Johannesburg, South Africa, 22 November 2025 – Greenpeace has called on the G20 to ramp up their plans to cut emissions and make progress on global tax reform by taxing the super-rich to unlock public finance for climate mitigation, adaptation and social justice.
Ahead of the G20 Heads of States Summit, Greenpeace Africa activists also painted ‘Tax The Super-Rich’ on a major road leading to the Johannesburg Expo Centre, where world leaders will be gathering.
The action comes at a pivotal moment as the UN climate conference COP30 in Belém, Brazil, winds down after difficult negotiations on efforts to transition away from fossil fuels, end forest destruction and to progress climate finance for vulnerable countries. In Nairobi, the latest round of UN Tax Convention negotiations, which could unlock vital climate funds, have shown little interest in the proposal for a global minimum tax on the super-rich. The G20 Summit in South Africa now offers President Cyril Ramaphosa a critical opportunity to lead globally on climate justice, including advancing discussions on a wealth tax and raising ambition among G20 leaders.[1]
Fred Njehu, Fair Share Global Political Lead, Greenpeace Africa said: “Public momentum to tax the super-rich is fast growing – the political will has to follow with concrete actions. Billionaires in Africa and beyond are getting wealthier by the day, while billions are struggling with rising cost of living and escalating climate crisis. Making the wealthiest pay their fair share is essential to fund the fight against the climate crisis, mobilise domestic revenues for public services, and advance sustainable development. The G20 Summit is President Ramaphosa’s opportunity to turn words into action and show that South Africa – and Africa – can lead the world, and secure a place in history.”
New analysis published in a recently released G20 report shows that between 2000 and 2024, the world’s wealthiest 1% captured 41% of all new wealth, while just 1% went to the 50% of humanity at the other end of the scale. An Oxfam report found that over the last five years in Africa, the five richest African billionaires have increased their wealth by 88%.[2][3]
At the INC-3 of the UN Tax Conventions in Nairobi this month, Greenpeace called for stronger commitments to secure much-needed public finance for climate mitigation, nature protection, and sustainable development by ensuring the super-rich and corporate polluters pay their fair share in taxes. These measures could deliver on the COP29 finance commitment for developed countries to mobilise at least US$300 billion per year by 2035, and to scale up to at least US$1 trillion in public finance in line with needs.[4][5]
Cynthia Moyo, Lead Campaigner, Greenpeace Africa, said: President Ramaphosa must seize this G20 moment to back a Fair Share approach that makes the super-rich and big polluters pay what they owe. We cannot keep socialising costs while privatising profits. African citizens deserve transparency and a tax system that truly serves them. We cannot fund a green and equal future with a broken tax system. Tax justice is climate justice and without bold action on a global wealth tax and making polluters pay, the resources needed to protect people and the planet will remain out of reach.”
Ahead of the G20 Summit, Greenpeace International launched a new report, revealing the insufficient climate ambition in new 2035 emissions targets (Nationally Determined Contributions – NDCs) of the G20 countries. The report, 2035 Climate Ambition Gap, revealed the 2035 climate action plans of the G20 would yield just a 23-29% cut in emissions towards the 60% global reduction that is needed.
Attending COP30 in Belém, Tracy Carty, Climate Politics Expert, Greenpeace International said: “When the G20 countries – responsible for 80% of global emissions – deliver collective climate action plans that fall dangerously short, the world has a problem. Given their historic responsibility for emissions and greater financial capacity to act, developed G20 countries should be out front, cutting emissions far in excess of the 60% global average needed. The choices of G20 countries, especially developed ones, will make or break the 1.5°C goal, and it’s time to hold them to account.”
Do you know how many people in the world are dependent on small-scale fisheries for their livelihoods?
According to recent research, it’s roughly 492 million. Small scale fisheries provide jobs for 60 million people, which represents 90 percent of total fisheries employment worldwide; and four of every ten people engaged in small-scale fisheries are women. Small-scale fishers play a critical role in sustaining food security and livelihoods, and also in protecting the ocean and climate. Grounded in sustainable practices and traditional knowledge, small-scale fisheries feed the world while caring for healthy fish stocks and marine biodiversity. They also protect vital ecosystems in the fight against climate change, like mangroves, that capture carbon.
Greenpeace Africa activists, together with Joal villagers and local fishermen express their commitment to sustainable fishing after the departure of foreign pelagic trawlers.
Yet the very communities sustaining the ocean are being pushed to the frontline of its destruction.
From Patagonia to Senegal, Thailand, and the Indian Ocean, coastal communities are facing escalating pressures. In Chilean and Argentinian Patagonia, the rapid spread of salmon farms pollutes waters, harms local ecosystems, and displaces artisanal fishers, while driving a global demand for fishmeal and fish oil. In Senegal and across West Africa, industrial fishmeal and fish-oil plants are stripping coastal waters of wild fish, pushing communities into deepening food insecurity and eroding long-standing livelihoods. In Thailand, overfishing and illegal practices are depleting coastal fish populations, just as communities fight destructive industrial mega-projects. And across Sri Lanka and India, repeated maritime incidents have caused severe environmental damage and long-term social and economic distress. Climate change is also having devastating impacts on vulnerable regions and hitting harder coastal communities through sea level rise, increasingly intense heatwaves, cyclones, and loss of fishing grounds and tourism opportunities.
Addressing the threats their communities are facing, coastal representatives from around the world said:
“The destruction of endangered marine species and the depletion of essential ocean ecosystems are increasing at an alarming rate. This threatens both the sustainability of the sea and the survival of the coastal communities that rely on it,” said Selvaratnam Dilaxan, Founder of the Happy Voice Hub, community member, Mannar Pesalai, Sri Lanka.
“Aquatic animals belong to everyone. Everyone has the right to access aquatic resources, but no one has the right to destroy the future of aquatic resources – those are juvenile fish and young aquatic animals,” said Piya Thedyam, President of the Federation of Thai Fisherfolk Association.
“The situation is critical: if we do nothing, the sea risks becoming a liquid desert,” said Abdou Karim Sall, President of the Marine Protected Area’s Management Committee.
Activists and youth organizations hold a protest against illegal gold mining activity and display a banner with a message “Our Seas, Our Rights” in commemoration of the World Fisheries Day in Kampung Bulo, Sangihe Islands, Indonesia.
Industrial exploitation of the ocean that harms both people and the planet.
These threats are not isolated incidents, they are all different pieces of the same system. Across countries, small-scale fishers and coastal movements are proving that they are the solution by asserting control over their waters, protecting fishing grounds from industrial pressure, demanding transparent governance, and strengthening the resilient livelihoods that safeguard the future of the ocean. Coastal communities’ knowledge and sustainable practices are essential to conserving the ocean’s richness, an ocean we all depend on as it provides half of the oxygen we breathe, regulates climate, and feeds billions of people around the world.
Supporting small-scale fishers’ call to action, Nichanan Tanthanawit, Global Project Lead for Ocean Justice Campaign, Greenpeace South East Asia, said:
“Today, we honour the leadership of coastal peoples, and we stand with them in urging governments to recognise coastal communities as rights holders in all coastal and marine matters, from one coastline to another. We call for policies that uphold accountability and transparency in fisheries management and safeguard the communities who protect the ocean, because a fair and just ocean is the future we must protect.”
On World Fisheries Day, A Call to Governments: recognize and center coastal communities
This World Fisheries Day, Greenpeace is calling on global governments to recognize and center Indigenous and coastal communities, including small-scale fishers, in decision making about oceans, supporting the global small-scale fishers call to action. Recognising coastal communities rights and knowledge, and centering them in decision making about the ocean is vital to achieving global biodiversity goals and safeguarding our shared future. Standing with coastal communities is crucial to help ensure their demands reach local and global decision-makers and that they are centered in decision making about the ocean, including during COP17 of the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) in 2026, where the future of ocean protection, restoration, and governance will be shaped.
Laura Bergamo is the Global Communications and Engagement Lead for Ocean Justice at Greenpeace Southeast Asia
I’m a campaigner with Greenpeace Nordic, working right now from the Brazilian city of Belem, at the mouth of the Amazon river. If, like me, you were waiting outside the COP30 climate talks this week, you might have seen someone holding a sign exposing what is really happening inside. The reality? Industrial agriculture is out in full force.
Greenpeace Sweden activists go to local stores to put “Warning – linked to Amazon destruction” information stickers on JBS meat products, sold as “Nature meat”.
COP30 should be a defining moment for the climate. With political leaders gathered in the Amazon, there is a real opportunity to close the 1.5°C ambition gap, have robust decisions towards ending deforestation, hold big polluters accountable and avert the worst impacts of climate change.
But from glitzy receptions to side events, press conferences and sponsored pavilions, Big Ag is everywhere you look at COP30, with a very different agenda. Over 300 corporate lobbyists are throwing around buzzwords like ‘climate-smart agriculture’ and ‘no additional warming’ to divert attention away from the rampant deforestation, spiralling emissions and unchecked pollution upon which the industry is based.
JBS’s COP30 showcase: Greenwash and the false promise of “climate leadership” from Big Ag
Few companies epitomise Big Ag’s efforts to gloss over its abysmal environmental record than Brazilian beef behemoth JBS.
JBS has been repeatedly linked to deforestation, corruption scandals and indigenous land rights violations, including as recently as this year. According to a recent report by Greenpeace Nordic, IATP, Foodrise and Friends of the Earth, JBS is estimated to be by far the largest greenhouse gas emitter amongst 45 major meat and dairy companies examined. And emissions from this sector contribute the bulk of the whole agricultural sector’s total emissions.
April 2025: Greenpeace Brazil’s activists take action against JBS, the world’s biggest meat company, disrupting their annual shareholder meeting at the company’s headquarters in Sao Paulo. They are protesting the company’s role in environmental destruction and climate breakdown, including deforestation in the Amazon.
Despite this, JBS has long sought to cast itself as a climate leader, with admittedly limited success. In fact, just days before COP30 began it settled a lawsuit with the New York Office of the Attorney General for USD1.1 million over alleged greenwashing. Now it is facing a fresh legal challenge from NGO Mighty Earth over its net-zero claims.
This track record might make JBS an unlikely candidate to spearhead the meat industry’s greenwashing efforts, but JBS is steaming ahead. In corporate presentations and events at COP30, it has tried to convince the world that livestock farming can be a solution to, instead a driver of the climate crisis.
However, as is so often the case with Big Ag, all is not what it seems. Both Brazil’s research institute Embrapa and Kansas State University were contracted to validate Roncador’s ‘carbon-negative’ claims. To the best of our knowledge, neither has published comprehensive details on their results or the methodology used. A lack of transparency like that should raise red flags for policymakers and investors alike.
September 2025: Greenpeace Brazil documents how the Farm Nova Orleans, a massive property marked by embargoes and illegal deforestation, and the small rural property Chácara Rancho Alegre form a cattle laundering scheme that supplies JBS and threatens the Amazon.
Whatismore, major actors in the sector, including Roncador, aim to profit from selling carbon credits based on these uncertain figures, while, at best, farms like Roncador just repay the soil carbon debt caused by years of mis-management leaving pastures degraded. And, when rainforest is chopped down to make way for pasture (as 90% of deforested areas in the Brazilian Amazon reportedly are), it leaves a colossal carbon and biodiversity debt that no amount of soil sequestration can even begin to repay.
Better agriculture practices in some farms alone is not enough – it must be supported to become the norm across all of Brazil and, crucially, combined with the full elimination of deforestation from supply chains, alongside binding targets to reduce agricultural emissions, and a transition to agroecology.
Five Greenpeace New Zealand climbers scale the Te Rapa Fonterra milk processing factory to unfurl a 160 square metre banner reading “Fonterra methane cooks the climate”.
But scratch the surface and you will quickly find the ugly reality concealed beneath: our current food system is not designed to ‘feed the world’ but is instead supercharging climate change and destroying ecosystems like the Amazon.
That’s why at COP30, it’s so urgent that governments see through Big Ag’s greenwash. We urgently need effective action that not just halts, but reverses deforestation. Only then can we really start repairing the damage that Big Ag has wrought on the world’s greatest rainforest and avoid irreversible tipping points.
Add your name to the Respect the Amazon petition and demand that leaders at COP30 deliver a strong Forest Action Plan to implement the goal of halting and reversing deforestation and forest degradation and work to keep the 1.5°C goal within reach.
Jehki Härkönen is a campaigner at Greenpeace Nordic.
Belém, Brazil – Climate impacted community members from Peru, the Philippines, and Belgium urged governments at COP30 to commit to a roadmap to phase out fossil fuels and make polluters pay at a new interactive climate damages exhibition at the UN climate talks. The exhibition, on unaccounted for climate impacts of the oil and gas industry, also featured the display of a giant Climate Polluters Bill linked to the fossil fuel industry.
Photos and videos of the exhibition “Unaccounted” are available in the Greenpeace Media Library.
Saúl Luciano Lliuya, Peruvian farmer and Plaintiff in a landmark climate lawsuit against German energy firm RWE said: “This climate bill comes from communities that have been severely affected by climate change, but are the least responsible for it. Where I live, in the Andes, the landscape in the highlands is changing very quickly and the mountains are crying as the glaciers melt. My community and others like mine, along with the mountains, will see justice.”
To inaugurate the exhibition, Lliuya was joined by Filipino youth activist Charles Zander Deluna and Belgian climate activist Benjamin Van Bunderen Robberechts as part of the calls for governments to accelerate work on phasing out fossil fuels and to hold the industry accountable. Deluna’s community has recently announced the first climate-related personal injury and property damage case against UK oil giant Shell and Van Bunderen Robberechts. Is the founder of “Climate Justice for Rosa.”[1]
Beyond the giant bill [2], the exhibition provided visitors the opportunity to indicate on a collective world map, where they were confronted with climate impacts, co-creating an archive of disrupted lives and the growing unaccounted costs of the oil and gas industry.
Other exhibits included a video collage of extreme weather and displacement, showing the widening gap between political pledges and the reality of the climate crisis alongside a poem from Jackie Bernabela, a teacher from the Caribbean island Bonaire who is suing the Dutch government for failing to protect it from climate change.
Abdoulaye Diallo, Campaign Lead, Greenpeace International said: “For too long, the balance sheet of the climate crisis remained invisible. Ordinary people barely survive by swimming through flooded cities, while oil and gas corporations are showered in mega-profits. Negotiators must wake up to the growing public and political pressure to make polluters pay, and agree to new polluter taxes to unlock international climate finance in the final COP30 outcome.”
At COP30, Greenpeace is calling for a Global Response Plan to address the 1.5°C ambition gap and accelerate emissions reductions in this critical decade; a new, dedicated 5-year Forest Action Plan to end deforestation by 2030; and the establishment of a new work programme to advance the implementation of the COP29 finance outcome and developed countries’ public finance commitments – within which options should be developed on progressive environmental taxation in line with the polluter pays principle and the principle of common but differentiated responsibilities and respective capabilities (CBDR-RC).
ENDS
NOTES:
[1] In November 2015, Saúl Luciano Lliuya, a Peruvian farmer who lives in Huaraz, Peru, filed claims for declaratory judgment and damages in the District Court Essen, Germany against RWE, Germany’s largest electricity producer.
The mission of Climate Justice for Rosa is to honour the memory of Rosa, a 15-year-old girl who tragically drowned in the devastating climate-induced floods that hit Western Europe in the summer of 2021, claiming the lives of 220 people in Belgium and Germany.
[2] Data provided to Greenpeace International by leading scholars on the Social Cost of Carbon found economic damage from emissions of just five major oil and gas corporations in the last decade was estimated to be over US$ 5 trillionThe quantification of economic damages since 2015 was provided to Greenpeace International by Prof. James Rising of the University of Delaware and Dr. Lisa Rennels of Stanford University. The analysis uses data from the Carbon Majors Database and the SCC methodology. The SCC was used by former US administrations and policy analysts to assign a dollar value to future damages from an additional ton of CO₂ between the year of its emissions through to the year 2300.
Emissions data for the oil and gas companies was provided by the Carbon Majors Database, which in turn sources emissions data from publicly available company reports.
Respect the Amazon
