The Trees That Were

“The Earth provides enough

to satisfy every man’s need,

but not every man’s greed.”

— Mahatma Gandhi

If symbols could blush, the highways slicing through the outskirts of Belém, Brazil would be crimson by now. As you read this column, the globe’s leaders would be making their way to the Amazonian gateway city for the COP30 Summit. But the brand-new highway greeting many of these leaders is not a testament to ecological harmony, it is a freshly carved scar — an eight-mile expressway cut through protected Amazon rainforests. The trees that once stood there were older than most climate pledges. Today, they are gone, felled to make the commute smoother for dignitaries arriving to discuss the urgency of saving forests.

In the nation hosting Cop30, Brazil, there is another pursuit which is scarring the land and eating up the forests — the cash-rich yet redoubtable pursuit of soy farming. If highways drew the battle lines, soy farming has declared the war. The world’s largest soy producer, Brazil has spent decades transforming forests into fields, answering the global appetite for protein, edible oil and livestock feed. Soy is now the agricultural equivalent of crude oil: a liquid asset, commodity, geopolitical lever. Its expansion has mowed down millions of hectares of forest in the pursuit of foreign exchange and protein supply chains.

To give the devil his due, Brazil has defended its decision to build the new highways and expand soy farming with eager assertions. The highway, it maintains, will ease congestion and include eco-friendly flourishes such as wildlife crossings, solar lighting and progressive veneers. Soy is for all of the world, the leaders say. Like recyclable takeaway containers, these assurances are worded to make the destruction sound tasteful. But the locals are not pacified. Communities that have grown açaí berries for decades are watching jobs disappear under bulldozer tracks. To them, the highway is not a symbol of progress; it is an eviction notice.

Green Brigade Cries Foul

Conservationists have been unambiguous. Cutting rainforests to host a climate summit is satirical, to say the least. Imagine the conference goodie bags — bio-degradable water bottles and pens, eco-friendly carry bags and totems, perhaps even a sprig of foliage; all razed to make a delegate parking zone and pamper the limos. Absurd. But governments globally have repeatedly shown that nothing conveys climate concern quite like a high-carbon photo-op. After all, green messaging is becoming quite the performance art; evocative, emotive and, by curtain call, completely inconsequential.

The mother of such messaging was a 2006 voluntary pact, the Amazon Soy Moratorium, which sought to curb deforestation by stopping traders from buying soy from land deforested after 2008. The pact was critical as Brazil supplies 40 per cent of the globe’s soy bean, cultivating which requires large tracts of land, a literal sea of water and mountains of pesticides. Pesticides pollute waterways and lead to eutrophication, the growth of algae that depletes water oxygen and kills marine life. Like many other policies rushed into to make a great sound-byte, the pact had a loophole that could swallow an aircraft carrier – it protected old rainforests but left out secondary ones. These are forests cleared earlier and then regenerated, thereby regaining their vital ecological function. These ‘renewed forests’ are fair game for ‘re-clearance’.

So, farms push deeper into the Amazon, sending the green guys into near-cardiac arrest, shouting warnings that the loophole has become a trapdoor. Comically, forest regrowth is treated not as restoration but as ‘unused acreage’, ripe for conversion into farms. The spirit of preservation was noble, but the policy’s skeleton was too forgiving for a world driven by balance sheets and quarterly profits.

Carbon Karaoke

It is easy to shoot this bullet at Brazil alone, but that would be wrong. While Brazil’s climate contradictions are striking, they are not anomalous. Consider the United States, where climate commitments share floor space with approvals for new oil drilling leases in Alaska. The nation that helped architect the Paris Agreement also greenlit the Willow Project, an oil-drilling initiative projected to generate hundreds of millions of tonnes of CO₂. Nothing says ‘net zero’ like new oil infrastructure designed to peak in 2050.

In the United Kingdom, the government has been forced by courts to justify its climate targets while simultaneously approving new North Sea oil and gas drilling licenses. In Indonesia, coal output expands even as it hosts climate meets and secures billions in energy-transition funding. Germany, hailed for its Energiewende transition, revived coal plants when geopolitical headwinds threatened energy security. In Australia, a climate-conscious electorate presides over one of the largest fossil fuel export economies.

In each case, the script is eerily familiar. Sounding the alarm about planetary breakdown takes place on stage. The extraction and export contracts are signed backstage.

Clearly, world leaders know the lyrics of today’s ‘Carbon Karaoke’ – decarbonisation, 1.5 °C alignment, renewables transition and green finance. The problem is not pitch, it is follow-through. COP summits have devolved into the equivalent of New Year’s resolutions… made in December, audited in January and forgotten by February. Nations pledge emissions cuts and return home to widen highways, underwrite fossil fuel infrastructure and pamper agri lobbies. The speeches are immaculate. The unspoken words are dirty. Planet Earth pays the price.

Summit of Absurdities

The Amazon, by far, shoulders the lion’s share of the world’s green anxiety. It is the lungs of the planet, but lungs do collapse when existing tissue is lost faster than regeneration can occur. According to estimates, around 17 per cent of the Amazon has been lost. Ecologists warn that crossing the 25-per cent mark would make the picture irreversible, transforming rainforests into degraded savannah. At that point, no number of ‘sustainable highways’, wildlife underpasses or carbon credits would be enough to reverse the damage.

The irony is not that forests were cleared to host COP30. It is that such irony is no longer surprising. At COP27 in Sharm El-Sheikh, delegates arrived in private jets to discuss emission reduction strategies. More than 400 private planes were logged landing in Egypt for the climate summit; they added up to a carbon footprint higher than the annual emissions of small countries. COP28 in Dubai was similar, a curious juxtaposition of climate diplomacy hosted by one of the world’s prominent oil-producing states, chaired by the CEO of a national oil company.

The 2024 G20 summit venue in Delhi was beautified by relocating urban settlements rather than fixing them. Paris builds low-emission zones but struggles to meet local decarbonisation deadlines. Canada champions carbon pricing, yet approved pipelines. The European Union pushes aggressive green regulation while outsourcing carbon-heavy industrial manufacturing to less-regulated regions, shrinking domestic emissions by exporting them abroad. The common thread is not hypocrisy. It is convenience.

All is Not Lost, Not Yet

COP30 could still amount to something, but only if leaders agree climate policy must rise from performative ambition to measurable disruption. Deforestation must be reclassified as an existential threat and the protection of primary and secondary forests made non-negotiable. Global agri supply chains, soy and cattle in particular, require enforceable deforestation-free certification, monitored by independent auditors, not self-attested compliance reports. Voluntary pacts were a polite first draft. It is time for binding contracts.

Good things do happen on the green front. For instance, China built elevated highways to protect wetlands. Switzerland and Canada created wildlife corridors to prevent habitat fragmentation. Costa Rica reversed deforestation so well that its forest cover grew from 26 per cent in 1983 to 50 per cent today. Alternatives exist. What is missing is the will to treat them as the norm, not as mere exhibition pieces.

Cop30 could have been a backdrop of green triumph, in a city that proved development and conservation can co-flourish. Instead, it is a metaphor for the global climate condition: well-intentioned, structurally conflicted, ecologically indebted and dangerously unresolved. The planet does not need more promises. It needs consequences for breaking them. If trees fall to make podiums where leaders vow to save forests, the summit has already lost the plot. Nature, unlike governments, does not renegotiate deadlines.

He can be reached on [email protected]. Views expressed are personal. The writer is a veteran journalist and communications specialist