World leaders arrive for preliminary meeting at COP30 UN climate summit in Brazil

World leaders and officials began arriving Thursday at the COP30 summit in the Brazilian city of Belem.

President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva welcomed them as they arrived at the venue ahead of the conference’s opening ceremony.

Those descending on the United Nations annual climate summit in Brazil this week will not need to see much more than the view from their airplane window to sense the unfathomable stakes.

Surrounding the coastal city of Belem is an emerald green carpet festooned with winding rivers.

But the view also reveals barren plains: some 17% of the Amazon's forest cover has vanished in the past 50 years, swallowed up for farmland, logging and mining.

Often called the “lungs of the world” for its capacity to absorb vast quantities of carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas that warms the planet, the biodiverse Amazon rainforest has been increasingly choked by wildfires and cleared by cattle ranching.

It is here on the edge of the world's largest tropical rainforest that Lula hopes to convince world powers to mobilize enough funds to halt the ongoing destruction of climate-stabilizing tropical rainforests in danger around the world and make progress on other critical climate goals.

Organizers are hoping this year's Conference of Parties — known less formally as COP30 — will yield commitments of money and action to support the goals laid out at previous such meetings, billing it as the "Implementation COP."

But they'll have to overcome reduced participation from the world's biggest emitters as the heads of the world’s three biggest polluters — China, the United States and India — will be notably absent.

These tensions are on display as a preliminary leaders’ gathering gets