Eight nations that encircle the Amazon agreed on Tuesday a set of unified environmental policies and measures to boost regional cooperation at the most important rainforest summit in 14 years. However, representatives gathered in the Brazilian city of Belém failed to agree on a common goal to end deforestation.
Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, who has staked his international reputation on improving Brazil's environmental standing, had pushed for the region to unite around a common policy to end deforestation by 2030, a policy that your country has already adopted.
However, the joint declaration issued on Tuesday lowers this goal and creates an alliance to combat the destruction of forests, leaving it up to each Amazon country to choose their individual deforestation targets.
The failure of the eight countries to agree to a pact to protect their own forests points to further global difficulty in forging a deal to combat climate change. The scientific community has long warned that politicians are moving too slowly to prevent catastrophic global warming.
“The planet is melting, we are breaking temperature records every day. It is not possible that, in a scenario like this, eight Amazonian countries cannot put in a declaration, in big letters, that deforestation should be zero," said Marcio Astrini, from the Climate Observatory organization.
About 60% of the Amazon, the largest tropical forest in the world and whose preservation is key to the survival of the planet, is located in Brazil. Deforestation in the Brazilian part of the main lung of the Earth has fallen dramatically since Lula won the presidency from his predecessor Jair Bolsonaro, who favored development over conservation and allowed uncontrolled logging during his presidency, but they continue to lose thousands of square kilometers each year. Preliminary data from the Brazilian government released last week showed deforestation in the Amazon fell 66% in July from a year earlier.
The presidents of Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia and Peru attended the summit, while Ecuador, Guyana, Suriname and Venezuela sent senior officials. Leaders from other tropical forest countries, including Indonesia, the Congo and the Republic of the Congo, are also participating in the two-day event.
Bolivia and Venezuela are the only Amazon countries that did not sign a 2021 agreement among more than 100 countries pledging to work to halt deforestation by 2030. A Brazilian government source told Reuters ahead of the summit that Bolivia , where forest destruction is increasing, is reluctant to accept this deadline. Bolivian President Luis Arce did not address the 2030 commitment in his speech on Tuesday.
Brazilian Foreign Minister Mauro Vieira defended at a press conference that the issue of deforestation "will in no way divide the region" and cited "an understanding on deforestation" in the statement, without elaborating.
This week's summit brought together the Amazon Cooperation Treaty Organization (OTCA) for the first time since 2009, with the goal of reaching a broad agreement on issues ranging from fighting deforestation to financing sustainable development. But already in the run-up to the summit, the first divergences regarding deforestation and oil development began to emerge.
Amazon countries have also rejected the ongoing campaign by Colombia's leftist president, Gustavo Petro, to end new oil development in the Amazon. In his speech on Tuesday, Petro compared the desire of the left to continue extracting oil with the denialism of climate change on the part of the right.
Petro argued that the idea of making a gradual "energy transition" from fossil fuels was a way of delaying the work needed to stop climate change.
Meanwhile, Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, who called off his summit at the last minute suffering from ear infections, runs an oil-dependent economy and has shown little interest in curbing deforestation in the Amazon. He has also faced UN condemnation of human rights abuses related to the involvement of state forces in gold mining.
Brazil itself also faces its own contradictions. As Lula defends his plan to end deforestation by 2030, Brasilia is weighing whether to develop a potentially huge offshore oil find near the mouth of the Amazon River and the country's northern coast, dominated by rainforest.
"What we are discussing in Brazil today is the investigation of a vast and large area, in my opinion, perhaps the last frontier of oil and gas before... the energy transition," the energy minister of Brazil told reporters. Brazil, Alexandre Silveira, after Petro's speech. Silveira defended that his government must investigate what oil is in said reserve before making a decision on the matter.
The summit also did not set a deadline to end illegal gold mining, although the assembled leaders agreed to increase cooperation and better combat cross-border environmental crimes.
The final joint declaration, called the Belém Declaration, strongly supports the rights and protections of indigenous peoples, while agreeing to cooperate on water management, health, common negotiating positions at climate summits, and sustainable development.
The declaration also establishes a scientific body that will meet annually and produce authoritative reports on science related to the Amazon rainforest, similar to the United Nations' International Panel on Climate Change.
Despite the differences, the meeting has helped unify the region's position on climate and is seen as the prelude to the Climate Change conference to be organized by the UN in 2025, COP30, which will also be held in Belém.
Consensus has long eluded the commodity-heavy region, where roughly a third of the population lives in poverty and economic development remains the top concern.
With this joint deal in hand, Lula is likely to continue to push to convince his neighbors that they are stronger as a bloc, especially amid debates over how much donor countries and major development banks should help finance green transitions in low- and middle-income countries. “Coalition politics is back. The logic in Brasilia is that Brazil should not act alone," said Matias Spektor, a professor of international relations at the Getulio Vargas Foundation in Sao Paulo.
The urgency of climate change means that "all the rules are being questioned," said Ilona Szabo, president of the Igarape Institute, a Rio de Janeiro-based think tank. "Brazil is willing to negotiate the importance of the region."
The summit opened on the same day that the European Union's climate change panel confirmed that this past July had been the warmest on record globally.
