UN boosts financial support to poorer countries attending COP30 amid hotel crisis

By Lisandra Paraguassu and Kate Abnett

BRASILIA (Reuters) -The U.N. will give low-income countries more money to help them attend COP30, the global climate summit set to take place in Brazil this November, in view of soaring accommodation costs in the Amazonian city of Belem.

For months, Brazil has resisted calls to move the conference out of Belem, with President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva showing no willingness to backtrack on his promise to present the Amazon rainforest to the world at COP30.

The U.N.'s International Civil Service Commission, which decides on the "daily subsistence allowance," has agreed to raise it for Belem, after a request from the U.N.'s climate secretariat, a spokesperson for the secretariat told Reuters.

According to a statement released by the Brazilian COP30 presidency, the allowance has been raised to $197, from $144, for 144 developing countries. The allowance covers two or three delegates per country, and 374 delegates in total.

The decision was announced this Wednesday during the third meeting between the UN's climate body, the UNFCCC, and representatives from Brazil to discuss how to alleviate what has become an acute accommodation crisis, with hotels charging 10 to 15 times their regular rates for the conference period. 

Nearly every government in the world will gather at the annual U.N. summit to negotiate how to curb climate change.

But concerns about logistics, rather than global climate policy, have dominated pre-summit meetings. Developing countries have warned that they cannot afford Belem's accommodation prices, which have soared amid the shortage of rooms.

Brazil is racing to expand on the 18,000 hotel beds in the coastal city to host the roughly 45,000 people projected to attend COP30. It says developing countries can book more affordable accommodation at daily rates of up to $220.

Less than two months before the conference, only 79 countries have made reservations through the official COP30 platform or through other means, and 70 are still in negotiations, according to the Brazilian government. The annual COP negotiations usually involve nearly 200 countries.

(Reporting by Lisandra Paraguassu, in Brasilia; additional reporting by Kate Abnett, in Brussels, editing by Philippa Fletcher)