The leaders of Amazon nations including Brazil, Colombia and Peru have gathered in the Brazilian city of Belém for a rare conclave about the future of the world’s largest rainforest amid growing concern over the global climate emergency.
The environmental summit – convened by Brazil’s leftist president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva – represents a handbrake turn in Brazilian government policy after four years of Amazon destruction and international isolation under the country’s previous leader, Jair Bolsonaro.
Those who have flown into Belém for the meeting include Bolivia’s president, Luis Arce, Colombia’s president, Gustavo Petro, Guyana’s prime minister, Mark Phillips, and Peru’s Dina Boluarte. Venezuela’s president, Nicolás Maduro, pulled out at the last minute blaming an ear infection. The other members of the eight-country Amazon Cooperation Treaty Organization (ACTO), Ecuador and Suriname, have sent senior representatives.
“This is a landmark moment,” Lula tweeted on Tuesday morning as his guests were shepherded to the talks by police motorcycle outriders. “What we are doing in defence of the Amazon and its population is historic.”
At the summit’s opening session, Lula said the “severe escalation of the climate crisis” meant the need for regional cooperation was “more pressing than ever before”.
As politicians began to arrive in the sweltering riverside city on Monday, Brazil’s environment minister, Marina Silva, said: “We come here with the clarity … that the Amazon is drastically threatened … that we cannot allow it to reach a point of no return … and that it will be impossible to reverse this process if we work in isolation.”
Among the issues to be discussed at ACTO’s first such meeting in 14 years are a possible deal to halt deforestation by 2030 and joint efforts to fight rampant illegal mining and the organised crime groups which are tightening their grip on the rainforest region. Colombia’s president has been pushing for an end to oil and gas exploration in the Amazon, although Brazilian moves to develop an oilfield near the mouth of the Amazon River complicate those efforts.
A final communique, known as the Belém Declaration, is expected to be unveiled by ACTO members of at the end of the two-day meeting. Experts say it is likely to contain collaborative strategies for fighting deforestation and financing sustainable development initiatives, and the creation of a law enforcement centre in the Brazilian city of Manaus to promote cooperation among regional police forces.
The challenges facing the group’s members are almost as immense as the Amazon itself – a sprawling 6.7m sq km region that, if it was a single country, would be the seventh largest on Earth. As well as nearly 50 million people, the region is home to an estimated 400bn trees belonging to 16,000 different species, more than 1,300 species of bird, tens of thousands of species of plant, and 20% of the world’s freshwater resources. It is also estimated to contain more than 120bn tonnes of carbon, making it a vital carbon sink.
But over the past half-century, the advance of cattle ranching, logging, mining, soy farming and oil exploration has devastated huge swathes of the region, pushing it towards what scientists fear could be an irreversible tipping point which would cause the forest to die off.
Transnational mafia groups have also expanded their footprint, with one senior Brazilian police chief recently warning “criminal insurgents” could commandeer parts of the Amazon with dire consequences for the rainforest and its inhabitants.
In the days leading up to Tuesday’s summit, thousands of Indigenous activists gathered for a parallel summit in Belém to demand greater government support for their quest to defend the rainforest. The perils of such efforts were laid bare last year with the murders of British journalist Dom Phillips and the Brazilian Indigenous expert Bruno Pereira. Activists are also pushing for a pledge to protect 80% of the Amazon by 2025.
Campaigners voiced a mix of relief that Lula had brought an end to Bolsonaro’s era of Amazon chaos, and anxiety that Brazil’s conservative-dominated congress might prevent the president from enacting his ambitious environmental agenda, which has already achieved a 42.5% drop in deforestation.
“We know we have so many enemies in congress who don’t like us,” said Alessandra Korap, a leader of the Munduruku people.
Korap urged Lula to oppose oil exploration in the Amazon and take a stand against highly controversial draft legislation that would invalidate Indigenous claims to lands such groups could not prove they occupied when Brazil’s 1988 constitution was enacted. “This would mean the death of our peoples,” Korap said.