Belem, a city in Brazil’s Amazon rainforest region, will host the United Nations’ annual climate change summit in 2025, President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva announced Friday.
The UN’s decision to bring COP30, as the summit is known, to Brazil is the latest boost to the leftist leader’s efforts to assert a global leadership role on environmental issues.
“It will be a honor to receive representatives from all over the world to a state in our Amazon,” Lula said on Twitter as he announced the UN’s selection. He originally pitched the city in the northern state of Para as a host during last year’s COP27 summit in Egypt.
“This choice increases our responsibility to show that Brazil is prepared and has the environmental agenda in its mind,” Helder Barbalho, the governor of Para, said in a video accompanying the announcement.
Lula’s promises to reverse years of rising rates of deforestation have won him acclaim on the world stage, a sharp contrast from former President Jair Bolsonaro, who became the target of international disapproval for loosening protections of the forest. Since he took office in January, the US and UK have pledged to begin contributing to the Amazon Fund, a Brazil-led initiative created in 2008, with other nations in talks to join them.
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That agenda is now facing mounting challenges in Brazil, after a congressional committee moved to strip some powers from the Ministry of Environment and its head, Marina Silva, this week. The decision had tacit support from Lula, according to local press reports, as part of larger legislative negotiations over the structure of his cabinet and the approval of his new fiscal plan.
The COP30 summit will take place in November 2025. The event brings together global leaders to discuss climate measures and efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and last year’s event generated an agreement to create a fund to aid poorer nations that have been harmed by the impacts of climate change.
