The Amazon and What to Expect from COP 30

The 30th United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP 30), to be held in Belém, marks a watershed moment for Brazil and for the world. For the first time, the global climate debate will take place in the heart of the Amazon. The stage for discussions about the planet’s future will no longer be a distant concept, but the living territory of a people who demand the right to speak for themselves.

This proximity brings an essential commitment: COP 30 cannot repeat the historical mistake of talking about the Amazon without listening to the Amazon.

The region is both the challenge and the hope of the 21st century. The world’s largest tropical biome cannot be reduced to carbon statistics or treated as a stockpile of biodiversity available to external interests. For Indigenous peoples, riverine and quilombola communities, extractivists, and urban populations, the Amazon is memory, identity, and horizon. Yet it is also a space for crucial decisions to avoid a path of predatory and unequal exploitation, we must consolidate an innovative, sustainable, and inclusive development model capable of combining standing forest, prosperity, and social justice.

No lasting solution to the climate crisis will be possible without the protagonism of Amazonian peoples. This is the indispensable condition for COP 30 to have real impact. Projects imposed from the outside that ignore local realities merely reproduce inequalities and violate fundamental rights. It is urgent that the world recognize that the Amazon is not a geographical void, but an inhabited and diverse territory, home to millennia-old knowledge that converses with contemporary science and points toward new ways of coexistence between humanity and nature.

More than a biome, the Amazon is a cornerstone of global climate stability. Yet the legacy of COP 30 cannot end with the event itself. It must yield concrete commitments – consistent investments, cooperative policies, and strengthened local institutions for research and innovation.

In this context, science produced in the Amazon must be recognized as an active and decision-making voice. As Rector of the Federal University of Pará (UFPA), the largest public higher education institution in the region, I reaffirm the importance of “singing the things of the world from our own village.” In other words, we must speak with our own voice to the rest of the planet.

UFPA does not play a peripheral role; it is a structuring force. Present in all mesoregions of Pará, with over 50,000 students and hundreds of research groups, the university has brought quality education and science to young people who were once excluded from such opportunities. This initiative, in itself, is a project of regional development—training leaders, boosting local economies, and nurturing critical thinking about the challenges facing the Amazon.

Our work ranges from the bioeconomy of the standing forest to the use of emerging technologies such as Artificial Intelligence, while also valuing our culture. Amazonian scientific production is both innovative and strategic for the planet. Investing in it means investing in the global climate future. UFPA believes that science without social commitment is incomplete; therefore, our laboratories and projects engage directly with the realities of forest, river, and urban communities.

COP 30 will be successful if it can reverse the traditional logic and allow the world to learn from the Amazon. The forest is not merely a space to be protected: it is a collective subject of knowledge, culture, and future. Recognizing this means investing in the people who keep it alive and in institutions like UFPA, which transform this wealth into science, innovation, and public policy.

May this global conference in Belém truly become a milestone of listening, respect, and commitment. After all, the Amazon does not wish to be a theme; it wants to be a voice.

Gilmar Pereira da Silva
Professor, PhD in Education, and Rector of the Federal University of Pará