This November, the United Nations will descend on the city of Belém, Brazil in an attempt to solve climate change. The 2025 United Nations Climate Change Conference, or COP30, will bring 50,000 people to the city. Brazil cut down portions of the Amazon rainforest to build a four-lane highway and make it just a little easier for those 50,000 people to arrive.
As reported by the BBC, the state government of Pará cleared out eight miles of Amazon rainforest to build the highway. The BBC’s article has pictures of the clear-cut forest floor where logs have been piled up along a stretch of road that will soon hold concrete and passing cars.
Forests, in general, and the Amazon Rainforest, in particular, are instrumental in fighting rising global temperatures. André Aranha Corrêa Do Lago, a career Brazilian diplomat who is heading up the COP30, eloquently made the case for forests in a letter he published earlier this week that laid out his vision for the conference, the climate, and the world.
“When we get together in the Brazilian Amazon in November, we must listen to the latest science and re-evaluate the extraordinary role already played by forests and the people who preserve and rely on them,” Do Lago wrote.
Local resident Claudio Verequete lives near the highway and previously made a living harvesting açaí berries. Those trees are gone now, cut down to make way for the UN Climate Conference. “Our fear is that one day someone will come here and say: ‘Here’s some money. We need this area to build a gas station, or to build a warehouse.’ And then we’ll have to leave,” he told the BBC.
The highway cuts across the forest, cutting off access to animals and people who have lived in the forest for generations. What was once a whole area will soon be two halves blocked by pavement. Verequete told the BBC his village won’t even have an onramp to the highway. They will just live abutting its looming noise-blocking walls. Scientists and conservationists, those who know the extraordinary role of the Amazon well, told the BBC they fear the new highway will devastate the local ecology.
Pará has wanted to build a highway to Belém, a city with more than two million people, since 2012. But environmental protections around the Amazon rainforest have always prevented it. In a perverse twist of fate, the upcoming climate conference has given the state the authority to build infrastructure to support it. And so the Amazon was felled. The highway will be called Avenida Liberdade or “Liberty Avenue.”
Avenida Liberdade is part of a much bigger infrastructure project that Pará hopes will revitalize Belém. It’s spending $81 million to expand the airport and build a five-million-square-foot park. The city is building multiple hotels, and organizers are planning to sail high-capacity cruise ships into the city’s port to house people who can’t find room in the hotels.
Belém was chosen on purpose. This is the first U.N. climate conference that will be held in the Amazon, an important natural wonder that’s instrumental in regulating the planet’s temperature. Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva campaigned on protecting the forest and, early in his tenure, did slow down deforestation. But it hasn’t stopped, and Lula has even endorsed projects such as allowing oil companies to do exploratory drilling at the mouth of the Amazon river.
“Forests can buy us time in climate action in our rapidly closing window of opportunity,” Do Lago said in his letter. “If we reverse deforestation and recover what has been lost, we can unlock massive removals of greenhouse gases from the atmosphere while bringing ecosystems back to life.”
He’s right. Too bad his country just cleared eight miles of Amazon Rainforest to make way for the conference he’s preparing for in this letter.
