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Ricardo Teixeira has spent the past few weeks freshening up Love Lomas, the "love motel" he owns in the Brazilian port city of Belém.
He's also mulling how to tone down some of the rooms' more sensual aspects, including erotic chairs and menus of sex toys for sale. It's all in anticipation of welcoming a very different type of guest than his usual clientele.
Love motels are common throughout Brazil, with rooms available by the hour often booked for romantic trysts. But as tens of thousands of people descend on Belém for COP30 — the world's biggest annual climate summit — a dearth of accommodation has led to a scramble for beds.
The prospect of diplomats, scientists and climate activists being asked to specify which erotic features they'd like removed from rooms is striking, but it also speaks to a serious issue.
"Their voices (will be) silenced in the very rooms where decisions about their survival are being made," said Harjeet Singh, a COP negotiations veteran and founding director of Satat Sampada Climate Foundation.
COP30 was billed as a landmark gathering, where countries would chart a course to dramatically cut climate pollution.
Instead, huge polluters have missed multiple deadlines to submit national climate goals, President Donald Trump is fresh from a speech calling climate change a "con job," the US says it will not send a delegation to the summit, and Brazil has just approved oil drilling at the mouth of the Amazon — all the while, global temperatures tick upward and climate targets slip out of reach.
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