While the presidents of eight South American nations met this week to discuss an alliance to protect the world’s largest forest, thousands of activists took to the streets outside the convention centre in Belém do Pará, Brazil. Source: Science
Holding up signs that read “Amazon free of oil,” and “Our future is not for sale,” they demanded a joint pledge to end deforestation and fossil fuel extraction in the Amazon. But those hopes didn’t come to pass.
When the heads of state released their Amazon Summit declaration it was devoid of any firm commitment or quantifiable goals.
Instead, the Belém Declaration, signed by the countries that make up the Amazon Cooperation Treaty Organization (ACTO) – Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, Guyana, Peru, Suriname, and Venezuela – listed 113 general objectives. Some were as vague as stating a general goal to “avoid the point of no return in the Amazon.”
But others were more specific, such as the intention to create a pan-Amazonian deforestation monitoring system and an “Amazon IPCC,” a scientific panel modelled after the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that would generate annual reports on deforestation and sustainable development in the region.
It is thought that the lack of specific goals, especially for deforestation, undermine an opportunity for the Amazonian nations to speak with a collective voice at the 20th Conference of the Parties (COP), the United Nation’s climate change meeting slated for November.
During the summit, the host, Brazilian President Luiz Inácio “Lula” da Silva, pushed for a commitment to end deforestation in the Amazon by 2030. Most Amazonian countries had already agreed to this goal during the 2021 COP meeting in Glasgow, Scotland. But Guyana, Venezuela, and Bolivia hadn’t done so. And instead of winning their agreement, the summit declaration merely stated it would respect national goals and establish a formal alliance to promote regional cooperation on fighting deforestation.
The proposed deforestation monitoring system will be part of those efforts. It is not clear yet how the system will work.
Carlos Nobre, a climatologist and chair of the Science Panel for the Amazon, a group of scientists dedicated to studying the region says the Amazon is close to a “tipping point”when the carbon emitted by the forest will surpass the carbon absorbed by the trees, transforming the region into a dry savanna and, in the process, releasing tons of carbon into the atmosphere.
“The risk of a tipping point is not in the distant future; the Amazon is on a cliff edge,” Nobre says.
Another key issue, fossil fuels got only a single sentence in the document stating that countries should “initiate a dialogue on the sustainability of sectors such as hydrocarbons and mining in the Amazon region.”
