A new four-lane highway is being constructed through tens of thousands of acres of protected Amazon rainforest for the upcoming COP30 climate summit in Belém, Brazil. The highway is intended to ease traffic for the more than 50,000 people, including world leaders, expected to attend the summit in November.
While the state government promotes the highway’s “sustainable” credentials, many locals and conservationists are outraged by its environmental impact. The Amazon is crucial for absorbing carbon and maintaining global biodiversity, and critics argue that this deforestation contradicts the very purpose of a climate summit.
Along the partially completed road, towering rainforest serves as a stark reminder of what was once there. Cleared land stretches more than 13 kilometers (8 miles) through the rainforest, with logs piled high and heavy machinery carving through the forest floor, including wetlands, to pave the road through a protected area.
Claudio Verequete, who lives about 200 meters from the road, used to harvest açaí berries from trees that once stood in the area. “Everything was destroyed,” he says, gesturing at the clearing. “Our harvest has already been cut down. We no longer have that income to support our family.”
Verequete believes the project is necessary, noting that when he was young, Belém was “beautiful, well-kept, well cared for,” but has since been “abandoned” with little attention from the ruling class.
João Alexandre Trindade da Silva, who sells Amazonian herbal medicines in the market, acknowledges the problems construction can cause but hopes the long-term benefits will be worth it. “We hope the discussions aren’t just on paper and become real actions,” he says. “We want the measures, the decisions taken, to really be put into practice so that the planet can breathe a little better, and the population in the future will have a little cleaner air.”
This will be the hope of world leaders attending COP30 as well, though growing scrutiny questions whether the carbon footprint of flying thousands of leaders across the globe and building the necessary infrastructure contradicts the summit’s environmental goals.
