Belém faces its social and natural demons as host to COP30

The lack of trees in one of the Amazon’s most revered cities, especially in poor neighborhoods, contributes to projections that Belém will face 222 days of extreme heat by 2050.

More than 40 infrastructure initiatives were launched to prepare Belém for COP30, with more than 30 of them still underway. Image by Peter Speetjens.

The 17th-century Presépio Fort offers a great view of old and new Belém. Small wooden boats sail back and forth. The strikingly blue Ver-o-Peso fish hall seems even bluer in the morning sun.

Next door to Ver-o-Peso, dozens of stands sell açai with fried fish, souvenirs and a stunning variety of fruits, nuts and herbs from the Amazon Rainforest. The grand Belle Epoque mansions are a far cry from the residential towers piercing the sky and the urban slums located farther south.

From Nov. 10-21, this setting will host the COP30 climate summit and more than 50,000 visitors. Following summits in Dubai and Baku — both cities intimately linked with the oil industry — there was a sense of hope and relief among environmentalists when Belém, the capital of the Amazonian state of Pará, was announced in May 2023 as the 2025 host.

Known as the “gateway” to the Amazon, Belém would be able to attract people’s attention to the plight and potential of the rainforest, which plays a vital role in keeping the average global temperature rise under 1.5° Celsius (2.7° Fahrenheit), as stipulated in the 2016 Paris Agreement.

In contrast with the last two “oil COPs,” the upcoming summit has been dubbed the “forest COP.” However, while Belém is located northeast of the Amazon Rainforest, in the delta of the Guamá and Acará rivers, experts and citizens who spoke with Mongabay questioned whether visitors and authorities will have a unique chance to get a glimpse of the rainforest or of an urban metropolis struggling with traffic, sewage, floods and shade — as many in the world.

A striking snapshot of this contradiction was revealed in October by Brazilian news outlet Sumaúma. The report showed that 55% of Belém’s inhabitants live on streets without a single tree; the national average is 34%. The Amazonian city is the sixth-least-forested capital in Brazil, according to official data. Peripheral neighborhoods like Miramar have 98% of their population residing on streets without a tree, while in wealthier central neighborhoods, such as Nazaré (84%), Umarizal (77%) and Batista Campos (73%), most residents live on streets lined with trees.

Belém is a synthesis of Pará, which for years has witnessed some of Brazil’s highest deforestation rates and is home to Brazil’s illegal gold mining capital, Indigenous lands and rivers plagued with mercury, land conflicts and major deforestation schemes.

In the months leading up to the conference, many of those issues were debated, including skyrocketing prices of accommodations during COP30. According to the Reuters newswire, several nations have considered not sending delegates to Belém because of high hotel fares.

However, the hotel crisis and environmental crimes are far from the only issues about Belém’s COP. The event has forced Belém to take a hard look at itself in the mirror.

Take me to the river

Prior to the European invasion, Belém was a large Tupinambá settlement, driven by its rivers.

“Geographically and historically, Belém has always been a river city,” Ana Claudia Cardoso, associate professor at the School of Architecture and Urbanism at the Federal University of Pará (UFPA), told Mongabay.

The first Portuguese colonists aimed to exploit the region by establishing plantations, but they soon realized it was easier and more profitable to extract products from the forest, like the Indigenous people did and had always done.

“For hundreds of years, fish, fruits and other forest products were brought to the market in Belém and shipped to other parts of Brazil, the Caribbean and Europe,” Cardoso said at the UFPA campus on the bank of the Guamá River.

As Belém became economically relevant, the Portuguese started strengthening the city’s infrastructure. One of the main examples was the Presépio Fort, Portugal’s main power base in the north of its crown colony.

Fishing boats near the Ver-o-Peso market in the heart of the city. Image by Peter Speetjens.

“The city never had an industrial revolution,” she continued. “It didn’t need one. It had the forest, the river and the market. Everything changed in the 1950s when the national road network reached the north. Belém turned its back on the river.”

From 1964, with the military dictatorship in Brazil, more roads followed. Generals viewed — and many still view — the Amazon as a territory that needed to be occupied by urban development in order to be “protected” from foreign invasion. The view, widely considered a conspiracy theory by historians, led to large infrastructure projects, such as the Trans-Amazonian Highway. And it would not take long before the roads brought land-grabbers, farmers, ranchers and illegal miners.

From being the market of the Amazon, Belém became a market for products from Brazil’s industrialized south.

“People were no longer able to live off the land or were forced off their land,” Cardoso said. “They moved to the city to look for work. Especially in the 1980s, Belém saw a huge influx of people.”

Floods and favelas

In 1950, some 250,000 lived in the city. Today, Belém is home to nearly 1.4 million people, while the greater metropolitan area is home to 2.5 million people.

According to official data from 2022, 57% of the city’s inhabitants live in so-called baixadas, up from 52% in 2010.

Derived from the Portuguese word for “lowered,” baixadas refer to low-lying, densely populated, low-income areas that often have only limited access to public facilities such as sewer and electricity systems. In other parts of Brazil, these communities are known as favelas.

“People have always lived on the várzea,” or floodplain, Cardoso explained. “But never so many. Today, the river banks are full. The river no longer has space to roam.”

With 40% of urban Belém below sea level, most of the city’s inhabitants are familiar with flooding. With every heavy rain, roads become rivers and water enters homes.

Over 40% of Belém sits below sea level, making the population used to floods. Image by Peter Speetjens.

The beautiful UFPA campus overlooking the Guamá River is no exception. Blessed with ample vegetation and few waterways running through, the campus lies at an altitude of 3.6 meters (11.8 feet).

That’s higher than most of the city, and normally, some 100 kilometers (62 miles) away from the ocean, the tide in Belém doesn’t exceed 3.4 m (11.2 ft). However, in April 2024, heavy rainfall in combination with high tide caused the river to rise by 3.8 m (12.5 ft), which flooded the campus.

“The water retreated within a few hours, so it didn’t do much damage,” Cardoso said. “But it was a warning of things to come. If the ‘perfect storm’ of Porto Alegre were to hit Belém, some 60% of the city would be underwater.”

Torrential rains in April and May 2024 caused massive flooding in the southern state of Rio Grande do Sul. More than 200 people were killed and hundreds of thousands lost their homes.

The state capital of Porto Alegre was particularly hard-hit. At one point, the level in Guaíba Lake rose by 5.3 m (17.4 ft), beating the 1941 record and flooding a heavily populated area of the city, home to 1.3 million people, for three weeks.

Water works

In June, the municipal risk reduction plan (PMRR) issued a report concluding that 301 areas in Belém are at risk of flooding. They are mostly located near the river basins that run through the city, whereas 88 areas, mostly found on the city’s 42 islands, are at risk of erosion.

Originally from the south of Brazil, Patricia Souza has lived in Belém for about six years and has no intention of leaving. She loves the cultural mix of the city, as reflected in its people, music and cuisine.

Sol used to live in Baixada do Marco in the south of Belém but recently moved to a home on slightly higher grounds closer to the city center.

“I loved living in Baixada do Marco,” the 35-year-old graphic designer said. “The baixadas are often very close-knit communities, as many people stem from the same region outside the city.”

Yet, as the state is largely absent in the baixadas, they suffer from a lack of public services. It’s the main reason she eventually moved out.

“My house was overlooking a drainage canal,” Souza said. “The problem is that most sewage goes into the canal, which produces a stench, especially when it’s hot. And with heavy rainfall, the canal would always overflow.”

A 2023 study by the Instituto Trata Brasil showed that 76.8% of Belém’s inhabitants had access to potable water, while 17.1% were connected to a sewage system and 3.6% of the city’s sewage was treated.

With COP30 as a catalyst, Belém has resembled a giant construction site for the past two years. The federal government earmarked some 4.8 billion reais ($891 million) to improve the city’s infrastructure.

On Aug. 4, the COP30 organizing committee reported in a press release that eight projects had been completed, while 37 were still underway. They include, among other things, refurbishing the Ver-o-Peso market, repaving 88.7 km of roads (55 mi), building two parks, constructing sewage treatment plants and rehabilitating 13 drainage canals across four of the city’s main river basins. Especially the latter concerns the city’s low-income areas.

“More than just hosting a global event, Belém is being prepared for the future,” the press release stated. “The infrastructure projects are part of a long-term strategy to leave a meaningful legacy for the city and its residents.”

 

More than 40 infrastructure initiatives were launched to prepare Belém for COP30, with more than 30 of them still underway. Image by Peter Speetjens.

Green legacy

Some residents feel the investments in Belém’s future well-being have not been evenly divided over the rich and poor parts of the city.

“Most money goes to the chic part of town,” said history teacher Raimundo de Oliveira, who lives in Guamá. With some 100,000 inhabitants, Guamá is the most densely populated area of Belém, located some 5 km (3 mi) from the old city center.

“In Guamá, they are only working on draining, cleaning and enlarging the canals,” he told Mongabay on Aug. 20. “The works haven’t been completed yet, and I don’t think they will be when the COP30 starts in November.”

Oliveira is not alone in criticizing the alleged uneven distribution of public money. Brazilian news outlet Agência Pública reported how cleaning up the Doca Canal and building a new sewage treatment plant benefits the upscale neighborhood of Reduto, while the baixada of Vila da Barca is left with the waste.

Another project is the construction of a four-lane highway, a project that cuts through the Belém Environmental Protection Area (APAB), fragmenting one of the last remaining patches of rainforest in the city.

Some 50,000 visitors are expected to flock to Belem for COP30. Image by Peter Speetjens.

“They are building two big parks,” Oliveira said. “Yet on the side of the city that already has a lot of green, while Guamá has hardly any trees, which makes the neighborhood a very hot place to live in.”

According to a study by CarbonPlan, a nonprofit organization publishing data on climate change in order to trigger action, Belém is likely to experience 222 days of extreme heat by 2050, compared with 50 in 2000.

“We are on the periphery of the city, and we are on the periphery of COP30,” Oliveira said. “But still, I think it’s an opportunity to highlight the troubles of the baixadas and the people of the Amazon.”

He mentioned the Cúpula dos Povos (“the Peoples’ Summit”), a collective of various social movements campaigning for climate justice that will be present during the COP30 and the Aldeia COP (“Village COP”) at the UFPA campus, which will house some 3,000 Indigenous representatives from across Brazil.

Francisco Batista, who runs a cultural center in Terra Firme, a baixada south of Guamá, agreed. According to him, COP30 has led to a growing debate in schools, community centers and homes about climate change and the environment in general.

“I think that is the positive impact the COP30 has had,” he said. “It has managed to drag the topic out of its bubble into the periphery.”

He was less positive about the public works being executed in Terra Firme. The authorities are working on the drainage and canalization of the Tucunduba River and its tributaries, one of which is Lago Verde.

According to Batista, the Lago Verde project hasn’t been able to move forward, due to the low compensation the municipality offers when it needs to expropriate a house in order to expand a road or canal. As most of the baixadas are informal, people lack property deeds, which the authorities use as an excuse to offer only limited compensation.

“With the compensation they offer, it’s impossible to buy a house elsewhere,” Batista said. “Also, the river project in Terra Firme only brings concrete, not trees or communal spaces – not even the ones that were previously there.”

Natural monument

Back at the UFPA campus, urbanist Ana Cardoso remained skeptical, seeing the state’s efforts to make Belém more robust against future flooding.

“The government is investing a lot of money in drainage, but that offers no guarantee against flooding in the long term,” she said. “The problem of the baixadas is not just a lack of infrastructure, but also that it receives all the water from the higher parts of town.”

“Any solution must start there,” she continued. “More concrete, more asphalt, more roofs bring down the water quicker. Sooner or later the canals will overflow again. What we need is proper planning and land use. We should leave space for the river, preserve the green areas we still have, and plant trees. Lots of trees.”

With low tide, Belém’s port becomes a hunting ground for vultures and herons. Image by Peter Speetjens.

Íris Bandeira, who works at the Brazilian Geological Survey (SGB), told InfoAmazonia something similar. “The right thing to do was for people not to live there.”

However, she added, as long as people do, they are entitled to proper drainage and sanitation “to live with dignity.”

Yet, in addition to those issues, living costs in Belém are high and are rapidly escalating. The city recorded the highest increase in residential rental prices (about 6%) in the first half of 2025 among surveyed capitals, according to a report by news outlets Agência Pública, Amazônia Vox, Carta Amazônia and Lupa. The shift of properties toward short-term seasonal rentals fueled by COP30 raises fears that the event will leave a legacy of permanently high prices for rent and property purchases, a phenomenon seen in other global host cities.

Utility costs compound this housing burden: Pará is the second-largest electric energy producer in Brazil, according to the report, yet the state is subjected to the most expensive electricity tariff in the country, placing severe strain on budgets that are further squeezed by the heavy financial burden of high public transportation costs.

Cardoso hoped the summit, and everything around it, would help Belém and Pará adopt a radically different development model. A desire that now seems distant.

“For centuries we were told that the Amazon was a land without people,” she said. “We now know this was a big lie. The central Amazon was home to millions of Indigenous people, who left us this amazing ‘natural monument.’ All we have to do is to learn to live with it and not destroy it.”

Author: Peter Speetjens

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This article was originally published on Mongabay under the Creative Commons BY NC ND licence. Read the original article.