When COP30 Burned and Tonga Inked Their Fingers

We woke up today already stretched thin across the planet, and by the time November 20, 2025 ended, it felt like a day that could only belong to us: climate negotiators coughing through smoke in Belém, mourners counting the dead in Gaza and Kampong Thom, call center workers in Bamban learning their captor is headed to prison, island voters in Tonga walking home with ink drying on their fingertips, and thousands of newly jobless Verizon employees refreshing job sites in the glow of kitchen lights.

In Belém, Brazil, we tried to decide the future of our atmosphere inside a building that turned out to be flammable. A fire broke out at the COP30 venue, triggering alarms, filling pavilions with smoke, and forcing negotiators and staff into the tropical heat outside while firefighters rushed in; around 13 people were treated for smoke inhalation, and for a few hours the world’s climate talks were reduced to a line of badges and laptops on the sidewalk. Later, in calmer rooms, Brazil’s environment minister announced that Germany will commit about 1 billion euros over the next decade to a new fund for tropical forests like the Amazon, so on the same day we evacuated a burning conference center, we also pledged money to keep other fires from starting.

Elsewhere, we continued to hurt one another with weapons instead of words. In Khan Younis in the Gaza Strip, an Israeli strike hit homes and streets already scarred by months of war, killing five Palestinians and injuring others, including a baby who does not yet know what a ceasefire is supposed to feel like. In Khyber Pakhtunkhwa’s Dera Ismail Khan district in Pakistan, a roadside bomb tore into an armored police vehicle, killing two police officers and injuring four more, another small crater in a landscape where uniforms and patrol routes are as dangerous as they are necessary.

Water and earth turned on us too. In Cambodia’s Kampong Thom province, a night bus carrying tourists from Siem Reap toward Phnom Penh plunged off a bridge into a river; sixteen of us died there and twenty four more were pulled out injured, while backpacks, sandals, and snack wrappers drifted in an oil-slicked current under the span. On Indonesia’s Java island, in Cilacap Regency, we were still digging through muddy slopes a week after landslides; by today the toll had risen to eighteen confirmed dead and around thirty four still missing beneath meters of soaked soil that used to be homes and courtyards.

The ground shook for us in a different way on another part of Java, where Mount Semeru erupted again, sending ash and rocks down its flanks and stranding climbers who thought they had planned for every risk. Rescue teams climbed and flew in to bring more than 170 of us down from the mountain and evacuated close to a thousand residents from nearby villages, while ash settled on roofs and crops like a gray second sky. Far away in the Czech Republic near České Budějovice, two passenger trains collided, injuring 57 people, five of them seriously, and in the Gulf of Thailand a leaking ferry with nearly 100 people on board had to be emptied onto rescue boats before it could slip any lower in the water.

In courtrooms, we tried to say what justice should look like when we exploit one another. In the Philippines, a regional trial court sentenced former Bamban mayor Alice Guo to life in prison for human trafficking tied to a scam center in her town, where more than 700 workers had been forced to run online fraud operations; some of us walked out of overcrowded dormitories into freedom today because of that verdict. In Nigeria, a court in Abuja gave Nnamdi Kanu, leader of the Indigenous People of Biafra, a life sentence on seven terrorism charges, turning a separatist leader into a prisoner whose name will continue to divide us. In Spain, the Supreme Court barred Attorney General Álvaro García Ortiz from office for two years and fined him for leaking confidential details from a tax case involving the partner of Madrid’s regional president, proof that even those meant to guard the law can find themselves weighed by it.

Politics did not belong only to courtrooms. In Nepal, Generation Z protesters flooded streets in multiple districts after the ouster of former prime minister K. P. Sharma Oli and the appointment of interim prime minister Sushila Karki, facing police lines and curfews as they shouted that their future should not be decided in back rooms alone. On the Pacific island kingdom of Tonga, we did something quieter but just as consequential: nobles chose nine of their own as representatives, and ordinary citizens elected seventeen members to the Legislative Assembly, 26 seats in all decided by hands that folded paper ballots and dropped them into boxes before walking back past palm trees and tin roofs with ink marks on their fingers.

On the economic front, the numbers we write on balance sheets translated into new absences around dinner tables. In the United States, Verizon announced it would cut more than 13,000 jobs, nearly a fifth of its global workforce, as part of a restructuring meant to focus on customer experience and stem subscriber losses, and today that corporate strategy arrived as emails and meetings that told individual engineers, call center staff, and managers that their badges, logins, and health insurance would soon expire. Somewhere else in the network, customers streamed videos and sent messages over infrastructure built and maintained by people who now have to explain to their families why next month will be tighter than the last.

If this entry is our memory, then November 20, 2025 is the day our climate summit literally caught fire, our courts handed down life sentences on three continents, our bus fell from a Cambodian bridge while a Czech train jumped its tracks, our ferry leaked and yet everyone on board survived, our Pacific islanders voted their representatives into parliament, and our telecom giant told tens of thousands of us that we were suddenly surplus. We are humanity, and today we burned, negotiated, sentenced, rescued, protested, voted, and logged off our work accounts for the last time, all within the same 24 hours.