By Elissama Menezes | Originally published in Splash | October 29, 2026
Elissama Menezes, a Brazilian co-director of Equal Routes, a nonprofit working on shipping decarbonisation, writes for Splash today.
Brazil’s presidential elections show that one should never discount the underdog. The same lesson could be applied to the International Maritime Organization (IMO) climate negotiations, which are resuming in London just next month.
Last Sunday, millions of Brazilians elected a candidate who finished second in the first round and made him president in the runoff. Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva secured his fourth term with 51.76% of the vote, against all the odds.
The parallels with global shipping are hard to miss.
Washington made little secret of which presidential candidate it preferred in Brazil, and at the IMO its position is no less clear. The US administration rejects the IMO Net-Zero Framework (NZF), a historic agreement to tackle shipping emissions through carbon intensity targets and carbon pricing. The NZF is a hard-fought compromise that was backed by the vast majority of IMO member states when it was reached in April 2025.
When this flagship climate policy was set to be adopted, just over a year ago, the US deployed “bully-boy” tactics to narrowly pass a motion to delay the vote by one year.
But Brazil presidential elections have now shown that people want climate action, a central issue in the election campaigns.
Lula’s victory gives him another four years to pursue his pledge to end deforestation by 2030, following reductions in forest loss during his current term. It also preserves his mandate to continue Brazil’s international climate diplomacy following its hosting of COP30 in Belém in 2025.
And this brings us again back to the IMO, where Brazil is an influential player.
Brazil is one of the main architects of the NZF, and its policy architecture carries Brazil’s fingerprints. Until Sunday, sceptics could argue that the government behind that work might not last and that the future of the NZF becomes even more uncertain. That argument is gone.
Lula’s victory is a re-legitimisation of Brazil’s role at the IMO and gives it a fresh mandate to get the NZF agreement over the finishing line this year.
The deeper lesson is about sovereignty. Brazilians were told, in many ways, that their future depended on staying in Washington’s good graces. They rejected that and clearly preferred a leader who stands up to “bullies”.
IMO countries in a way face the same choice as average Brazilians.
And every month without strong global rules has a price. Fuel producers and shipowners need a stable signal to invest in e-fuels, wind-assisted propulsion and other zero-emission options. Without it, projects stall and first movers are punished. Delay prolongs uncertainty just as the sector must cut short-lived climate pollutants such as methane, which slips from the growing LNG-fuelled fleet. It also postpones the revenue mechanisms meant to make this transition fair for the countries least responsible for the problem.
Europe’s own rules, the EU ETS for shipping and FuelEU Maritime, help fill the regulatory vacuum, but they cannot do the job alone. FuelEU’s steepest cuts do not arrive until the 2040s, leaving room for business as usual in the near term. Its emission factors must also capture methane accurately. Until a global rule exists, Europe should keep strengthening its regime, but a regional patchwork is no substitute for a global standard.
That is why the EU, more than anyone, should take heart from Brazil.
Europe helped secure the NZF agreement last year, yet some of its member states abstained when the pressure came last October. The bloc should arrive in London united behind the framework it helped build. And so should the rest of the world, united in support of what they agreed on a year ago.
Brazilians did not wait for anyone’s permission to choose their future and neither should the IMO.
