Beyond Belém’s Logistics Crisis: Why Hosting COP30 in the Amazon Still Matters

This is part of The Quint’s COP30 coverage to help make sense of the crucial climate talks. Become a member to support us.“In Portuguese, there’s a word for it—obrigado. It means more than a thank you. That’s how I feel for Amazonia. After all these years, I’ve a deep connection with the region,” says Daniel Nardin, a resident of Belém, the capital of Brazil’s Pará state.Now 40, Nardin moved to Pará—one of the nine states covering the length and breadth of the Amazon rainforest within Brazil—as a nine-year-old in 1994. He never left.Sixty percent of the Amazon rainforest lies within Brazil’s borders. One of the largest CO2 sinks on earth, the biome is crucial to the planet’s fight against global warming.After Nardin’s father lost his engineer job in São Paulo, one of Brazil’s most populous cities, the family of five survived for a while on his mother’s home bakes. “My father needed to make cakes and candies with my mum to buy food for us,” he recalls. “So, when he landed a job in Pará state, he thought to himself, ‘Let’s do it’.”For Nardin, it was the “best decision” his late father ever made. Nardin’s home, Belém, has been in global headlines, but not for the right reasons. The city will host the 2025 UN Climate Change Conference (COP30) in November this year.But as important as it is to host the next COP—the first to take place in the Amazon—it looks like a large number of countries, especially the poorer ones, are going to be priced out of the event. Belém, a coastal city of 1.3 million residents, appears to be scrambling till the eleventh hour to provide affordable stay for the roughly 50,000 attendees expected at COP30.With demand far outstripping supply, hotel and apartment prices have surged, with nightly rates reportedly ranging from $300 to as much as $3,700."These [developing] are the countries on the frontlines of the climate crisis, and their voices matter most. If they can’t be present, COP30 risks becoming another highly performative COP,” warns Sharon Sarah Thawaney, a Kolkata-based independent researcher, focusing on climate and gender in the Global South.From Nardin’s perspective, however, the real question is: 'Why does it lack the necessary logistics?'—pointing to how Belém has been left behind, something he hopes COP30 will begin to fix.“When one thinks of Brazil, they think of Rio and São Paulo. But there’s a lot of Brazil which lies in the periphery. Even Brazilians don’t know this part of Brazil.”Daniel Nardin, a resident of BelémFrom Trump's 'Con Job' Claim to EU Rift, COP30 Won’t Be Easy in a Tipping WorldWhen nine-year-old Nardin found out his family was moving to Barcarena, roughly 100 km from Belém, he was intrigued. “What are we gonna see there, what are we gonna find there…maybe there are alligators and anacondas on the streets”—his imagination ran wild.“I didn’t know anything,” he tells The Quint, adding that once he arrived in the region, he was first struck by “a lot of big trees I had never seen before.”Spread over 6.7 million sq km, the Amazon is nearly twice the size of India. Its mammoth size aside, its biodiversity is even harder to fathom—the tropical forests are home to 3 million plants and animal species. Brazil’s rapidly shrinking indigenous population also makes its home here, but it’s sparsely inhabitated.At 14, Nardin often rode a bicycle to Caripi Beach with his friends. From his home in Barcarena, it was roughly 4 km away.“We rode inside the forest…it looked like a trail,” he says. He soon saw deforestation in the name of progress. “First came the roads, but they soon started to deforest the area to build new houses along those roads,” he recalls.Anguished, Nardin wrote an essay about the cutting of trees in what was once a trail to Caripi Beach. His “proud” father printed his essay—and put it up in the local banks, bakeries, and even the church.Now, Nardin runs a network for local and indigenous journalists from the Amazon who want to tell climate and environmental stories from within the region. His company Amazônia Vox, started in 2023, is working overtime as COP30 nears.The Amazon today faces far more serious threats than when Nardin wrote that essay as a teenager—uncontrolled fires, indiscriminate deforestation, and other forms of degradation are severely affecting the health of standing forests and their capacity to support biodiversity and human well-being.As of 2024, as much as 15 percent of the Amazon had already been cleared, and another 17 percent degraded by human activity. Bernardo Flores, a Brazilian scientist studying the resilience of ecosystems, authored a study last year, which showed that "up to half of the Amazon rainforest could hit a tipping point by 2050" due to the compounding effects of the human activity and the global climate crisis on the biome. “This means that global cooperation to decarbonise the global economy is fundamental now if we want to leave a liveable planet,” he tells The Quint.Ane Alencar, Director of Science, Amazon Environmental Research Institute, a non-profit in Belém, adds, “Forest fires have sharply increased in 2023 and 2024, reaching record levels not seen in more than 40 years of satellite monitoring. The outlook is concerning as climate change is expected to bring more frequent and intense droughts, creating ideal conditions for fire.”“In the long term, restoring degraded lands, and building climate-resilient rural economies will be essential to protect the Amazon, and its vital role as one of the planet's largest carbon sinks,” the Brazilian researcher adds.'It Isn't About Money': Decoding Global Military Spending vs Development GoalsWith the COP nearing, it's anybody's guess whether or not the logistics crisis will dampen the mood. As of August, a United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) survey had found that 87 percent of the usual 200 participating countries were yet to book their accommodations citing unaffordable rates. The Brazilian government, in turn, had claimed that 61 countries had accommodations.A month earlier, the UN climate bureau had even held an emergency meeting to address this crisis. There has also been pressure on Brazil—until last month—to relocate the summit to Rio de Janeiro or São Paulo, which have better tourism infrastructure and are adept at hosting large-scale events. Brazil rejected the idea.“At a summit of this scale, access should be the priority, especially for the countries most affected and least heard in climate negotiations,” Thawaney notes, adding that the number of countries which have now confirmed attendance is 79, "with 70 still negotiating."So, despite the mounting pressure—and a very real possibility that poorer and developing nations could get sidelined, why does the Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva-led Brazil government want to host in Belém?One political expert, who did not want to be named, pointed to how the groundwork was laid at COP27 in Sharm El-Sheikh, Egypt in 2022. "Lula had just won after a heated election, beating Jair Bolsanaro,” he recalls.The internal rift within Brazil over its environmental strategy was for everyone to see. The country had not one, not two, but three separate pavilions at COP27 representing the then outgoing Bolsanaro government, the governors of the Amazonian states, and civil society, respectively.President-elect Lula attended the COP, in an unofficial capacity, with a clear message: 'Brazil is back', the expert added.“In the first three years of the current (Bolsanaro) government,” Lula said from the pavilion representing the Amazonian states, “deforestation in the Amazon increased by 73 percent...Environmental crimes, which grew in a frightening way during this government that is coming to an end, will now be fought relentlessly.”With the deforestation of the Amazon tied to Lula’s larger climate agenda, he formalised Belém as the candidate to host COP30. “His decision is symbolic—as Lula had said then, world leaders, activists, and scientists talk about Amazon but have never been there, so they need to see the rich biome firsthand,” adds the expert. But it is also political. Pará governor Helder Barbalho is the president of the consortium of the governors of the Amazonian states, and he comes from a family of politicians, and has a lot of influence,” the expert explains. For Brazilian researchers, the Amazon is both an "obvious" choice, and the one which sends out a "powerful message"."It's kind of obvious that a COP in Brazil would have to happen in the Amazon because Brazil's emission matrix is dominated by land-use change emissions—particularly, deforestation."David M Lapola, researcher specialising in land-use changeIn comparison, the last three COPs were held in countries where the primary source of emissions is fossil fuels."Bringing the world to the Amazon highlights this crucial difference, and reminds us that tackling climate change is not only about reducing fossil fuel use, but also about protecting forests and the people who depend on them," Alencar tells The Quint.Thawaney, however, points out the hypocrisy. “The narrative of opportunity rings hollow, where short-term economic gains risk long-term ecological or ecosystem losses,” she says, highlighting Brazil's decision to clear a protected section of the forest for a new highway for the summit.“Does the Amazon need to be felled to be protected? The conference infrastructure mandates cutting down the very forest it intends to protect! COP30 risks succumbing to performative multilateralism, where the Amazon is sacrificed for a global photo-op.”Cutting Down the Amazon Rainforest and Other Ironies on the Road to COP30Besides the “big trees” in the Amazon, what also struck Nardin as a young boy was the friendliness of the locals. “There are roads and bridges now, but back then, we had to take a ferry from Belém to get to Barcarena," he recalls. One day, when the family of five was driving towards the boat, the car broke down. "It rains a lot there—my father was trying to drive through a waterlogged street when that happened,” Nardin recalls. “But so many people came forward to help us. A woman invited us into her house, made us coffee, and told my father that her husband will help fix the car. And he did. We spent three to four hours at their home,” he says.But, despite the community spirit, Belém is plagued with infrastructural challenges. For example, the city has one of the worst sanitation systems, with only six in 10 residents having access to treated sewage.Ahead of COP30, Belém has seen at least 38 infrastructure projects totalling over $1.3 billion, according to the local media. On 3 October, Lula, during an inspection of the COP30 construction sites, said, “Every cent we invest here belongs to the people of Belém, and no one will take it away. COP is an event that will last a maximum of 20 days. After that, all these works will remain for the people of the state of Pará, for the people of the city of Belém."His optimism is shared by Nardin, who says, “Belém has been getting a lot of attention because of COP", which, he says, could be a "turning point" for his city.Beyond Belém, with the Amazon front and centre, Alencar reminds, “It is not just a brand and important to Brazil; it is essential for the stability of our planet. I hope that this Amazonian experience for world leaders will inspire novel solutions, agreements, and open their eyes for the local realities."“In the short term, the Amazon needs to create financial systems to boost forest restoration across the entire biome and strengthen local adaptive capacity of Amazonian societies. In the long term, what we need is to create leverages for global decarbonisation, with equity and justice as principles.” Flores adds.Last month, Brazil announced that it will invest the first $1 billion in the Tropical Forest Forever Facility, an ambitious $125 billion fund to protect tropical forests. "It looks like a good promise as it will be another way of securing funding for tropical forests," says Lapola.However, he underlines the need to phase out fossil fuels. "It's important for leaders to know that deforestation will be responsible for about 10 percent of the emissions. I'm not confident that tropical forests will mitigate significantly climate change. There's a limit to how much carbon the forests can absorb. So, the big issue to be dealt with at COP30 is fossil fuels. Are we going to phase out of oil?" asks the Brazilian researcher.In the meantime, Brazil is framing COP30 as the "Implementation COP" to shift the global climate conversation from promises to action. That assertion is not without its roadblocks. Thawaney says the least that should be achieved is by "not regressing” in the climate negotiations.“Despite everything, COP30 still matters. With failing climate diplomacy defined with the West’s spasmodic interest, the summit offers the Global South an opportunity to redefine climate multilateralism in a way that actually works for developing countries.”(The Quint has reached out to Brazil’s leadership, including Ana Toni, CEO of COP30. The article will be updated as and when they respond.)(This article has been published as part of the Danida Fellowship Programme on climate reporting.)

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COP30 Countdown: Can the Amazon Shine Despite Belém’s Logistics Woes?

The Amazon's vital role as one of the planet’s largest carbon sinks cannot be overstated, say climate experts.

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