A summit that brings together the countries of the Amazon begins Tuesday, August 8, in the Brazilian city of Belem (North). The issues transcend the region, and summit participants hope to find concrete solutions against global warming. The aim is to discuss common strategies to fight against deforestation and to promote sustainable development in this vast region which is home to around 10% of the planet’s biodiversity.
The summit, which will continue until Wednesday, brings together representatives of the eight member countries of the Amazon Cooperation Treaty Organization (OTCA), created in 1995 to protect the rainforest. Brazil’s President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva receives his counterparts from Bolivia, Colombia, Guyana, Peru and Venezuela, while Ecuador and Suriname are represented by ministers. This summit in Belem also serves as a dress rehearsal for this port city of 1.3 million inhabitants which will host the United Nations climate conference COP30 in 2025.
“We must preserve [the Amazon], not as a sanctuary, but as a source of learning for scientists around the world, to find ways to preserve [the forest] while creating wealth, allowing to those who live here to live with dignity,” Lula said Monday, during an official ceremony in Santarem, another Amazon city.
Find a common action plan to eradicate illegal deforestation
“We cannot allow the Amazon to reach the point of no return,” Marina Silva, Brazil’s environment minister, said Monday in Belem. If this point of no return were reached, the Amazon would emit more carbon than it absorbed, which would aggravate global warming.
The publication of a joint declaration is planned to seal the commitments of ACTO member countries. The “Declaration of Belem” was “negotiated by the eight countries in record time, just over a month,” said Mauro Vieira, Brazil’s foreign minister, on Monday. It stipulates the “new goals and new tasks” to be accomplished in order to preserve the largest rainforest on the planet.
One of the main challenges will be to find a common action plan to eradicate illegal deforestation. Deforested land is often turned into pasture for livestock, but destruction is also caused by gold miners and timber traffickers.
Brazil is home to 60% of the Amazon rainforest
Returning to power in January, Lula pledged to end deforestation by 2030, which had risen sharply under his far-right predecessor Jair Bolsonaro. Brazil is home to 60% of the Amazon rainforest. But Minister Marina Silva knows that each country will go at its own pace: “We don’t want to impose our views, we have to reach a gradual consensus,” she explained on Monday. His Colombian counterpart, Susana Muhamad, wants the declaration to include the common goal of preserving “80% of the Amazon by 2025”.
Colombia is also defending a faster energy transition, with an economy that does not depend on oil, which seems unthinkable at the moment for major hydrocarbon producers such as Venezuela or Brazil.
“Making peace with nature”
Many indigenous leaders have also met in Belem, taking part this weekend in a conference called “Amazonian Dialogues”. They hope that their claims will be heard, especially on the right to land. “Indigenous peoples must be seen as millennial institutions,” Colombian Dario Jose Mejia Montalvo, a member of the United Nations permanent body on indigenous issues, told Agence France-Presse. He hopes that the leaders will be able to “come together to make peace with nature”.
On Wednesday, the summit will continue with the participation of non-OTCA member countries invited to Belem, such as France, which has Amazon territory with Guyana and will be represented by its ambassador in Brasilia, Brigitte Collet. Indonesia, the Republic of Congo and Congo-Brazzaville, which are home to vast rainforests in other continents, have also been invited.