Dina Mahmoud (London, Brasilia)
Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva will host a high-stakes regional summit next week, as Amazon leaders seek to lay out a roadmap to saving the world’s largest rainforest.
The meeting of the eight member states of the Amazon Cooperation Treaty Organization, next Tuesday and Wednesday, in Belém, capital of Pará state in the Amazon region, will serve as a precursor to the UN climate conference COP30 that the city will host in 2025.
A few days before the summit, data revealed a remarkable decline in deforestation over the past 12 months, which reinforces international efforts to confront “climate change”.
According to these data, the rate of decline in the Amazon rainforest region, known as the “lungs of the earth”, reached 60% during last July, compared to the same month in 2022, which constitutes good news for the leaders of the member states of the “Treaty on Cooperation in the Amazon” organization. ahead of their summit, according to observers.
The Amazon rainforest helps capture greenhouse gases, as well as being a spot rich in water resources and biodiversity. 60% of these forests are located in Brazil, and extend to other countries, including Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador and Peru.
It is expected that the upcoming summit will focus on ways to prevent the situation in the Amazon forest from reaching a critical stage from an environmental point of view, especially after last year witnessed fires, which were the largest of their kind in a decade.
Brazilian officials point out that the serious threat posed by the climate crisis obliges the leaders participating in the summit to agree on concrete measures to ensure that the Amazon forest does not reach a point where it begins to dry out and wither, a danger that scientists warn of.
Experts attributed the progress achieved in terms of protecting environmental diversity and forest trees in the “lungs of the earth” to the measures taken by the Brazilian authorities on this path since the beginning of this year, including the imposition of strict penalties for those who seize land by hand, in the Amazon forest region. And launch security campaigns to stop illegal mining operations.
These measures led to the first 6 months of this year witnessing a 34% decline in deforestation rates in the Amazon region, according to data from a satellite warning system known as “Deter”.
Although the Brazilian authorities are still awaiting confirmation of the preliminary figures, which indicate that the decline rate reached 60% in July, experts expect that this percentage will rise to close to 70%.
While the Brazilian president stresses the need for the international community to help his country preserve the Amazon region, officials in his government express their concerns about the escalating risks facing that region during the remaining months of this year.
Part of these concerns, according to a report published by the British newspaper “The Guardian”, is related to the renewal of the phenomenon of the Southern Oscillation or “El Niño” in the world, and the accompanying sharp rise in temperatures, which makes the Amazon forests more vulnerable to the risk of drought and fires in the coming period. .
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