BELEM, Brazil - On Tuesday, the leaders of eight countries that are home to the Amazon River basin agreed to work together to conserve the world’s largest rainforest at a groundbreaking meeting convened by President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva of Brazil.
The agreement, called the Belem Declaration for the Brazilian city where the meeting was held, provides a road map to stave off the rampant deforestation, caused in large part by industrial agriculture and land-grabbing, that has severely damaged the rainforest and has major implications for the earth’s climate.
The meeting was also expected to yield a separate agreement on Wednesday among other nations with major rainforests – including Congo, the Republic of Congo and Indonesia – to more closely coordinate protecting the ecosystems globally.
The Amazon rainforest is not only a haven of biodiversity but also plays an important role in the fight against climate change because it pulls huge amounts of planet-warming carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and stores it away. Over the past half-century, around 17 per cent of the forest has been razed and an even bigger share severely degraded.
While the agreement projected symbolic unity, it fell short of the biggest ambitions Mr Lula had hoped to realise.
For months before the summit, Mr Lula pushed the leaders of Bolivia and Venezuela to commit to ending deforestation in their countries by 2030, a pledge the six other Amazon basin countries had already made at the global climate summit in Glasgow in 2021. Colombia’s President Gustavo Petro had in turn pushed Mr Lula to match his commitment to ban all oil drilling in the forest, but Brazil still has plans for a huge offshore project at the mouth of the Amazon River.
Neither push succeeded.
The expected announcement on Wednesday of further cooperation among other countries with most of the rest of the world’s rainforests could include efforts to increase access to financing from wealthier nations that would promote sustainable forest use.
The foundation for that agreement was laid in 2022 at COP27, the United Nations-sponsored global climate summit, which was held in Egypt.
Belem is set to host COP30 in 2025. NYTIMES
