The United Nations has chosen Brazil to host the international climate meeting, COP30, in the Amazonian city of Belém do Pará in 2025, the country’s president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, announced on Friday.
“I have participated in COPs in Egypt, in Paris, in Copenhagen and all that is talked about is the Amazon. So why not have the COP in the Amazon [people] can get to know the Amazon, see its rivers, its forests, its wildlife,” Lula said in a video posted on Twitter.
Foreign Minister Mauro Vieira said the UN approved Brazil’s bid to host COP30 on May 18 after Lula’s request at last year’s COP27 meeting in Egypt.
Belém do Pará is a city in northern Brazil located on the edge of the Amazon rainforest. It is the capital of the state of Pará located on the coast of the Amazon River estuary.
Pará Governor Helder Barbalho said in the same video that it is a “great privilege for the whole country” to host the event, saying it “increases responsibility” for Brazil’s climate agenda regarding the rights of indigenous peoples and the environment. .
Lula has promised to fight Amazon deforestation and repair the damage done to the Amazon by his predecessor, Jair Bolsonaro, under whose presidency deforestation exploded.
But Lula’s government has come under fire for seemingly backtracking on its climate-related election promises in recent days. His administration helped Congress pass a bill that strips the ministries of environment and indigenous peoples of certain powers, weakening their control over environmental protection and the demarcation of indigenous lands in the Amazon.
The COP is the annual United Nations conference on climate change, where states discuss and agree on measures to deal with the environment. This year, the 28th edition of the conference will be held in Dubai, according to the UN. The UN calendar doesn’t include anything after that at this time.
Last year’s climate summit saw negotiators from nearly 200 countries take a historic step by agreeing to establish a “loss and damage” fund to help vulnerable countries cope with climate disasters and agreed that the world was to cut greenhouse gas emissions by nearly half by 2030. .
However, an attempt to tackle the biggest source of global warming emissions driving the climate crisis has ended in a fiasco after a number of countries including China and the Saudi Arabia, have blocked a key proposal to phase out all fossil fuels, not just coal. .
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