By Kennedy Maize
The corpse of COP 29 (Nov. 11-22 2024 in Baku, Azerbaijan) has barely cooled, and COP 30 is already generating deserved obloquy.
Warning, the headline you are about to read is not from The Onion but from the BBC: Amazon forest felled to build road for climate summit.
The venerable Beeb reported, “A new four-lane highway cutting through tens of thousands of acres of protected Amazon rainforest is being built for the COP30 climate summit in the Brazilian city of Belém.” The article includes a revealing drone-captured video.
The 2025 Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework on Climate Change is scheduled for Belém, Nov. 10-21. COP 30’s website is already live.
A letter on Monday (Mar. 10) from André Corréa do Lago, president of COP 30, and Ana Toni, executive director of the international meeting, warned, “Change is inevitable—either by choice or by catastrophe. If global warming is left unchecked, change will be imposed on us as it disrupts our societies, economies, and families.”
Brazil’s President Lula da Silva appointed Brazilian diplomat Corrêa do Lago COP president in January. Brazilian climate activists praised the appointment, given his history of leading environmental justice discussions. Corréa doLago is a career diplomat at Itamaraty (Brazil’s Foreign Ministry) and a longtime climate negotiator. He has been secretary for climate, energy and environment at the foreign ministry and chief climate negotiator since Lula returned to power in 2023.
Pondering the destructive road building, the New York Post commented, “The eight-mile stretch of new highway — dubbed Avenida Liberdade, or Avenue of Liberty — has gouged a deep gash through a large swath of Amazon rainforest just in time for world leaders to convene to discuss how much they care about the Amazon rainforest.”
The BBC account of the road noted that Pará, the Brazilian state where Belém is located, had been contemplating the new four-lane highway since 2012, “but it had repeatedly been shelved because of environmental concerns.” The report said, “Along the partially built road, lush rainforest towers on either side – a reminder of what was once there. Logs are piled high in the cleared land which stretches more than 13km (8 miles) through the rainforest into Belém.
“Diggers and machines carve through the forest floor, paving over wetland to surface the road which will cut through a protected area.”
Belém is a city of 1.3 million on the mouth of the Amazon River. Brazil is the third consecutive major oil producer chosen to host the annual UN climate gabfest, following COP 28 in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, and COP 29 Baku, Azerbaijan in 2024.
Neither produced anything of lasting significance and both produced subtle flexing of authoritarian governmental muscle, although less than the outright violence of the Egyptian government in COP 27. Brazil is likely to be a much friendlier venue, but unlikely to be more consequential.
Brazil expects a flood of some 50,000 delegates, staff, observers, reporters, activists, and various hangers-on to hit Belém in November. Contemplating the human inundation, the Associated Press reported, “Nine months ahead of this year’s annual U.N. climate summit, known as COP30, lodging prices in the Brazilian host city of Belem are turning heads—and may soon turn off would-be attendees from the first such meeting in the Amazon rainforest.”
The AP account added, “On Airbnb, a room with a shared bathroom in Ananindeua, a poor city near Belem, is listed at $9,320 per day. A comparable room today could be rented for as little as $11 per day. In more upscale neighborhoods, renting an apartment that accommodates eight people costs up to $446,595 for a two-week stay.”
The wire service quoted a local architect and online influencer, “This is like putting gringos in captivity. False imprisonment is a crime!”
To subscribe, for back issues, and a searchable archive, The Quad Report.