Brazil starts climate summit with vigor

Global warming

Brazil starts climate summit with vigor – balance sheet has scratches

New highway through the rainforest, oil drilling in the Amazon, cruise ships as hotels in the port: How credible is Brazil at its home game at the COP30?

Brazil prides itself as a pioneer in the tough fight against the climate crisis. As host of the World Climate Conference, President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva wants to demand ambitious decisions from around 200 countries. But does the construction of a new expressway through the rainforest to the city of Belém fit with this? And new oil drilling in the mouth of the Amazon, which was approved shortly before the prestigious mammoth conference?

In March, climate activists expressed outrage over the wide path for the road, which killed valuable trees. However, the regional government emphasizes that planning and construction have been going on for years and have nothing to do with COP30.

The climate network Observatório do Clima condemned the Petrobas Group’s controversial oil drilling as an “act of sabotage” against the climate conference. This undermines Lula’s claimed leadership role in climate protection. Lawsuits from environmentalists are ongoing – but so are the drillings.

And how does it fit with the environmentally friendly concept that two specially chartered cruise ships are now anchored off Belém for weeks to cover the huge demand for hotel beds? The unconventional solution was necessary because the city is logistically at its limit: around 50,000 diplomats, journalists and activists are traveling for the two weeks.

In the bustling, humid city with its crumbling sidewalks and buildings, congested streets and blaring loudspeakers from the many street vendors, a lot was obviously invested in order to at least visually shine at COP30: a number of squares, parks and even sewage treatment plants were cleaned and repaired, and the plants were brought into shape. The equivalent of around 650 million euros from Brazilian federal funds alone flowed to Belém, a rather poor city even by Brazilian standards with a large indigenous population.

What does host Brazil want to achieve with its symbolically charged COP30 on the edge of the rainforest, exactly ten years after the acclaimed Paris climate agreement? President Lula speaks of a “COP of truth”. Since then, climate conferences have decided a lot, but the states have delivered far too little. They now have the opportunity to “demonstrate the seriousness of their commitment to the planet.”

Specifically, Brazil wants to push two projects, among other things: At a previous summit, a new billion-dollar fund to protect tropical forests in more than 70 countries was launched. On the other hand, Lula wants to mobilize more resources to make it easier for poorer countries to adapt to the fatal consequences of global warming – such as more severe and frequent droughts, floods, storms and forest fires. The need is gigantic. The new UN “adaptation gap” report shows that developing countries will need at least $310 billion (€268 billion) annually by 2035 to adapt to global warming – twelve times the current international public funding.