Manaus: Months before hosting the UN’s first climate talks held in the Amazon, Brazil is fast-tracking a series of controversial decisions that undercut President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva’s lofty environmental rhetoric and show widening divisions within his cabinet.
The country’s federal environmental agency approved plans for offshore drilling near the mouth of the
Amazon and rock blasting along another river in the rainforest, while Congress is moving to make it harder to recognize Indigenous land and easier to build infrastructure in the rainforest.
These efforts would be controversial in normal times. But on the eve of the COP30 climate summit, environmental advocates say they’re undermining
Lula’s
claims to be an environmental defender whose administration has made headway in slowing deforestation in
the Amazon.