COP30: The Amazon near the tipping point
It’s over 30°C, and the air is drenched with humidity on the banks of the Cuieiras River, at the mouth of the Amazon’s Río Negro. Beads of sweat form on the skin, but the sun doesn’t dry them, and the rain that should bring relief from the heat on this June afternoon doesn’t appear. Tayo Pontes, 21, from the Kambeba Indigenous community, puts his wooden canoe away. There’s no chance of catching anything in this heat. Perhaps in the early morning hours, the “Coca-Cola water,” as the Río Negro is described, will be cooler, giving the young man a better chance of finding fish to feed his family.
In the Amazon, life is punctuated by the rainy season (from mid-December to mid-May) and the dry season (from mid-May to mid-December). But for at least the past two years, the situation has been catastrophic in this vast South American rainforest that spans nine countries, primarily Brazil. Extreme swings from droughts to floods, increasing deforestation and rising temperatures in general are threatening the delicate balance that shields the Amazonian biodiversity against the effects of climate change.
The impact of these changes is hitting particularly hard in the village of the Kambebas (the “people of the water” who, according to legend, were born from a drop of water that fell to the Earth), located two hours by boat from Manaus, the largest city in the Amazon with 2.2 million inhabitants. This community has been settled for several decades at the confluence of the Río Cuieiras and the Río Negro, the latter being itself a tributary of the Amazon, the longest river in the world. The Amazon winds its path over nearly 7,000 km, from eastern Peru, where most of the Kambeba people live, to the Atlantic Ocean in northern Brazil. The 100 or so Kambeba people of the Río Negro are able to spend less and less time in the fields and on the river because of the suffocating heat and the “new dry seasons.” This is problematic not only for the food supply, but also for the community’s small economy, which relies heavily on tourism and the passage of cruise ships along the river. If there’s no water, there’s no tourists either.
“Because of the drought and the heat [which raises the water temperature], many fish are dying,” says Tayo Pontes. “I have many friends who have left the village because they didn’t know whether the dry season would be as intense this year. Living with this uncertainty, not knowing if you’ll be able to fish and if what you catch will be edible, had become too difficult.”
From a climate standpoint, this is a pivotal year for Brazil. The 180 communities and 860,000 Indigenous people listed by the Coordination of Indigenous Organizations of the Brazilian Amazon (COIAB) are hoping to see an acceleration of government “climate aid,” such as reforestation efforts and measures to mitigate the impact of climate change on a day-to-day basis. On top of all this, from November 10 to 21, the city of Belém, in the eastern part of the country, the obligatory outlet for all products of the Amazon via its historic port, will host the 30th Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, the COP30. As the host country, Brazil is keen to put Indigenous people at the forefront, to demonstrate their essential role as bellwethers in the fight against climate change and as protectors of the Amazon. However, Indigenous peoples fear that their demands and recommendations, particularly with regard to illegal deforestation, are falling on deaf ears.
And the Indigenous communities still need to be able to travel to Belém. For example, the Kambeba people around Manaus, some 1,000 km as the crow flies from the COP venue, were isolated for a few months in 2024 when a large part of the Río Negro and its tributaries dried up. In October 2024, the Río Negro fell to 12.66 m — its lowest level in 122 years of monitoring — according to data from the Geological Survey of Brazil, while the median is around 18 m at that time of year.
On the riverbank, Raimundo Cruz da Silva, cell phone in hand, swipes through a series of photos. “When I was young, it retreated just a few metres during the dry season. But look: last year, we were probably more than a kilometre from the river,” says the 50-year-old father.
The disruption of the Amazonian seasons also has economic consequences. If the tourists stop coming, so does the money. Fishing and agriculture are therefore becoming critical. But because of the drought, each fish is more costly to catch: you have to travel farther and farther on foot, then by boat, to hope to catch the rare fish that aren’t already dead.
The village’s farms are also affected. Raimundo Cruz da Silva estimates that the Kambeba people lost at least a hundred trees last year. Mango and pineapple production has been hit hard. As a result, residents had to buy more food in town, despite the lack of income. Only Brazil nuts, renowned for the ability to survive the worst of the heat, are still holding out. However, many Kambebas fear that they too will eventually be affected.
As the afternoon draws to a close, life in Kambeba village gradually resumes. When the siesta’s over, the dogs emerge from their hollows dug in the ground to escape the heat, the children take to the “Coca-Cola water” to cool off, teenagers play soccer to stretch their legs, and the adults start preparing supper to feed everyone. It’s also time to check if there’s any water left from the last rainfall in the semi-enclosed basins surrounding the homes. Earlier in the day, the solar-powered electric fan was an inseparable friend.
To any outsider passing by at that moment, daily life in the village might seem perfectly normal. However, the Kambebas all say that “the balance is broken.” What tourists come to see on cruise ships, when there’s enough water to get to the village, is less and less a portrait of their “reality.” These tourists don’t see the other side of the coin: climate disruption, which is forcing the Kambeba people to rethink their habits and traditions. For example, they haven’t always cut their day so distinctly in half to try to resist the heat, even though an after-lunch siesta has long been a ritual for them, as it is for other populations living in hot countries.
And, as “people of the water,” the Kambebas feel the impact of climate change to the very depths of their beings. The elders are increasingly wondering how to ensure the transmission of a culture based on the presence of rivers, which act as blood vessels for Mother Nature, when the size of these rivers is now uncertain for part of the year. The survival of the village’s culture is also linked to that of the Amazon. “My grandfather always told me, ‘We’re nothing without the water,’” says 20-year-old village spokeswoman Tainara da Costa Cruz.
The young environmental activist is also due to attend COP30 in Belém. Initially, Tainara hoped to use virtual reality headsets to show the impact of the “new seasons” on life in her community. Lacking the means to do so, she will try through her presence alone at the COP to convey the despair of her people, who feel completely forgotten despite many years of heartfelt pleas from Indigenous communities to save the Amazon.
“When we talk about the Amazon, many people only think of lush jungles and the rushing river. They don’t realize that we’re suffering here too. For them, everything’s green, everything’s beautiful. But I want to change that perspective to prove that even the Amazon, with all its splendor, is being hit by climate change,” explains Tainara da Costa Cruz.
For decades, the Amazon rainforest has acted as a giant filter, absorbing and storing large quantities of carbon dioxide. But scientists have demonstrated, notably in the scientific journal Nature, that from 2010 to 2018, the Amazon had partially lost this capacity. According to NASA’s Earth Observatory, “[a]lthough the Amazon is still a net carbon sink — capturing 100 million metric tons more carbon dioxide per year than it emits — it is on the brink of becoming a net carbon source,” having lost at least 17% of its area over the past 50 years.
Deforestation, often illegal, is a major factor in this loss of the forest’s capacity to capture carbon dioxide. In its latest annual report on deforestation in Brazil, published in May 2025, MapBiomas, a collaborative network of non-governmental organizations, universities and technology companies, estimates that 9,880,551 hectares of forest — one and a half times the area of New Brunswick — have been lost in the last six years alone. This loss is almost exclusively due to agriculture (97%) and the conversion of rainforest into pasture, often illegally and by fire, in order to produce meat or dairy products or to grow soybean fields. The two ecoregions of the Amazon and the Cerrado, a vast savanna in central Brazil surrounding Belém, alone account for over 83% of the deforested areas.
And, as the rainforest shrinks, so does its resistance, especially to drought. Fewer trees means lower water retention and increased drought, which in turn influences the likelihood of forest fires, among other things.
“We have good ideas, but the government only has election promises for us,” complains Triukuchuri Taixira-Musana, chief of the Kambeba village. “A few years ago, we had a wonderful balance. But the non-natives think they can make money from the Amazon without ever giving anything back. They need to learn, before there’s nothing left, that you don’t have to kill a tree to be happy.”
In an attempt to restore balance, Indigenous communities are calling for genuine recognition of their territories (a right enshrined in the 1988 Constitution) as a first environmental policy. In March 2023, the Monitoring of the Andes Amazon Program (MAAP), led by an alliance of NGOs, demonstrated that protected areas and Indigenous territories in the Amazon rainforest had suffered only one third of the primary forest loss observed in unprotected areas.
Carlos Quispe Dávila, of the Amazon-based NGO Derecho, Ambiente y Recursos Naturales (Environmental Law and Natural Resources, DAR), works with diverse communities in Peru and Brazil to implement strategies to defend the climate and the rights of Indigenous peoples — an initiative supported by Canada’s International Development Research Centre (IDRC). In his opinion, it’s impossible to talk about protecting the population or the Amazon without territorial recognition. “People can’t fight if they don’t have a right to the territory they’re defending,” he says in a videoconference interview from his office in Peru.
The environmental law specialist also points to a “very obvious” current trend towards the expansion of transnational criminal activities, such as mining, logging or the construction of illegal roads that force the displacement of entire communities. A study of government data conducted by the Instituto Centro de Vida (ICV), a non-profit environmental organization, concurs: 91% of deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon between August 2023 and July 2024 is linked to illegal activities, such as land clearing for agriculture and artisanal mining, “often orchestrated by international criminal organizations.”
“It’s not just a question of whether illicit activities are happening and whether the government is able to stop them. These groups and companies also come because there’s an economic logic that allows them to come, because governments have granted them rights to extract resources,” asserts Carlos Quispe Dávila.
For his part, Toya Manchineri, general coordinator of the COIAB, believes that instead of talking about capturing CO2 from the air, the Brazilian government should be looking at a concrete policy for demarcating Indigenous territories. He intends to bring this demand to the negotiating table at the upcoming COP. He’s hoping Brazil will do more than just use Indigenous communities to make for good press at the Belém climate conference.
“President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s [left-wing] government is more open to discussions with us,” believes Toya Manchineri. “But even though this government is more receptive than before, our rights are not fully respected. And there are a few projects in Congress that run counter to our interests, such as approved applications for mineral exploration in Indigenous territories.”
During the two-hour motorboat ride back to Manaus on the Río Negro, your gaze inevitably falls on the gaps that have appeared in the riverbank jungle over time. They are the result of workers who came for the “rubber boom” over a century ago, as well as the less fortunate who today build makeshift shelters, pushing back the boundaries of Manaus. The rainforest always seems to have paid the price for human expansion in the region.
The Kambeba people would need several days to cover the more than 1,000 km to get to Belém by boat. That’s why they are hoping to secure private funding to pay for their delegation’s plane tickets. Regardless, in Belém, in the neighbouring state of Pará, they will find a region that’s been reorganized to suit human needs, not least because of the arrival of thousands of dignitaries for COP30.
Located 100 km from the Atlantic Ocean, Belém, the “gateway to the Amazon,” remains a particularly impoverished city. The locals, and especially the Indigenous peoples, have seen very little benefit from the economy created by the port, founded by the Portuguese in 1616. Even today, some 16% of its 1.4 million inhabitants has no access to basic sanitation infrastructure, according to the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics. In choosing Belém as the host for the conference, COP30 President André Corrêa do Lago rightly said that it was the perfect opportunity to tackle these challenges head-on. But the fact remains that preparing to welcome tens of thousands of participants was a huge logistical headache for this port city. (COP30 representatives declined our requests for interviews for this story.)
The huge park created on the outskirts of Belém to host the main meetings is considered by urban planner José Júlio Ferreira Lima, professor at the Federal University of Pará, to be the most “meaningful” achievement, as it will provide a living space for local residents after the event, with its green spaces and sports fields. Conversely, the construction of other infrastructures especially for the occasion leaves the urban planner rather perplexed. For example, a multi-lane asphalt road several dozen kilometres long now passes through the forest: some of the COP participants, who will be staying on cruise ships along the Atlantic coast, had to be able to reach the city, almost an hour’s drive away, for lack of sufficient accommodation near the main venues. A long pedestrian corridor also divides Belém in two, with no real consideration being given to providing shade. The heat makes it unusable. Then there are the improvements in disadvantaged neighbourhoods, funded by the State of Pará and the COP30 to give the event a better image, which risk displacing more people than they will help.
The major transformation of Belém, historically poor compared to the other major Brazilian cities, has left the local population concerned. Many of the residents we met would have preferred more direct investments into combating climate change. By 2050, Belém could become one of the world’s hottest cities, with 222 days of extreme heat (over 32°C) per year, according to an analysis by CarbonPlan, a non-profit organization that produces climate data and analyses, carried out in collaboration with the Washington Post in 2023. This would be the biggest increase of any major city on the planet.
In the open-air market square, Fabio Miranda, a 40-year-old merchant of açais, the fruits with the taste of red berries and cocoa that are the pride of the whole Amazon region, feels that the improvements in the city are just window dressing, that they have not been designed with local workers in mind. “The COP event won’t change a thing for me. Only the rich will benefit by renting out their apartments during the conference,” he says.
This sentiment is echoed by Sara Alexandre da Silva Pereira, 53, who is never without her little stand fan. “Ten years ago, I didn’t need a fan,” says the merchant. “But now, it’s every day, and it’ll be the same when we have access to the new [non-air-conditioned] market they’re building. [Electricity for my fan] is one of my biggest expenses.” She goes on to say that the expenses incurred to offset the rising temperatures do not affect the budgets of the rich, “but the workers, the poorer classes, are the ones who pay the price.”
On the outskirts of the city, in the underprivileged neighbourhoods of Curió-Utinga and Vila da Barca, there is even more doubt as to whether COP30 will benefit the population. Juscelino, 57, saw a paint mark appear on his wooden cottage, announcing that he would have to leave his home in Curió-Utinga, which will be displaced because of waterworks undertaken in preparation for COP30. “At least now they [the leaders] see us. They hadn’t done anything in the neighbourhood for 30 years,” he says, sitting out of the sun in his doorway. The fan repairman, a practically essential service in this neighbourhood, doesn’t think the government will go so far as to evict residents, as there’s no money to compensate them anyway.
In Vila da Barca, a shantytown built one sheet metal and wood house at a time, there are no sewers, no waterworks and no garbage collection. People dump everything right on the banks of Guajará Bay, under their houses on stilts. But they will see a water treatment plant springing up next door, and the pipes will run right through their neighbourhoods, though they won’t be connected to it. The government plans to complete this work in April 2026.
During the visit to the heart of the neighbourhood’s labyrinth of wooden plank sidewalks, Inêz Medeiros, a 37-year-old educator and community leader in Vila da Barca, often reiterates that her community is not against COP30. However, she would have liked to have been involved in the projects so that the conference could leave a concrete legacy, even in the most disadvantaged neighbourhoods.
“As the poorest members of society, we are the ones most affected by climate change. I consider it to be environmental racism. We’re going to have a chic area for the COP, where we’ll be rebuilding, and the waste from all this will pile up where we live,” she said in June.
According to Mark Lutes, senior global climate policy advisor at the São Paulo-based World Wildlife Fund (WWF International), who regularly participates in various global forums on climate issues, the next COP will be a huge test for Brazil. This is especially true as the country’s ambition is to encourage the international community to provide more funding for the protection of the regions most affected by climate change, including the Amazon — particularly with regard to deforestation.
“I just hope that after the COP, the world doesn’t go back to business as usual. There’s a real risk that the pressure will ease, especially as, in Brazil’s case, regardless of the current government’s good intentions, the country is finding it very hard to prevent the adoption of bad environmental laws,” he explains.
WWF Brazil, for example, has its sights set on the government’s recent proposal to grant offshore exploratory drilling rights off the mouth of the Amazon in the Atlantic Ocean. According to a report published by the organization in June 2025, Brazil is set to increase its oil and gas production by more than 20% by 2030, and the Brazilian state-owned corporation Petrobras accounts for more than half of this increase, through exploration projects, among others.
Sitting on the patio of a bar overlooking Guajará Bay on the border of Belém, Ronaldo Amanayé, executive director of the Federation of Indigenous Peoples of the State of Pará (of which Belém is the capital), wipes the sweat from his brow before speaking. “I’ve been to the last three COPs, and I’ve always been disappointed,” he says at the outset. “It has to be different this year, especially because the world’s leaders will have to come to the Amazon to see the reality. And they shouldn’t be wondering whether there will be five-star hotels, but rather be happy to be close to the issues at last.”
In his opinion, there’s no risk that Indigenous communities will allow themselves to be exploited during this COP, especially given that it’s taking place “at home.” The world, and especially Brazil’s former colonizers (Portugal, Spain, France and the Netherlands), must “assume its responsibility” for the suffering in the Amazon. Because it is Brazil’s Indigenous communities who, as Ronaldo Amanayé says, are “openly killed in conflicts with illicit industries that profit from Indigenous lands,” particularly in the Amazon.
“In the past, we were naive. We underestimated the white man’s thirst for gold and silver,” says Ronaldo Amanayé, as the sun quietly sets before his eyes.
Xavier Savard-Fournier visited Brazil at the invitation of the International Development Research Centre (IDRC). This report was produced in collaboration with Sandro Gama Pedroso and Alessandro Falco.
This article was initially published in the December 2025 issue of L’actualité.
Share this page