As many nations face challenges in funding their development needs amid worsening climate change impacts and other global issues, Guyana’s leaders believe the Low Carbon Development Strategy (LCDS) 2030 provides a model that countries can not only support but seek to emulate, as it is already delivering scalable financing solutions.
Placing the LCDS 2030 in the spotlight was Minister of Natural Resources, Vickram Bharrat, during the COP30 High-Level Segment in Belém. He said Guyana’s model for sustainable, low-carbon development shows that climate adaptation and development can advance together when global finance systems enable it. The LCDS 2030, he said, has strengthened national monitoring, expanded Indigenous land rights, scaled renewable energy, improved food security and advanced biodiversity protection.
Minister Bharrat argued that Guyana’s integrated model stands in contrast to global systems that remain slow, fragmented and underfunded. “Adaptation is a daily question of safety and survival for millions,” he said. “Yet adaptation finance is too little, too slow and too hard to access.” The LCDS demonstrates how mitigation and adaptation can be pursued together; however, scaling such models will require global financial reform.
Guyana has received more than half a billion US dollars in jurisdictional REDD+ revenue to date, which has been reinvested directly into Indigenous communities for climate-resilient infrastructure, eco-tourism, sustainable forestry, and social services — proving, he said to the climate event, that climate finance can protect forests, support Indigenous peoples and strengthen national resilience simultaneously.
Minister Bharrat also used this platform to outline the two other areas where global action must shift from rhetoric to implementation: the energy transition and forests and nature.
Regarding the energy transition, he warned that the world is entering a period of unprecedented energy demand, even as millions remain without access to modern energy. Transitioning away from fossil fuels, he said, must be guided by carbon science and a just transition — not slogans. That includes global carbon pricing, phasing out fossil-fuel subsidies, and recognising the role of responsible, lower-carbon producers in meeting unavoidable demand. Guyana’s own no-flaring requirement for offshore operations, he noted, is one example of how producers can reduce emissions while maintaining energy security.
On forests, the minister highlighted Guyana’s leadership in the Forest and Climate Leaders’ Partnership, which it co-chairs with the United Kingdom. The Forest Finance Roadmap — developed through this Partnership — outlines six mechanisms to make forests worth more alive than dead. Two are already advancing: the Tropical Forests Forever Facility, championed by Guyana and Brazil, and Jurisdictional REDD+, which enabled Guyana to become the first country to issue ART-TREES jurisdictional credits and access the CORSIA compliance market.
Guyana also helped launch the new Scaling JREDD+ Coalition in Belém, bringing together forest countries, Indigenous organisations, investors, standards bodies and civil society to expand high-integrity jurisdictional forest finance worldwide.
As he closed his presentation, Minister Bharrat pointed out that Guyana’s experience shows that the world does not lack solutions — rather, it only lacks the finance and modernised systems required to scale them. “Let us leave Belém not only believing that a better future is possible,” he told leaders, “but demonstrating that we chose to build it, together.”