Brazilian President, Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva has officially launched a bid for the northeastern city of Belem to host the COP30 international climate summit in 2025 as he had promised last year when he attended the COP27 in Egypt as president-elect.
Whilst participating in the conference in Egypt, he pledged to recommit the rainforest nation to tackling the climate crisis and would name a city in the Amazon to host the 2025 U.N. climate talks.
Brazil’s foreign relations ministry had formalized Belem as a candidate to host COP30, a Lula said in a video uploaded on Twitter on Wednesday.
“In Egypt, I made the pledge that Brazil could host COP30, and I am happy to know that our (foreign relations) minister Mauro Vieira has formalized Belem’s bid,” Lula said in the video.
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Former Brazilian environment minister Izabella Teixera said that having a Cop in the Amazon would be “amazing”. She however said that she was concerned because of infrastructure, costs, digital infrastructure, hotels and other things that will be needed “when you have a Cop with 30,000 people”.
Lula has been promising to tackle deforestation in the Amazon, which hit a 15-year-high under former President Jair Bolsonaro. He recently named Marina Silva, who oversaw a significant drop in deforestation during his first stint as president in the 2000s, as his environment minister.
Story was adapted from Reuters.
