Baku became a discourse, COP30 in Belém needs to become action

While you read this text, the Amazon is providing an essential service to the planet. According to calculations by the UN and the World Bank, the biome generates approximately US$317 billion per year in free environmental services. It produces oxygen, regulates the climate, purifies water, and influences continental rainfall.

These services, vital to agriculture and global stability, are neither remunerated nor accounted for in national accounts. It's as if Brazil were maintaining a continuously operating ecological power plant, without any financial return. The country pays to preserve the machinery that guarantees fertility to foreign fields and stability to distant economies.

COP29, held in Azerbaijan in 2024, ended as a predictable spectacle. The industrial powers announced US$300 billion for the climate fund until 2035—a promise less than the value that the Amazon generates in a single year. Meanwhile, 11,5 million hectares of forest burned in 2024.

According to MapBiomas, this burned area exceeds the size of South Korea. The UN has calculated the global climate damage at US$957 billion. Each hectare of the Amazon is worth US$8.290 per year in ecosystem services. Multiplied by the 550 million hectares of the biome, the result reaches US$4,5 trillion annually — the GDP of Germany.

In November, Belém will host COP30, a conference that could redefine Brazil's role in the 21st century. The challenge is to understand that preservation is not about relinquishing wealth, but about creating value from life. The forest is not an obstacle to progress—it is its most stable source.

According to IPAM (Amazon Environmental Research Institute), created in 1995, the Amazonian bioeconomy currently generates only US$7 billion annually, less than 0,3% of the national GDP. This is a portrait of a country that holds the largest biological reserve on Earth and yet treats it as a footnote.

The cost of inequality

While Norway accumulates US$200 billion annually with its sovereign wealth fund from oil, Brazil neglects a wealth of incalculable value. From Manaus to Santarém, laboratories transform Amazonian extracts into cosmetics that, upon crossing the Atlantic, see their prices multiplied fifty times.

For example: a French moisturizer made with buriti oil costs €180. The riverside dweller who harvested the fruit received R$2. This difference is not merely commercial; it is moral. It measures the distance between those who discover value and those who merely extract it. The forest loses, the country becomes poorer, the world profits.

The Amazon doesn't need international charity. It needs its own economic model, based on science, innovation, and social justice. The region is home to 2.500 plant species with pharmaceutical potential, but only 1% have been studied. The rest sleep silently beneath the tree canopy.

Acai, which generates US$1,5 billion annually, shows the possible path. A local product has become global, transforming the food of riverside communities into an exportable energy source. If the country applied the same strategy to another 2.499 species, the bioeconomy would surpass agribusiness in less than a decade.

The final test

COP30 will be a test of Brazil's maturity in the face of its own destiny. The country needs to prove that it can combine sovereignty, knowledge, and social inclusion. The standing forest is the foundation of a new economy—regenerative, sophisticated, and sustainable.

On the streets of Belém, cart drivers sell açaí for R$ 5 while foreign executives negotiate billions in carbon funds. 

Between these two worlds lies the country's future. The final question is as simple as it is unsettling: how long will Brazil continue to give away its greatest fortune without acknowledging it as its own?