Image by Ivars Utināns.
This year’s annual UN climate conference COP30 with 50,000 expected attendees held in Belém, Brazil is one-upping the past two COPs (UN Conference of the Parties) that were held by, and dictated by, Middle Eastern fossil fuel countries, eye-openers that many eco-minded people, still to this day, cannot stomach. Now, Brazil is set to upstage the oil sheiks by bulldozing tens of thousands of acres of “protected rainforest” to build a 4-lane highway to “help reduce traffic” during the two-week conference. This is not made-up. It is true.
The new highway smack-dab down the middle of thick rainforest is known as Avenida Liberdade (English translation: Avenue of Liberty, oh please!) According to the Brazilian government it has “sustainability in mind” with solar lights, bike lanes, and animal crossings so, hopefully, attendees will catch a glimpse of a roaming jaguar, a top predator in the Amazon moseying along glancing at and growling at passing automobiles. If only attendees get lucky enough to take a photo of the jaguar growling, showing teeth, to show friends back home how they faced danger in the rainforest. Venturesomeness and courageousness will be celebrated.
In a statement reminiscent of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-four term “newspeak,” meaning propagandistic language characterized by euphemism and circumlocution, as reported by BBC News: “The focus of COP30, according to the host country, Brazil, will be ‘Uniting for our Forests.’ It is their hope that this year’s conference will be a first step to advance and unite climate and biodiversity agendas.” Really?
In a lighthearted fashion, BBC commented: “The Amazon plays a vital role in absorbing carbon for the world and providing biodiversity, and many say this deforestation contradicts the very purpose of a climate summit.” (Amazon Forest Felled to Build Road for Climate Summit, BBC News, March 11, 2025) Oh really, no kidding!
And the Brazilian government, cranking up newspeak to a higher pitch yet, claims: “The Brazilian president and environment minister say this will be a historic summit because it is ‘a COP in the Amazon, not a COP about the Amazon,’ The president says the meeting will provide an opportunity to focus on the needs of the Amazon, show the forest to the world, and present what the federal government has done to protect it,” Ibid.
The Amazon is the world’s largest rainforest – spanning 6.9 million square kilometres (2.72 million square miles) across nine countries and covering around 40% of the South American continent. Making up half of the planet’s remaining tropical forests, the forest is also one of the most biologically diverse ecosystems, home to about three million species of plants and animals and 1.6 million indigenous people. The forest is also an important regulator of weather cycles, owing to its cooling effect and its contribution to rainfall and moisture supply in the region, and it is one of the world’s largest natural carbon sinks, absorbing and storing an amount of carbon equivalent to 15 to 20 years of global CO2 emissions from the atmosphere. (Source: Up to 47% of Amazon Rainforest at Risk of Collapse by Mid-Century Due to ‘Unprecedented Stress’ From Global Warming and Deforestation, Earth.org, Feb. 15, 2024)
Here’s what COP30 should hand out to the 50,000 attendees: The Amazon Rainforest is at risk of exceeding tipping points, leading to a death spiral for up to 47% of the forest within the next several decades because of a combination of climate change-related drivers of severe stress. According to research in Nature: “The region is increasingly exposed to unprecedented stress from warming temperatures, extreme droughts, deforestation and fires, even in central and remote parts of the system,” the study, published Wednesday in the scientific journal Nature, read, adding that crossing potential critical thresholds – or tipping points – might trigger “local, regional, or even biome-wide forest collapse” and knock-on effects for regional climate change. Once we cross this tipping point, we will lose control of how the system will behave,” said ecologist Bernardo Flores of the University of Santa Catarina in Brazil, lead author of the report. “The forest will die by itself.” (Nature)
Moreover, a 2021 study found that the Amazonian region had turned into a carbon emitter, in competition with cars, trains, airplanes, and industry. According to the 2021 study, the forest emits about one billion tonnes of CO2 each year, equivalent to the annual emissions released in Japan, the world’s fifth-biggest polluter.
Prior to human-generated CO2 from fossil fuels, which traps heat, the Amazon rainforest was a net carbon sink for millennia. Now, it’s joining the global warming/extreme drought onslaught. Drought Leaves Amazon Basin Rivers at All-time Low, BBC News, Sept. 18,2024. Additionally, and of consequence for the world at large, the Amazon is not alone, Europe’s rivers ran almost completely dry in 2022. In places, the Loire could be crossed on foot; France’s longest river never flowed so slowly. The Rhine was nearly impassable to barge traffic. In Italy, the Po was 2 metres lower than normal, crippling crops. As Serbia dredged the Danube.
COP30 attendees hopefully take notice and focus on the blatant fact that these recurring bouts of severe drought throughout the world are happening more frequently and with much more gusto or destructiveness. For example: China Drought Causes Yangtze to Dry Up, Sparking Shortage of Hydropower, The Guardian, Aug. 22, 2022. The only solution to recurring bouts of increasingly more severe droughts caused by overheating the planet is to stop burning fossil fuels. Science is nearly 100% on this.
Aa for the Amazon rainforest: According to researchers, the only way to avoid biome-wide collapse is to limit deforestation to 10% of the forest’s total cover, restore at least 5% of the biome, and limit global heating to 1.5C above pre-industrial levels in line with the 2015 Paris Agreement target. In other words, since the world is far removed from those data points, and headed in the opposite direction with increasing speed, Avenida Liberdade is a posterchild for the collapse of the Amazon rainforest.
