their tax sovereignty: the right to decide who is taxed, on what terms, and in whose interests. Stripped of this power, governments are pushed into manufactured scarcity — trapped in the myth that there is “no money” for climate action or public services, even as billions drain away through loopholes, profit shifting, and harmful incentives.

The Tax Justice Network’s recent research shows that reasserting tax sovereignty would cover most countries’ climate finance needs and leave most with billions to spare towards other public services — yet this potential remains out of reach, with 80% of countries’ tax sovereignty already “endangered” or “negated.”

Today’s global economic architecture entrenches that reality. It protects wealth while constraining governments — especially in the Global South — from mobilising their own resources. The result is dependence on debt, austerity, and volatile private flows, where creditors and corporations hold more sway over policy than citizens. What we face is not a climate finance gap, but a tax sovereignty gap — one that robs governments of the fiscal space to raise and use revenues for the transitions their people and planet urgently need.

Brazil at the crossroads

Brazil is not only hosting COP30 — it is also co-leading, with Azerbaijan, the Baku-to-Belém Roadmap, the flagship process tasked with mobilising US $1.3 trillion a year in climate finance by 2035. For Brazil, this is more than diplomacy: it is a political choice to step onto the global stage as a broker between North and South, and as a country whose own development depends on whether the world can finance a just transition.

The roadmap underscores both urgency and risk. Mobilising US $1.3 trillion annually is essential — but how that money is raised matters as much as the figure itself. Will it come as new loans, tightening the debt trap that already consumes much of the Global South’s revenue? Will it rely on false climate solutions like carbon markets that mask inaction, fuel land grabs, and fail to cut emissions? Without tax sovereignty, these targets risk joining the long trail of broken pledges that have stalled climate action for decades.

This is why Brazil matters now. With COP30 in Belém, in the heart of the Amazon, the world’s eyes will be on a country that reflects the contradictions of today’s global economy: a rising power with vast natural wealth and climate leadership ambitions, yet pouring billions into new oil and gas expansion that risks locking the region into decades of carbon dependence. These contradictions give Brazil both the credibility and the urgency to demand climate finance anchored in public revenues, not in debt or extractivism.

A Climate for Change will spotlight this debate. It argues that tax is not only the most reliable and fastest source of climate finance, but also the most democratic — unlike aid, debt, or private capital, which shift power from citizens to creditors and corporations. For Brazil, advancing tax justice is both a domestic necessity and a global responsibility: reclaiming the revenues needed to protect its people, preserve the Amazon, break its reliance on fossil fuel rents, and prove that another model of climate finance is possible.

Building a new agenda

The conference will bring together advocates, policymakers, researchers, and grassroots movements from across the world to build common strategies and narratives. Together, we will set out a vision where countries can exercise their rights to tax fairly, reclaim the resources lost each year to tax abuse, and direct them towards development and climate priorities defined by their people.

In doing so, we will make clear that tax justice and climate justice are inseparable — and that reclaiming tax sovereignty is central to transforming the global economic order that has entrenched inequality, empowered corporate interests, and delayed climate action for far too long.

Join us

Register now to attend the conference online or in person on 13–14 October 2025. The two-day conference will be held at UNICAMP in Campinas, Brazil and will start at 9:30am local time. More information about the event, speakers and panels is available here.

The conference is co-hosted by Instituto de Economia, University of Campinas (UNICAMP), Inesc, Observatório Brasileiro do Sistema Tributário, Red de Justicia Fiscal de América Latina y el Caribe, Transforma, and the Tax Justice Network, the two-day conference will take place at the University of Campinas in Brazil on 13-14 October 2025.