Brazil ’s Amazon Summit falls short on charting meaningful goals to protect forest, researchers say

While the presidents of eight South American nations met this week to discuss an alliance to protect the world’s largest forest, thousands of activists took to the streets outside the convention center in Belém do Pará, Brazil. Holding up signs that read “Amazon free of oil,” and “Our future is not for sale,” they demanded a joint pledge to end deforestation and fossil fuel extraction in the Amazon. But those hopes didn’t come to pass: When the heads of state released their Amazon Summit declaration on Tuesday, it was devoid of any firm commitment or quantifiable goals. “Given the urgency of the climate crisis, it is surprising that the final declaration does not include a plan or any concrete directive on the main issues the Amazon faces,” says ecologist Paulo Moutinho, who studies deforestation at the Amazon Environmental Research Institute. Instead, the Belém Declaration , signed by the countries that make up the Amazon Cooperation Treaty Organization (ACTO)—Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, Guyana, Peru, Suriname, and Venezuela—listed 113 general objectives. Some were as vague as stating a general goal to “avoid the point of no return in the Amazon.” But others were more specific, such as the intention to create a pan-Amazonian deforestation monitoring system and an “Amazon IPCC,” a scientific panel modeled after the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that would generate annual reports on deforestation and sust...
Source: Science of Aging Knowledge Environment - Category: Geriatrics Source Type: research