‘Brazil Is Back’ Lula Tells COP27, In Vow To Protect Amazon Rainforest

Brazilian president-elect Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva received a standing ovation at the COP27 climate summit on Wednesday when he pledged to protect his nation’s portion of the Amazon rainforest and reverse the destructive policies of his predecessor, Jair Bolsonaro.

Speaking to jubilant delegates at the conference in Egypt’s Sharm El Sheikh, the incoming leader known as Lula said: “There is no climate security for the world without a protected Amazon … We will spare no efforts to have zero deforestation and the degradation of our biomes by 2030.”

He added: “The fight against climate change will have the highest profile in the structure of my next government,” repeatedly returning to the refrain, “Brazil is back.”

Da Silva, 77, narrowly beat right-wing incumbent Jair Bolsonaro last month in a nail-biting electoral showdown. Bolsonaro, a climate skeptic, was during his tenure widely condemned by the international community for changing the law to permit further destruction of the rainforest, causing deforestation to jump an estimated 75%. Critics say he also enabled the abuse and disenfranchisement of the Amazon’s Indigenous peoples—policies some rights groups likened to ethnic cleansing.

To mark a departure from the rule of his predecessor, da Silva said he would be forming a ministry of Indigenous peoples, and that while he would keep the agricultural industries onside, Brazil would “[not] need to deforest one square metre to be one of the largest food producers in the world.” He also announced Brazil would be bidding to hold 2025’s COP30 in an Amazonian city.

“There are not two Brazils,” he went on. “I want to say there are not two planet Earths. We are one sole species called humanity.”

Brazil is home to about 60% of the Amazon rainforest, which sprawls across eight countries in Latin America. As the world’s largest rainforest, it is estimated to store some 123 billion tons of carbon above and below ground, and is one of the most biodiverse habitats on Earth. Under Bolsonaro’s watch, as loggers, farmers and ranchers moved in to clear and burn swaths of trees, research showed that the habitat has flipped from being a carbon sink to a carbon source—a devastating blow to the global effort to reduce carbon emissions.

When he is sworn into office in January this will be a second go-around for Da Silva, who was Brazil’s president from 2003 to 2010. In 2017 he was convicted on money laundering and corruption charges and jailed the following year, but was released in 2021 after evidence emerged of irregularities in the trial and of a campaign by political rivals to discredit him and remove him from Brazil’s political scene.

The speech was rewarded with cheers and singing from the assembled delegates. Indeed, it was perhaps one of the conference’s high points: this year the summit has been a relatively downbeat affair, garnering notably less media attention than last year’s COP26 in Glasgow. This is partly because that event was intended to be a mile marker at which nations presented updated climate commitments for the first time since the 2015 Paris Agreement, at which 194 countries and territories agreed to limit their output of planet-warming greenhouse gasses.

The COP (or Conference of the Parties) has also been marred once again by accusations of hypocrisy, with numerous business leaders flying to the summit in CO2-splurging private jets, a ludicrous sponsorship by arch-polluters Coca-Cola, and the presence of more than 600 oil and gas lobbyists—more than the total number of climate delegates from the entire African continent.

Yet for all its problems, the conference this year has seen some major breakthroughs: yesterday, the G77 bloc of more than 130 developing nations, along with China, set out a draft proposal for a “loss and damage” fund. The loss and damage debate is one of the most contentious of all topics at the COP meetings: in principle, such a fund would entail that wealthy nations, which are historically responsible for most of humanity’s climate change-causing carbon emissions, would need to pay restitution to countries hit by climate disasters. Needless to say, many wealthy powers—especially the U.S.—are uneasy about such an arrangement. But if well over half the world’s nations were to make a unified stand at next year’s COP28 in the UAE, Western holdouts could find themselves in a difficult diplomatic bind.

Also this week, and well ahead of da Silva’s speech, came news that Brazil, Indonesia and the Democratic Republic of Congo had formed a pact to protect their rainforests. Home to more than half the world’s rainforest habitat, the three nations had been in talks for a decade on how to go about preventing further destruction of their ecosystems.

“South-to-south cooperation—Brazil, Indonesia, DRC—is very natural,” DR Congo’s Environment Minister, Eve Bazaiba, told Reuters on Monday. “We have the same challenges, the same opportunity to be the solution to climate change.”

COP27 will conclude on Friday.