When leaders from nearly every nation on Earth gathered in Belém, Brazil, for COP30, the global climate summit unfolded in a place where ecological urgency and moral responsibility meet: the Amazon. For Union alumna, faculty member, and Director of Union’s Center for Earth Ethics (CEE) Karenna Gore, the setting was not just symbolic. It was essential.
“The Amazon has been described as the lungs of the planet,” she reflected. “Being there meant feeling that ecosystem—and the voices of the people who live there—at the heart of the proceedings.”
This COP was historic on multiple fronts. It marked ten years since the Paris Agreement, when nations first pledged to keep global warming below levels scientists deemed unsafe. It returned the UN climate process to Brazil, where the modern negotiations began at the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio. And under Brazil’s COP30 presidency, it introduced something new: a Global Ethical Stocktake.
If the technical “global stocktake” measures nations’ emissions reductions and climate finance commitments, the ethical stocktake asks deeper questions: What do we value? Whose lives and lands count? How do culture, spirituality, and moral responsibility reshape our understanding of climate action?
These are precisely the questions that drew the Center for Earth Ethics—and Union’s theological imagination—into the heart of COP30.
Union’s President, Rev. Dr. Serene Jones also traveled to Belém to bear witness to this historic moment and to support the work of Gore and the CEE team. Reflecting on her experience, she said:
“COP30 reminded the world that the climate crisis is inseparable from questions of justice, power, and dignity. Union’s presence in Belém, through Karenna’s leadership and the work of the Center for Earth Ethics, signaled our unwavering commitment to confronting systems that harm the Earth and its most vulnerable peoples. This is faith in the public square at its most urgent.”
Co-leading a new conversation: the Global Ethical Stocktake
Gore served as co-leader of the North America dialogue of the Global Ethical Stocktake, supporting Brazil’s Minister of Environment and Climate Change, Marina Silva, who chaired the initiative’s circle of leadership. In that role, CEE convened an official dialogue in New York City in September and helped catalyze self-organized dialogues across the region—from island nations to Arctic communities to environmental justice movements in the United States.
“This was the first time there has been an ethical stocktake,” Gore said. “It’s very much alive as an idea. It’s not complete after this COP—but could grow into something more. That is our goal and our hope.”
The North America dialogue brought together a constellation of moral voices:
- Environmental justice pioneers like Robert Bullard and Union alum Ben Chavis
- Indigenous wisdom keepers, including Haudenosaunee and Diné leaders
- Best-selling author Robin Wall Kimmerer, whose work bridges science, Indigenous knowledge, and ecological reverence
- Leaders from Greenland and Bermuda highlighting climate impacts from melting ice to island finance barriers
North America, Gore emphasized, carries a distinct moral burden and opportunity. The United States is the world’s largest historical emitter. Yet it is also home to some of the strongest critiques of the extractive systems that produced the crisis.
“These are voices for the world,” she said. “They reveal the truth about the systems that have caused harm—but they also offer wisdom about how we can heal.”
“We can’t eat money”: the Amazon speaks
Holding COP30 in Belém meant the Amazon shaped the gathering. Indigenous leaders were present in record numbers—inside the negotiations and as protectors and protesters outside. Their message, Gore said, was unmissable: “We can’t eat money.”
“At a time when so much of the economic development agenda is about turning cultures into cash-based economies accountable to global capital markets, that statement was a powerful reminder,” she said. “The basis of life is what’s important: air, water, shelter, food, community, and culture.”
For Gore and CEE, this is where ethics and spirituality meet policy. The climate crisis is not only technical; it is fundamentally a spiritual crisis—one rooted in how we understand our place in creation.
Shining a light of truth at “the COP of truth”
On paper, COP30’s final text was disappointing. Despite widespread debate, fossil fuels were not named in the final agreement. And yet, Gore insists, the convening was still meaningful.
“There was an authenticity to the discourse,” she said. “The values, culture, and spirituality that came in—through the Global Ethical Stocktake, through Indigenous voices, through faith leaders—were like a light shining on the truth.”
She cited Ida B. Wells-Barnett’s famous line: “The way to right wrongs is to shine the light of truth upon them.” Brazil’s President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva even called COP30 “the COP of truth.”
A truly ethical outcome, Gore said, would mean rapidly ending deforestation, fully transitioning away from fossil fuels, and ensuring that the communities least responsible for the crisis—but most harmed by it—receive the resources they are owed for adaptation and a just transition.
Union at the global table
Gore is clear that she enters COP spaces as someone deeply shaped by Union Theological Seminary.
“At Union, we were asked: Who are you accountable to? And that question stays with me,” she said. “It helps me understand why people are there and how they move through these negotiations.”
Union’s legacy of movement-building—from civil rights to anti-apartheid struggles—also informs her leadership.
“Those are the lessons we need to build a climate movement strong enough to break through,” she said. “Union’s combination of legacy and open-heartedness makes it uniquely suited to lead in this moment.”
Hope in deeper wells of conscience
Much ecological destruction today, Gore observes, is “perfectly legal and socially encouraged.” That is why the climate crisis requires moral courage.
“We have to draw from deeper wells of conscience,” she said. “Historically, faith communities have helped people do that—grounding them in values, sustaining moral courage, and helping them act for something greater than themselves.”
This is the work ahead: convening dialogues, centering frontline communities, amplifying Indigenous wisdom, and insisting that any meaningful climate solution must be rooted in ethics.
Or, as the protesters outside COP30 reminded the world:
We can’t eat money.