From Belém to Boston: Connecting Our Climate Stories
By Abigail Bergman | February 2026
Belém, Brazil, the COP30 host city, is on track to become the second hottest city in the world by 2050. I did not encounter this staggering fact directly until my final day at the conference, the closing day of the two-week multilateral decision-making forum. I was attending a press conference in the Blue Zone, the restricted UN-managed area of the conference, where I listened intently to a local indigenous transwoman contextualizing the Blue Zone fire that had taken place the day prior within the urgency of Belém’s situation, citing the above statistic. She also described the event in fierce terms that reflected indigenous Amazonian spirituality, sharing a story about a spirit figure that sets fire to those who destroy the Amazon, alluding to the presence of fossil fuel lobbyists and others with extractivist agendas at COP. Speaking as a transwoman, she spoke of the dangers LGBTQ people face during emergencies, and how these dangers are most amplified among trans people who are already more vulnerable to violence. Rooms away, the official UN party delegates were wrapping up their changes to climate policies for this COP, and remembering this brought the extraordinary nature of COP to the fore as a unique site in which local climate experiences are shared alongside global policy efforts.
In only seven days, I had witnessed flooding and intense rains. On one of my days with Blue Zone access, it rained so powerfully that the venue ceiling leaked and so loudly that several events had to be cancelled because, even with the sound systems, speakers and panelists could not be heard over the pelting downpours. While I expected there to be rain in the Amazonian regions of Brazil, I had not anticipated to have been affected by wet weather while indoors. The very next day, I attended an event in the Children and Youth Pavilion, one of the thematic programming spaces in the Blue Zone, where I heard from three young Brazilian climate leaders, all advocating for flood mitigation efforts in their various hometowns. These youth leaders mentioned that, in their short lifetimes, they had already seen storms and flooding worsen significantly. Slowly, it was becoming clearer to me that this weather pattern was atypical, even for the rainforest.
Extreme heat and fire were also part of my broader COP30 experience. Each morning, the Boston College delegation met at a neighborhood cafe near our two AirBnBs for breakfast. Between bites, we would occasionally glance at the mounted TV airing the local news and comment on what was being reported, much of it relating to COP30. One morning, we saw reports of a house fire in another Belém neighborhood that was difficult to contain. When the fire broke out in the Blue Zone the next day, I was starting to understand how it fit into the broader pattern of climate-related consequences felt in Belém.
Our experiences of extreme weather in and around the Blue Zone reflected only a slice of what has already become a part of everyday life for those in Belém and Brazil generally. When the woman at the press conference shared the trajectory of Belém, it gave a shape and name to much of what I witnessed in my short time there. This place that may soon be the second hottest city in the world opened my worldview, brought me into relation with some of the kindest people I’ve ever met, and generously shared both its manmade and natural beauty with me. COP30 helped me take notice of the power of local climate stories and of making abstract scientific evidence more concrete and felt.
Whether we are aware of it or not, we all have—or are only now starting to have—a personal relationship with what’s at stake. And, the stories I heard at COP evoked many aspects of my own climate story. They reframed an incident of coastal erosion that occurred in my hometown in 2023; the erosion had become so severe that the stone seawall supporting a beachside restaurant collapsed. At the time, I considered this to be a fluke, an isolated incident. Now, I can pair this incident with a memory I have on the other side of this same beach from years earlier: I remember noticing that the wind had been whipping the sand so strongly that the bottom few stairs from the beach to the street had become completely buried. I remember noticing this because I stumbled down those last few steps and laughed it off with whoever was joining me in the sun that day.
Now, I recognize this moment as an instance of witnessing, of experiencing firsthand how the very contours of where I grew up were changing. Growing up on these shores, I can start to trace the shifting shoreline as it shrinks at a rate of two feet per year. Looking at the projection maps, I can point to houses of friends that will be impacted, of shops that will close, of roads that will be impassable, in not too long. Though the way climate change is manifesting in the communities north of Boston may look different from its Brazilian impacts, our climate stories could unite people in a common cause, and COP30 was the first channel in which this power was palpable on a global scale.
Though these experiences have the potential to reframe climate perspectives, potentially mobilizing positive change, they also reveal deep and troubling losses. Stories like my own, or like the woman at the press conference, do not come to any satisfying resolution. The acts of listening to and telling these personal accounts can activate ecological grief, and, just like other forms of grief, too often we tend to avoid or deny its presence through refusing to tell our stories or even see them through the lens of climate change. Yet, when I think about the ways the COP30 outcomes fell short—the missing fossil fuel and deforestation phase out plans, an 85% emissions reduction gap—my disappointment in the multinational policy does not lessen the inspiration I felt from hearing from local changemakers. By attending COP, civil society became a beacon of hope for what I believe we can achieve in the future through our collective efforts to combat climate change and process what we’ve lost along the way.
In the weeks since my COP30 experience, I’ve been asking myself, where are the sites in which I already have power and can wield it in ways that disrupt our own troubling climate projections here at home? As an early childhood education researcher, this question feels all the more essential. While at COP, I was also privileged to speak alongside six other climate leaders from North American universities, including faculty, program directors, and other grad students. We grappled with this and similar questions on stage together at the UN Sustainable Development Goals pavilion, reflecting specifically on the role of the university in accelerating climate action. This discussion became a generative space where we all shared our wildest imaginations and hopes for how our higher-ed can create space for climate change dialogue, foster interdisciplinary research across departments and institutions, and translate new knowledge about climate to communities and grassroots groups that can leverage these insights into their changemaking efforts and policies. Every context we find ourselves in, including higher ed and research of any discipline, can become a channel through which the power structures that maintain and accelerate climate change can be resisted.
It can be easy to get overwhelmed and paralyzed at the prospect of what might befall us. We may be rightfully disappointed in our leaders who fail to protect our futures. However, my time at COP30 uncovered the power behind the stories and acts of real people, and in so doing, it yielded new sources of hope. Projected statistics, while terror-inducing on the one hand, can also motivate us to course correct while we still can protect ourselves, our loved ones, and our communities. As botanist Robin Wall Kimmerer writes in Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants, “...our relationship with land cannot heal until we hear its stories. But who will tell them?” When pouring rains and blazing fires silence—albeit temporarily—our climate negotiations, we must heed nature’s pleas to listen.