As COP30 Brazil now begins in Belém, the world once again gathers to promise salvation — a solution to the climate crisis. Global leaders fly in and meet under the canopy of the Amazon rainforest, pledging ambition, justice and preservation.

Brazil’s president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva stands before the cameras proclaiming his nation’s leadership in the global climate fight, but his rhetoric seems to be out of sync with reality.

The Brazilian government that now dresses itself in the language of sustainability is the same one advancing laws, projects, and extractive industries that endanger the very forest it claims to protect.

The Amazon is under threat not only from loggers and illegal miners, it’s under threat from the country’s own government, which hosts a climate summit even as it opens new oil frontiers, weakens Indigenous land protections and fast tracks eco-destructive licences.

COP30 Brazil — Smoke and mirrors

While diplomats sip açaí smoothies in Belém, fires, deforestation, and degradation continue to rage across the Amazon.

In late 2023, the capital of Amazonas, Manaus, disappeared beneath a suffocating dark cloud of smoke. Residents awoke to grey skies and the taste of burning forests in their mouths. Masks were no longer a protection from a virus; they were shields against the very air they needed to survive.

Air monitors registered PM2.5 levels twenty times the World Health Organisation’s limit. This is the Amazon speaking, and it was screaming.

The fires trace a very familiar path: the BR-319 highway, once abandoned, now being revived under Lula’s government, carving through the rainforest like a knife. Bulldozers are cutting a corridor of destruction through one of the most intact parts of the rainforest, opening it to cattle ranching, land grabbing, organised crime, both legal and illegal mining, fire, and possibly new pandemics.

“Brazil is moving backward while promising climate leadership, it’s heading in the opposite direction to its commitments for COP30 Brazil,” says Lucas Ferrante, researcher at the University of São Paulo (USP). He added:

Deforestation and degradation are already seen around BR-319. If the highway is rebuilt, it could set off an irreversible chain reaction that will devastate the Amazon, harm Indigenous communities, and accelerate climate change beyond control.

Cássio Cardoso Pereira, ecologist and editor of BioScience journal, said:

While deforestation grabs headlines, the deeper crisis of forest degradation continues unchecked. And now, reckless projects, including the BR-319 highway, the Ferrogrão railroad, and the disastrous proposal to drill for oil at the mouth of the Amazon, push the rainforest closer to collapse.

Drill, drill, drill

One of the most striking contradictions is Brazil’s approval of oil exploration at the mouth of the Amazon River, on the so-called Brazilian equatorial margin.

Despite global calls to phase out fossil fuels, state-owned giant Petrobras received environmental authorisation from Brazil’s environmental agency, Ibama, to drill an exploratory well in Block 59, about 500 km from the river’s mouth, in an area home to sensitive ecosystems, including the Great Amazon Reef System, and mangroves. Environmentalists warn about the risks of such project and the tragic consequences of an oil spill.

How can a country host a summit on climate action while expanding oil extraction in one of the world’s most biodiverse and climate-sensitive regions?

The contradiction is so glaring it almost seems deliberate, a reminder that climate diplomacy too often serves the optics of progress, it signals that the summit may serve branding more than real change.

The battle over Indigenous land

Brazil’s climate narrative also collapses when it comes to Indigenous rights.

The controversial “marco temporal” or “time frame”, a legislation backed by the agribusiness lobby (“ruralistas”), claims that Indigenous peoples can only claim land they physically occupied on 5 October 1988, the date when Brazil’s constitution came into force.

Entire Indigenous communities displaced before that date would lose their rights to ancestral territories.

Though Brazil’s supreme court struck the bill down in 2023, congress soon passed Law 14.701/2023 to reimpose it, a legislative deceptiveness that undermines constitutional justice.

For those who live by the forest, the stakes are existential.

UN experts have warned that the law could invalidate hundreds of land demarcations and accelerate deforestation. Yet, at COP30 Indigenous delegates will likely appear on governmental panels, their presence used as proof of inclusion, even as their land rights are being eroded at home.

Deregulation

As if this weren’t enough, in July 2025, Brazil’s congress passed the so-called “devastation bill”, officially bill 2159/2021. This legislation radically loosens environmental licencing rules, allowing many projects to proceed under weaker impact assessments, sidestepping oversight, and handing more authority to states and municipalities.

Human rights groups have warned that the bill puts people and the planet at risk by weakening protections related to Indigenous and Quilombola communities.

Although President Lula vetoed or amended 63 of the bill’s nearly 400 articles in August, observers warn that the remaining provisions still pose a serious threat. Aware that congress could overturn his vetoes, Lula appeared to strike a delicate balance, seeking to appease both the right and the left while maintaining an appearance of neutrality.

To host a climate summit whilst your government is passing this kind of law is to declare war on credibility. A country can’t simultaneously chair the climate table and fast track deregulation that invites deforestation and community displacement.

The bioeconomy in green disguise

Another of President Lula’s proudest talking points is Brazil’s “bioeconomy revolution”. At the BRICS Business Forum, he declared:

Our countries can lead a new development model based on sustainable agriculture, green industry, resilient infrastructure, and the bioeconomy.

It sounds visionary, but behind the slogans, the same extractive dynamics persist.

Large-scale soy, sugarcane, palm oil, and corn monocultures are expanding across the Amazon, justified as “renewable”, “green”, “clean”, “sustainable” biofuel crops, the “fuel of the future”. Projects like Amazônia 4.0 promise sustainable innovation, yet risk replicating the colonial logic of resource extraction in a green disguise.

“The extension of this concept to the Amazon carries the inherent risk of it ending up being pulped and sold for profit,” warns researcher Ossi Ollinaho from the University of Helsinki.

Meanwhile, environmental policy expert, Jorge Rodriguez Morales, observes that:

“Positioning bioenergy as a climate strategy has effectively justified broader policies supporting the biofuel industry and contributed to the greenwashing of Brazil’s climate policy.”

Offsets

Meanwhile, another COP30 Brazil spotlight is on carbon markets, the supposed magic wand of climate action, but voluntary carbon offsets are now under intense scrutiny. Research led by Dr. Thales West at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam found that many REDD+ forest projects, once celebrated as proof of progress, are built on “hope, not proof”, relying on shaky assumptions.

Nature reports that offsets often “undermine decarbonisation by enabling companies and countries to claim reductions that don’t exist.

At the heart of the problem is the baseline scenario: exaggerated threats allow projects to sell more credits, even for forests never at risk. Dr. West says:

Even with the best intentions, if you follow the ‘wrong recipe’, you’ll probably not get the right result.

Certifications systems, paid by the very projects they audit, create conflicts of interest, while many credits fail to account for forest loss through fire, logging, or displacement.

The Suruí project in Brazil, once celebrated as an Indigenous-led conservation success, collapsed under illegal mining and land pressures, demonstrating that even well-designed offsets can’t succeed in a broken system.

Critics warn that offsets have become a form of greenwashing, letting airlines, tech firms, and luxury brands continue polluting.

Dr. West cautions:

Unless there’s a change in attitude among companies, governments, and organisations such as the UN, the market is likely to continue prioritising convenience over integrity.

Integrity, truth and justice

Lula’s international rhetoric remains powerful, his speeches about “saving the Amazon” still win applause in New York, London, Paris, and Davos, but power without integrity is just noise.

At COP30 Brazil, the word “justice” will be repeated many times, but justice requires more than words, it requires action, alignment of policy and principle.

Brazil can’t host the world’s climate summit while giving licenses for oil at the mouth of the Amazon, while loosening land protections for Indigenous peoples and while fast-tracking environmentally sensitive projects under the “devastation bill”.

The Amazon is not just a forest, it’s the lungs of a continent, the keeper of “flying rivers” that bring rain and moisture across Brazil and other regions, a shield against climate chaos. Destroy it, and the consequences ripple far beyond Brazil, bringing droughts, floods, climate instability, and even new pandemics.

The forest is already speaking in fires, in the smoke, in the disappearing rivers and threatened people. The world listens to COP30 speeches, but the forest listens to actions — it responds to what leaders do, not what they claim.

The Amazon has no more time for hypocrisy.

Featured image via Foreign Policy Centre

By Monica Piccinini

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