Nieman Foundation at Harvard
The 2024 United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP 29) in Baku, Azerbaijan closed out with a deal for rich countries to contribute $300 billion over 10 years to help developing countries fight climate change. The poorer countries, expected to face more of the consequences for climate change, had requested $1.3 trillion.
Amid a flurry of stories about the terms of agreement, Brazilian publication Central da COP summed it up with a one-word headline: Azerbaijazo.
Brazilians and global soccer fans reading this will immediately clock, from that one word, that the deal is to be considered a massive failure, a tragedy even, because the headline is a reference to the Maracanazo: Brazil’s 2-1 loss to Uruguay in the 1950 World Cup final as the host country, at the Maracanã, a storied stadium that was built specifically for the tournament.
Headlines and stories like that are the bread and butter of Central da COP, a new publication launched by the Climate Observatory, Brazil’s top climate NGO, to cover climate politics and policies. The publication employs the language and urgency of soccer to help readers understand climate issues in the lead-up to COP 30 that will be held in Belém, Brazil in November 2025.
Other Central da COP headlines:
The stories are illustrated with cleverly photoshopped images such as Donald Trump sitting on a World Cup bench in a coach’s seat, the word “carbon” on the jersey of a player about to enter a match, and Brazilian soccer players comforting each other on the sinking island of Tuvalu.
Above the stories’ images is a “sports betting” banner ad that reads “pollute responsibly” and “come bet with us on how many degrees the world will warm while we still invest in oil.” Clicking on the ad leads to a website that makes it easy for users to write letters to their elected officials about environmental policies.
More than 212 million people live in Brazil, where soccer (futebol) is the most popular sport and a cultural pillar. The country has won the most FIFA men’s World Cups (5) since the tournament began in 1930. Over 10 million people attended matches in Brazil’s domestic league, Brasileirão, in 2024 alone.
But the numbers about Brazilians’ consumption of climate news look a little different.
In 2024, 60% of Brazilians had come across some type of climate change news in a given week, according to the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, down 65% from the year before. Sixty-one percent indicated they were interested in climate news in 2024, compared to 67% in 2023. While climate-specific news avoidance in Brazil decreased slightly in 2023, news avoidance in Brazil overall increased from 41% in 2023 to 47% in 2024, according to the Reuters Institute’s Digital News Report.
Roberto Kaz, the editor of Central da COP, said the name of the publication was inspired by Central da Copa (World Cup Central), a massively popular Brazilian TV program that covers World Cup news when the tournament rolls around every four years. Once he had the name, he then decided on the format of using soccer terms in climate contexts.
Kaz has some experience in creatively engaging audiences in difficult subjects. He’s a longtime writer and editor for revista piauí, a Brazilian news and culture magazine, for its satire section Piauí Herald. In 2018, he helped launch and edit a limited-run daily newsletter, MemeNews, that used memes to explain environmental policies and human rights issues in Brazil during Jair Bolsonaro’s presidency.
Now, Kaz is bringing a similar creativity to Central da COP. Stories are written by Climate Observatory staffers, freelancers, and writers from other climate-related NGOs in Brazil. Kaz typically commissions stories from writers about a specific issue and then later adds the soccer references while editing, or adapts already-published stories from partners.
“I always tell [the writers], don’t think about soccer,” Kaz said. “Just write as if you were writing for a normal website that talks about climate. What’s important for me is that it has consistency, that it has facts, that it’s [well-written]. I try not to put soccer in the whole text, because I think of soccer just as a way of the person getting into the [story]. Once the person is there, I want them to be informed about climate issues.”
A fact-checking column is called VAR (Video Assistant Referee), a video technology that soccer referees can use during matches to review plays and decisions. The list of the top 10 countries that emit the most carbon dioxide is presented as a table titled “World Emissions Championship 2023,” styled to look like a soccer league’s standings table. That list is then used for a tournament bracket where users can predict which countries they think will “reach the final,” aka meet their climate goals.
Kaz says that audience numbers on stories have been relatively modest, mostly because the project is still new and launched right before the holiday season in November. But starting this month, Kaz is rolling out a slate of new ideas, including a soccer-style sticker book and live, in-person events called Central na Rua (“Central [da COP] on the street”). There, Kaz and others — including a gas-pump-shaped mascot puppet named Petro Leco — will discuss and explain climate policy news to an audience à la Sports Center.
The first show will be in March at the Sesc Jundiaí, a cultural center in the state of São Paulo, followed by shows at Museo Pontal in Rio de Janeiro and Rio2C, a festival focused on creativity in the city.
The goal of all this isn’t to lure in die-hard soccer fans (though that would be a bonus), Kaz said, but rather present climate policy in a language people already understand, and make it a little fun.
“Brazil is a country where soccer is [huge], everyone has a team, and it moves billions of dollars,” Kaz said. “I thought it was a good idea not to reach the people who are into soccer, but to reach other people by using a new language to talk about climate, which is a boring subject. The idea was to take that boring subject and make it cool.”
