On the morning indigenous protesters occupied the entrance to the climate summit, socio-environmental leaders said the largest-ever demonstration with indigenous participation at the COP was justified.
“This is a COP based in an indigenous territory in the Amazon, and we know there are sentiments, but the space these people claim is legitimate,” said Caetano Scannavino, coordinator of the Saude & Alegría project in Pará state.
“We have the highest Indigenous participation ever, and if the future is ancestral, there’s nothing better than giving more space to their voices. That doesn’t mean space for violence,” he added.
Scannavino participated in the panel “Amazonian Bioeconomy and Innovation” held at Espaço sheet In Belém, through the mediation of journalists. Eliane Trindade.
The talk show “Papo de Responsa Special COP30” will gather on November 14th and 16th representatives of the Folha de Empriendres Sociales Network, which is made up of the finalists and winners of the Social Entrepreneurship Award, as well as stakeholders from the national socio-environmental impact ecosystem.
Fernanda Stefani, president of 100% Amazon, an impact business that focuses on riverine communities and biodiversity in a win-win way, said she had no expectations about the Amazon COP when Brazil was announced as the host country for the climate summit two years ago.
“Today we realized that it was essential for the conference to come here. People living in the cities have little awareness about this climate crisis, and many people from outside have given themselves over to the influence of the Amazon,” she says, who has lived in Belém for 20 years.
Both sides agreed that negotiations at COP30 would yield few concrete solutions to climate change, reflecting global apathy, including from the United States, which did not send an official delegation to the summit.
They also criticized the region’s territorial occupation model based on illegal deforestation, low-productivity livestock farming, and monocultures, which would have led the region to the worst human development index in the country.
They suggest valuing biodiversity and forest protectors as a countermeasure to this model, in addition to taxing products from the “dirty economy” such as soy and meat.
“At a time when the color of wealth begins to change from the black of oil to the green of the forest, why not consider the Manaus Free Trade Zone as the Silicon Valley of the Amazon?” Scannavino said.
Other biomes also joined the discussion, building on the experience of SOS Mata Atlântica, which came to the COP to put this issue on the negotiation table.
Luis Fernando Guedes, director of the NGO, says the Amazon forest is more relevant globally, having undergone a similar process to the Atlantic forest, which has suffered much deforestation in the past few decades, and that today it is a model for how to deal with this devastation.
“The Atlantic Forest could be the first in the world to achieve zero deforestation, undertake large-scale restoration, and become a global showcase for how to reverse this trajectory of destruction,” said Luis Fernando Guedes Pinto.
To achieve this, it is essential to consider funding not only for climate adaptation, but also for mitigating the environmental damage that is already occurring. Resistance from wealthy countries responsible for paying for the bill has stalled the COP.
“The world spends more money on wars than it does on solving the climate problem. We can solve the climate problem if we stop making missiles,” said Luis Guedes.
He took part in the second part of the discussion with David Hertz, founder of Gastromotiva, an NGO that uses gastronomy to strengthen vulnerable people and communities.
For Hertz, the amount of resources at issue does not solve the scale of the environmental problem. “There is a long road to transformation and we have to see how this funding actually gets there in the end.”
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