“Brics can fill a space that needs to be filled at this moment in the multilateral negotiations,” Brazil's chief negotiator at COP16, Maria Angelica Ikeda, said.
Colombia's Susana Muhamad, president of the COP16 nature talks, said the Brics countries were positioning to be “bridge builders”.
“They are trying to create this balance to represent the Global South in front of the far-right governments that are emerging in the US, Italy and Argentina,” she said.
“I understand there's a lot of countries wanting to join Brics, because it's a way, if you have to confront something like the US, you are not alone.”
A British official present at the talks, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said other countries needed to consider what the Brics' more muscular approach meant for global institutions.
But if Brics is to help fill the vacuum left by the US under President Donald Trump, it has to address internal divisions over politics and finance.
The group's refusal to assume the official financial obligations of donor countries could prove a stumbling block, Timo Leiter, a distinguished policy fellow at the London School of Economics, said.
So far the middle-income Brics have resisted demands from cash-strapped developed countries that they should share financial liability, complicating the quest for compromise at UN negotiations on climate funding and upcoming talks on development finance in Seville, Spain.
Of the $25.8bn in biodiversity-related financing in 2022, nearly three-quarters came from five sources: EU institutions, France, Germany, Japan and the US, data from the OECD showed.
Diverging national interests among the Brics, with Russia keen to maintain its sales of fossil fuels, while Brazil presses countries to decarbonise faster at COP30, may also prove sticking points.
“They (the Brics) are drastically different in terms of development stage and emissions trajectory,” said Li Shuo, director of China Climate at Asia Society.
“What ties them together is the geopolitical aspiration, which leads to the question of can they agree to put forward an affirmative agenda.”