Sailing for about an hour in the Amazon river’s delta, a flotilla of dozens of boats carrying hundreds of people raised Indigenous concerns about Brazil’s oil and gas, mining and agricultural expansion in their forests.
In Belém’s Parque da Cidade, climate negotiators gather for the first COP hosted in the Amazon rainforest. Outside the conference halls, Indigenous activists demanded outcomes that address threats from agriculture, fossil fuels and mining in their communities.
The activists will meet at the People’s Summit, a civil society event parallel to COP30, which organisers say is meant to denounce false climate solutions. Boat passengers carried signs reading “agriculture passes, destruction stays” and “we are the climate resistance”.
-
COP30 Bulletin Day 2: Ethiopia picked as COP32 host, while COP31 standoff continues
African nations backed Ethiopia’s bid to host the 2027 summit over Nigeria’s, while Australia and Türkiye remain deadlocked over next year’s host decision -
COP30 Bulletin Day 3: Brazil tries to find a home for tricky issues
Brazil is trying to craft a compromise package on several contentious issues and has dismissed the idea of a roadmap away from fossil fuels
Raimundo Tupinambá, chief of the Pajurá tribe, said that he and his village were there “to demonstrate against the federal government, the state government, and the parliamentarians who are pushing projects that could affect both the environment and us, the indigenous peoples”.
Chief Raoni Metuktire, an Indigenous leader who was recently awarded the highest decoration of Brazilian diplomacy by president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva for his decades of climate activism, said at the event that these communities shouldn’t be facing the climate impacts they have been experiencing, among them an extreme drought last year that scientists linked to climate change.
“This river where we are could dry up, too,” Raoni said.
Raoni also talked about the recent licenses Lula gave to Petrobras to explore oil off the Amazon coast, saying that projects like that could cause severe problems for the world, “first us, the Indigenous Peoples, but also all of you, all of us will have environmental problems.”
The demonstration happened one day after protesters clashed with security guards as they stormed their way into the COP30 conference venue. When asked about that, Indigenous groups at the flotilla said that they didn’t organise it, but weren’t necessarily against it.
Sailing along the soy corridor
One of the main boats in the flotilla was a vessel named ‘Caravan of the Response,’ a nod to the ‘we are the response’ slogan from Indigenous peoples and had been sailing for a week, having started 3,000 kilometres inland in Sinop, Mato Grosso.
The route is meant to emulate Brazil’s “soy corridor”, a network of roads, railways and waterways designed to move soybeans from inland production areas to ports for export. One of the boats carried a banner reading “agribusiness doesn’t fill your plate”.
The vessel also carried a large banner rejecting the Ferrogrão, a railway of nearly 1,000 kilometres that would become part of the soy corridor and would connect Sinop – Brazil’s soybean capital – to the state of Pará, where Belém is located. The project has been halted since 2021 due to possible environmental impacts. Tupinambá said Ferrogrão is one of his people’s main fights and called its possible construction a “predatory activity.”
If built, the railway would affect at least six indigenous lands, home to approximately 2,600 people, and 17 conservation areas, according to Brazilian media.
Inside the boat, on the first of four floors, activists played music, danced and sold traditional Indigenous food. The top floors were full of hammocks reserved for the people who did the trip from Sinop.
Making the case for rivers
With flags reading “The Arapiuns river talks, we listen”, the group of hundreds of Indigenous activists also sought to raise awareness on the health of rivers in the Amazon region, which experienced severe drought last year.
Arapiuns, a river over 1,300 km from Belém, has a tributary connection to the Tapajós, the fifth biggest of all the rivers that lead to the Amazon River. During the 2024 drought, it dried to its lowest levels.
Jéssica Kumaruara, an Indigenous activist from the region, was on the boat holding a sign that read “the Tapajós River, enchanted dwellings that also sustain us, is asking for help.”
She grew up in the area, and told Climate Home that she and her community will fight to defend their beloved river, “that the government wants to turn into a route for agribusiness”.
“When they kill our river, when they leave it in the forests, they are killing us too. It is a way of killing us and we are here to say that we are not going to stop, we are not going to keep quiet, we are going to fight until the end.”
The post “They are killing us too”: Amazon flotilla raises Indigenous concerns at COP30 appeared first on Climate Home News.
“They are killing us too”: Amazon flotilla raises Indigenous concerns at COP30
Next week, diplomats from around the world will descend on Yerevan, Armenia, to negotiate a series of decisions under the UN Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD).
Between 19 and 30 October, 196 parties will gather to hammer out the precise wording of the dozens of legal texts that make up the decisions under the Conference of the Parties (COP) to the CBD.
This year’s summit is particularly significant, as it marks the halfway point between the agreement of the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework and the deadline for achieving its targets.
The CBD has found that countries are currently not on track to meet 22 out of the framework’s 23 targets.
During the fortnight, delegates will also be negotiating decisions relating to the two supplemental protocols to the CBD: the Cartagena Protocol, which covers biosafety; and the Nagoya Protocol, which covers access and benefit-sharing for the use of genetic resources.
(The Cartagena and Nagoya Protocols, which are each governed by a “meeting of the parties”, or “MOP”, have fewer parties than the CBD as a whole, with 173 and 141, respectively.)
Carbon Brief is tracking the progress of countries towards consensus on dozens of negotiating texts using the interactive table below.
The tracker includes texts from the COP, as well as the MOPs for the Cartagena and Nagoya protocols. It also includes draft decisions from the most recent subsidiary body meetings, as these form the starting point for the negotiations in Yerevan.
The CBD has three subsidiary bodies: the subsidiary body on scientific, technical and technological advice (SBSTTA), the subsidiary body on implementation (SBI) and the subsidiary body on article 8(j) and other provisions (SB8J).
SB8J focuses on issues related to the Indigenous peoples and local communities. It was established at COP16 in Cali, Colombia, in 2024.
The first two columns of the interactive tracker list the topic of each agenda item and the relevant body, with subsequent columns including dates, page counts and links to the original documents.
The table is searchable and can be sorted using the arrows in the header.
Areas of disagreement in UN draft texts are denoted by square brackets. Counting the brackets in a particular iteration of a text therefore gives a sense of how far parties are from reaching consensus.
The bracket column is colour-coded, with dark green indicating a low number of brackets and red indicating a high number of brackets remaining.
Texts can also present parties with choices using “options” or alternatives (“alt”), which are counted together in the sixth column of the table.
The key discussions in Yerevan will centre around two agenda items in particular. The first is the global review, which will assess progress towards the GBF and make recommendations for accelerating action.
The second is finance, which can be separated into two parts: resource mobilisation and the financial mechanism. On resource mobilisation, biodiverse global south countries are likely to push for an increased amount of international finance for conservation.
Disagreement over the creation of the financial mechanism led to the suspension of COP16 in Cali in October 2024, as parties failed to find agreement on the mobilisation of finance before the end of the summit.
Global south countries want the establishment of a separate financial mechanism under the control of the CBD; global north countries largely prefer to maintain the existing mechanism, which sits under the Global Environment Facility.
At the resumed session of COP16 in Rome in early 2025, countries agreed on a roadmap that would lead to the establishment of a permanent mechanism.
related
Analysis: Lula presidency saved at least 20,000km2 of Brazilian Amazon since 2022
Why land-use emissions have fallen by a third this century – in six charts
Analysis: 84% of nations miss deadline to identify ‘nature-harming’ subsidies by 2025
UK withdraws millions in funding from world’s second-largest rainforest in Congo
The post Interactive: Tracking negotiating texts at the COP17 biodiversity summit appeared first on Carbon Brief.
Interactive: Tracking negotiating texts at the COP17 biodiversity summit
A beacon of love
On an outer island of Fiji, two thousand nautical miles from Sydney, is a shining light of hope and resilience for our troubled world.
The island of Kioa is home to a Tuvaluan community who migrated from their atoll of Vaitupu in the late 1940s. It is a land of warm hearts, big smiles, and deep cultural roots; a place where the sound of a conch still summons the island together, where islanders paddle out to fish in carved outrigger canoes, and healthy happy children walk barefoot to school.
Here, culture is life. Kioans live sustainably through their traditional knowledge and practices. The island is alive with song, dance and the rhythms of a life tied to the tides, the winds, and the seasons.
Facing the future
Greenpeace has been lucky to have a relationship with Kioa for a number of years now, and we are continually learning from this remarkable community.
Last week, as part of our Voyaging Oceania project, we returned to the island. Our purpose was twofold —- to carry messages from the island to leaders gathering in Nadi this week for the Pacific Pre-COP, and to support the Kioa community in their efforts to improve water security for the island.
Unlike Tuvalu itself, with its eight atolls, Kioa is a mountainous, forested and richly fertile island. It will remain habitable far into the future. Kioans did not initially migrate from Vaitupu due to climate change, but the move was prophetic. They now have a lifeboat.
However, even Kioa faces challenges on our rapidly warming planet, in particular when it comes to water. Climate change is shifting once reliable rainfall patterns. On top of this, the island is already feeling the effect of this year’s intensifying El Niño event, which for Fiji means reduced rainfall and prolonged dry spells.
Right now, fresh water has to be carefully rationed, and is only available for a few hours a day. During last week’s visit aboard our campaigning ship Oceania, Greenpeace was privileged to work with the Kioa community on a new solar-powered water distribution project for the island.
Designed and led by the island, the project involves using a solar pump to move water from a reliable source to a storage tank and then using gravity to distribute the water around the village.
It was a lesson in how local knowledge and ingenuity can be the backbone of today’s climate solutions. To build a dam around the source, the local community knew the exact spot where they could gather gravel at low tide to mix with the cement. They took only what was needed, knowing that all resources must be carefully conserved. Kioa has no roads and no machinery, and it was an all-of-island effort to carry the materials up to the project site, including many heavy bags of sand and rock.
Such projects truly bring to life the vision of a resilient, locally-led, fossil fuel free Pacific.