By Carlos A. Moreno
Belém (Brazil) (EFE).- The Brazilian state of Pará, the one that destroys the Amazon the most, wants to take advantage of the Summit of presidents of the Amazon countries, which it will host in August, to show its efforts to stop the destruction of the largest tropical jungle in the world, its governor said in an interview with EFE.
Belém, the capital of this gigantic Amazon state, will not only host the first summit in the history of the Amazon countries, scheduled for August 8 and 9, as was the city nominated by the Brazilian president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, to be venue of the 2025 UN Climate Conference (COP 30).
“We are the state with the highest levels of polluting gas emissions and deforestation in Brazil. We recognize the challenge that we represent and we even recognize the complex level of reality that we receive, but we are presenting results: we were the state that reduced deforestation the most last year in Brazil,” the governor of Pará, Helder Barbalho, told EFE.
The governor of this state with 8.7 million inhabitants and an extension of 1,257,900 square kilometers (an area slightly larger than that of countries such as Angola, South Africa or Colombia) affirmed that Pará was responsible for 75% of the reduction in deforestation throughout Brazil in 2022.
“From these data we want to show that reality is changing. Those are the efforts that we want to show at the summits that we will host and the efforts that we want to be supported by,” she said.
“These results were possible thanks to command and control, supervision, combating environmental illegalities and a set of public policies to seek economic alternatives to livestock and agriculture, such as systems that reconcile crops, livestock raising and preservation of the jungle,” he added.
According to Barbalho, the state that is home to almost a third of the entire population of the Amazon also wants to show that it is developing and implementing sustainable solutions to combat deforestation.
Pará was responsible for 37% of deforestation in 2022
According to data from the non-governmental organization Imazon, which has been measuring deforestation with the help of satellite images since 2008, in 2022 the Brazilian Amazon suffered its fifth consecutive annual record loss of vegetation cover, with 10,573 square kilometers destroyed, the largest area lost in 15 years.
Pará was responsible for 37% of all this destruction, with 3,874 square kilometers, followed by the states of Amazonas, with 24% (2,575 square kilometers), and Mato Grosso, with 15% (1,604 square kilometers).
But while devastation rose 24% in Amazonas and Mato Grosso compared to 2021, the area of forest destroyed in Pará fell from 4,037 square kilometers in 2021 to 3,874 square kilometers in 2022.
“The reduction in deforestation that we achieved in the last year shows that the State is acting and that the fight against illegalities is a State policy. But we also understand that it is not enough just to combat illegality, we must offer sustainable solutions for the inhabitants of the Amazon”, stressed the governor.
According to Barbalho, the solutions have to take into account that 29 million Brazilians live in the Amazon, who need economic alternatives. “You have to look for environmentally but also socially sustainable solutions,” he said.
He added that in order to develop alternatives to activities such as mining, agriculture and livestock, it is necessary to take advantage of technology and ancestral knowledge to “make our biodiversity an extraordinary economic asset.”
He also stressed that Pará has shown that it wants to discuss the climate agenda and that it will prepare to take advantage of the summits that Belém will organize to ask the world to “bet on us.”
In the same way, he affirmed, the choice of Belém as the venue for the summit of the Amazon countries is an opportunity for them to “build sustainable solutions for the Amazon in all of South America.”