Brazil Cuts Acres of Amazon Trees to Build Road for Climate Summit
Brazil Cuts Acres of Amazon Trees to Build Road for Climate Summit
A new four-lane road is being built by cutting down thousands of protected Amazon rainforest acres for the COP30 climate summit in the Brazilian city of Belém. The road aims to ease traffic in the city, which is expected to host more than 50,000 people, including world leaders this November.
The state’s government has designated the new road built in the Brazilian Amazon as “sustainable,” but the construction has generated outrage amongst locals over its environmental impact.
Critics have said that given the fact that the Amazon plays a crucial role in absorbing carbon for the world, deforestation for building a road contradicts the purpose of a climate summit.
JUST IN: Tens of thousands of acres in the Amazon rainforest have been cut down to build a road for the COP30 climate summit in Brazil.
Huge swaths of land are getting cleared out to "ease traffic to the city" of Belem for a new highway.
Video shows rows and rows of deforested… pic.twitter.com/KpAUknR8Go
— Eric Daugherty (@EricLDaugh) March 12, 2025
The Amazon rainforest will still surround the newly built road for the climate summit
Logs of the rainforest are currently placed beside the land that surrounds the partially built road, which is more than 13km through the forest to Belém. Currently, both diggers and machines carve through the forest floor, paving over the uncovered wetland.
The BBC interviewed a local, Claudio Verequete, who lives near the area where the road is to be built. Before its construction, Mr. Verequete used to earn a living from harvesting berries from trees that have since been cut down. He told the BBC that “Everything was destroyed,” “Our harvest has already been cut down. We no longer have that income to support our family.”
He also expressed his concerns over the construction of the road leading to more deforestation in the area, saying, “Our fear is that one day someone will come here and say: ‘Here’s some money. We need this area to build a gas station, or to build a warehouse.’ And then we’ll have to leave.”
The new highway will cut through the Amazon forest
This road has been in the making since 2012, as the government of the state of Pará proposed this idea more than ten years ago. The proposal was originally dismissed over the construction’s environmental impact.
The road is one of many previously shelved infrastructure projects that have been approved to prepare the city for the climate summit. Adler Silveira, the state’s infrastructure secretary, said there are 30 projects happening in the city to help modernise it so that “it can have a legacy for the population and, more importantly, serve people for COP30 in the best possible way.”
Brazil’s federal government is investing more than $81 million to expand the city’s airport’s capacity from seven to 14 million passengers. The city will also build a 500,000 square-metre park named Parque da Cidade.