TRANSCRIPT
For fourteen years the countries which contain the Amazon rainforest have been struggling to protect it.
The last time the Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva hosted a meeting of the Amazon Cooperation Treaty Organisation in 2009, the event was poorly attended by other leaders.
This year leaders are awake to the threat to the rainforest nicknamed 'the earth's lungs' as unprecedented heatwaves scorch the northern hemisphere.
Now eight leaders from Amazonian countries are meeting for the Amazon Forest Summit which is being held in the northern Brazilian city of Belem, to discuss ways to protect the rainforest and its people.
Heads of State from Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, Guyana, Peru, Suriname and Venezuela are attending the two-day summit.
Marina Silva is Brazil's Minister for Environment and Climate Change.
“This summit covers exactly the need for this strategy that President Lula outlined together with all of us, a two-track summit. As we had this 14-year hiatus without a call for the summit, we arrived at it with clarity: the first point is that the Amazon is drastically threatened. The second is that we cannot allow it to enter the point of no return. The third is that it is impossible to reverse this process by working in isolation.”
he is calling for the adoption of policies based on science.
“We are saying it is necessary to make public policies for the Amazon based on evidence. This is not the time to have erratic attitudes and any attitude that does not consider science can cause mistakes that are irreversible and great harm. For example, we are working for an intergovernmental panel of Amazonian countries to provide technical and scientific support for these actions.”
The Amazon stretches across an area twice the size of India, and two-thirds of it lies in Brazil.
The Indigenous peoples who call the Amazon home have been at the front and centre of the summit.
This is Brazil’s Minister of Indigenous Peoples, Sonia Guajajara.
“I’ve said before that the Amazon biome is universally desired, either by who wants to protect and care for it or by those who want to explore it. So all of that involves this mobilisation from the people and an ongoing concern to think the Amazon as a place that has people."
The Komi Memem River is vital to the Oro Waram, one of the six subgroups of the Wari’ Indigenous people, who have inhabited the western Brazilian Amazon for centuries.
Indigenous Wari' leader and councilman Francisco Oro Waram fears the waters his people drink from will be contaminated like other rivers.
He is working to have a law passed to protect the Indigenous tribes whose survival depends on clean river water.
"My people, my parents, used to drink this water here because there were no farms, no pesticides. Today, it's different. It's contaminated.I opened the door. Not just for today or tomorrow or only for the Komi Memem River. I am opening doors, whether it's for the river that runs through the farm or the Pacaas River. Now, it's up to the other council members to make this law for the other rivers."
Outside the summit venue, Brazilian environmental activists protested calling for the rejection of an application by the Petrobras oil company for oil exploration in the Amazon because of the risks of a spill.
Ecologists claim they are worried about seismic exploration and oil projects in Brazilian Amazon.
Flavia Guedes is one protestor:
"Here at the protest, we have people from these territories and organisations that work directly in these territories. We are demonstrating against oil exploitation and also against all other types of exploitation that take place in the Amazon."
Also protesting is Luis Barbosa.
"This kind of project today in 2023 does not think about us and only puts our lives and our way of life at risk."
Brazil’s President Lula says he hopes a declaration that has already been drafted, will become the nations’ shared call to arms as they move toward the COP 28 climate conference in November.
