Exclusive: Brazil’s environment minister talks about climate inaction and the course we have to plot to save ourselves and the planet
Soon after I returned home to Altamira from Cop30, I found myself talking about dinosaurs, meteors and “ambassadors of harm” with Brazil’s environment minister, Marina Silva.
No one in government knows the rainforest better than Marina, as she is best known in Brazil, who was born and raised in the Amazon. No one is more aware of the sacrifices that environmental and land defenders have made than this associate of the murdered activist Chico Mendes. And no one worked harder to raise ambition at Cop30, the first climate summit in the Amazon, than her. So what, I asked, had it achieved?
“This Cop revealed the truth that efforts until now have been insufficient,” she told me in a video call from Brasilia. “Our climate efforts continue, as ever, to buy time when we have no more time.”
In a tearful and defiant address to the closing plenary of the conference in Belém, Marina had told applauding delegates that she – like many others – had dreamed of achieving more when they attended the 1992 Rio de Janeiro Earth Summit, which set up UN conventions for the climate, biodiversity and desertification. What had she meant by that?
