A highway to hypocrisy

Media reporting around preparations of COP30 climate summit is worrying. COP30 is the 30th UN-led Conference of the Parties of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). It is slated to take place in Belém, Brazil, in November this year. Preparations are currently on for this global summit which will bring thousands of people to the port city of Belém. According to a recent BBC news report, a four-lane highway is being built for the COP30 climate summit.

- By Govind Singh and Mihika Chaturvedi

This new highway, aimed to ease traffic, will cut through “tens of thousands of acres of rainforest.” The deforestation of the Amazon rainforest has drawn criticism from conservationists and locals, who argue that it directly contradicts the summit’s environmental goals. The UNFCCC was adopted in 1992 at the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Its primary aim is to discuss steps toward international climate action for which it organises the annual COP summit.

The COP provides a platform for strengthening carbon emission reduction targets and promoting climate change adaptation strategies. Constructing a new highway through the Amazon rainforest, a well-known carbon sink, is a blatant, large-scale eye-opener. It thus puts the intent of the COP30 summit under scrutiny. The four-lane Avenida Liberdade highway is presently under construction in Belém and is expected to improve traffic flow after it is completed. On their part, the COP30 Secretariat in Brazil has put out a clarification that the construction of this new highway is not one of the “33 infrastructure projects planned for COP30”.