COP30 is expected to hold talks on “ending deforestation” after developers carved a four-lane highway through protected tracts of the Amazon rainforest to facilitate attendees.
The massive United Nations climate conference officially kicked off on Monday in Belém, Brazil, and is scheduled to conclude on Nov. 21. COP30 materials show that the conference will feature a panel on “transforming cattle supply chains — a climate change solution and key to ending deforestation” on Friday.
Critics, including President Donald Trump, have highlighted the irony that Brazil cleared a portion of rainforest to make room for the climate conference. The highway, known as Avenida Liberdade, was delayed several times over environmental objections, but subsequently approved as part of Belém’s broader modernization efforts for COP30, the BBC reported in March.
“They ripped the hell out of the Rainforest of Brazil to build a four lane highway for Environmentalists to travel,” Trump wrote on Truth Social on Sunday. “It’s become a big scandal!”
The Brazilian state denied that the highway was built for the climate conference, noting that plans for Avenida Liberdade were underway as early as 2020 — well before Brazil was selected to host COP30, Reuters reported in March.
“Everything was destroyed,” Claudio Verequete, a local resident whose family once relied on the açaí trees that used to grow where the road now cuts through the forest, told the BBC. “Our harvest has already been cut down. We no longer have that income to support our family.”
Over 190 countries and around 50,000 attendees are expected to be at the conference, according to multiple reports. Notably, one study released as COP29 began in 2024 showed that emissions from private jets spike around well-attended elitist conferences and forums.
Although the first Trump administration sent delegations to the U.N. conference and advocated for fossil fuel use, seventeen attorneys general warned against lending any credibility to the long-standing climate conference that has fostered some of the most aggressive global emissions goals like the Paris Agreement Trump exited through a day-one executive order.
Additionally, several nations including Norway, Indonesia and Brazil are now pledging to raise $125 billion to halt deforestation, the Canadian outlet CBC reported Monday.
“We really need to go from reducing deforestation to permanently protecting the tropical rainforests,” Norway’s Climate and Environment Minister Andreas Bjelland Eriksen, told CBC News Monday.
The U.N. did not respond to the Daily Caller News Foundation’s request for comment.
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