Assembly: Strengthening the Climate Regime: A Citizens’ Track as a Legacy of the Global Mutirão and COP30

Purpose:
The event aims to establish the Global Citizens Assembly as a legacy from Brazil’s COP30 Presidency, making the Mutirão vision a recurring and permanent feature within the COP system.

Theme:
This 50-minute event will present the intellectual case for citizen participation in global climate governance, drawing on Iswe’s policy brief launched at New York Climate Week. It will describe the current participatory ecosystem for climate and the benefits it can bring to improve implementation, and demonstrate that the Global Mutirão can tap into that energy and make people and citizens actual stakeholders of major multilateral climate decisions. In the spirit of COP30’s Global Mutirão, the event will feature a moment in which representatives of the COP30 Presidency receive and acknowledge the first results from pilot community assemblies convened through the Assemblis digital platform. These deliberations will highlight citizens’ demands for effective climate action, with a strong focus on Brazilian local realities and on the voices of Indigenous peoples, women’s groups, and youth.

Key messages:

• Value proposition: Citizen deliberations generate trusted, representative insights on climate action, strengthening legitimacy of negotiations and the implementability of new NDCs. These outcomes can feed into future COPs and ultimately the Global Stocktake.
• Legacy for Brazil’s COP30 Presidency: Just as COP21 in Paris is remembered for structuring the Action Agenda, COP30 will be remembered for initiating a permanent citizens’ track to strengthen the process, embedding structured citizens’ inputs. The Mutirão, as supported by the platform Assemblis among others, becomes one of Brazil’s meaningful legacy.
• Global momentum: After testing small-scale, in-depth pilots, as well as the platform, the Mutirão initiative can continue to scale up globally through Assemblis. COP30 is the launchpad for the next phase: massification of  distributed community assemblies worldwide.
• Continuity and cooperation: Brazil can ensure the Mutirão legacy lives on by inviting COP31 hosts to continue this work and establish an enduring citizens’ track within climate negotiations.