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Yep, you read that correctly. We’re living through peak dystopian greenwashing.
There’s something morbidly poetic about bulldozing eight miles of pristine Amazon rainforest to build a road to a… climate summit.
A new four-lane highway has cut through tens of thousands of acres of land ahead of COP30, which takes place in the Brazilian city of Belém. The goal is to reduce traffic as around 50,000 people descend on the area as part of the event.
Besides destroying a stretch of the world’s most vital and protected ecosystem, the new road will connect Belém’s city center to the climate conference venue, providing easy access to delegates eager to discuss deforestation’s dangers, amongst other environmental concerns. You can’t make this stuff up.
This is greenwashing with a chainsaw. A crash course in how performative environmentalism continues to disrupt any real progress. The Amazon is vital to our entire global landscape, absorbing carbon for the world and providing crucial biodiversity.
Every one of us relies on the region for food, water, wood and medicine, while the 150-200 billion tons of carbon stored in the rainforest help to stabilise the Earth’s climate. The region is also home to most species of primate than anywhere else on Earth, and around 47 million people, including 2.2 million Indigenous people speaking over 300 different languages.
Cutting down swathes of the Amazon isn’t just an aesthetic issue, but a threat to humanity as we know it. The rainforest quite literally serves as our planet’s lungs.
The new summit highway’s construction is justified under the guise of improving infrastructure for COP30. Translation: Let’s raze the planet’s lungs so we can comfortably discuss how to save them.
Besides the global impacts of this decision, locals are already feeling the impacts on their livelihoods.
‘Everything was destroyed,’ says Claudio Verequete, who lives around 200m from where the road will be completed. He used to make an income harvest açaí berries from nearby trees.
‘Our harvest has already been cut down. We no longer have that income to support our family.’
Verequete also says he’s received no support from the state government, and worries further construction will only lead to more damage for local business.
