MArina Silva's achievements may seem at the miraculous limit. Since he took up his duties for a second race as Minister of Brazil of the Environment and Climate in 2023, the country quickly and radically overthrew the trends of deforestation with a strict application of the environment rules which had been abandoned by its predecessor. According to the most recent official account Released last fall, Amazon's deforestation had fallen to the lowest level in a decade. In 2023 alone, he dropped almost half compared to the previous year.
“When we took office, we had deforestation on a ascending curve that was out of control,” she told me on April 30. “We had to rebuild institutions, command and control organizations and increase public funding.”
And yet, as we met in her office in Brasília, she took care not to linger too long on success. The Amazonian forest is dangerously close to a tilting point which could quickly reshape not only the most famous tropical forest biome in the world, but the whole planet. Once reached, the Amazon would lose the ability to support itself and large expanses would turn into a savannah, resulting in the loss of biodiversity and also a massive release of carbon dioxide. To arrest him, she says, managers will have to adopt new mechanisms to stop legal deforestation and catalyze efforts to rebuild degraded land, while pursuing current application work. But, she says, saving the Amazon will require work beyond the borders of Brazil: the world will have to slow down its burning of fossil fuels.
“Even if we can cancel deforestation, with climate change, if we do not reduce the carbon of fossil fuel emissions, the forest will be destroyed anyway,” she said.
For Silva, who was born and grew up in a family of rubber tappers in the Amazonian state distant from acre, this is the next step in a life trip to Amazon's protection. But it is also a key moment, potentially doing or breaking Brazil which occupies the center of the climate movement this year because it hosts the annual UN climate conference, COP30, in November.
“We are already at the limit, to the changing and changing point of the climate crisis,” she says. “There was an opportunity window not to shoot on the limit of 1.5 degrees, and now it's just a ribbon.”
Even a experienced climate The expert would be forgiven to have trouble following all the work that is happening in Brazil before COP30. Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula Da Silva, simply known as Lula, made the climate an absolute priority with the government ministers focused on the resolution of the issue. Silva, a national figure in Brazil who finished third in the 2014 presidential election, transformed his ministry into a central knot in the effort.
While I was in Brazil, the government announcement A 2 billion dollar financing program to re -boit up to 1 million hectares (roughly the size of the island of Hawaii) of degraded land in the Amazon. And in recent months, Silva has doubled on work with his counterpart in the Ministry of Finance on a Fund of 125 billion dollars aimed at protecting tropical forests around the world. Beyond tropical forest work, the government has deployed a carbon price for national industries and explained how it could work with other countries to harmonize equivalent policies elsewhere.
Silva hopes that these efforts all meet at COP30 in the context of a wider effort to make the conference a central moment for the implementation of climatic initiatives worldwide. She described the emerging objective of COP30 as a “global ethical storage”: Lula and the secretary general of the United Nations Antonio Guterres will hear a large group of stakeholders – from philosophers to Aboriginal peoples to political leadership – with an eye to help the world to draw a plan to implement climatic solutions. “We cannot continue to push things,” she says. “We must implement.”
It goes without saying that this year's climate negotiations will be filled with challenges – perhaps not more significant than the challenge posed by the American withdrawal of the international commitment of the Paris climate. Silva has not chopped words on the role of the United States and the Trump administration in global climate discussions. Without my incentive, she criticized everything, from her release from the Paris Agreement to shelter the national climate assessment. All this leaves a massive gap in the necessary climate action, she says: “Things have become more difficult, especially with the decisions of the Trump administration.”
My visit to Brasilia coincided with a key meeting in BRICS countries – a group of emerging market countries that cooperate as a counterweight to American and European power. In my hotel, I spotted the Chinese Foreign Minister walking in the hall with those around him with other delegations from countries. But Silva says that the rest of the world cannot replace the necessary actions in the United States “We cannot be negatives, not by geopolitics, not by the climate,” she told me. “The emptiness created by the United States is the emptiness of the United States.”
She underlined the difficult geopolitics, in part, to answer questions about Lula's climate leadership. Despite his concentration on the issue, some environmental activists criticized him, saying that he moves too slowly and does not do enough. An area of a particular concern: new oil exploration efforts in the Amazon region currently being studied. Asked about the pending decision, Silva first pivoted the frozen stone realities in stone. Oil demand remains high and supply is tense. The American position has created a meaning around the world that fossil fuels will be there for a while.
The solution, she says, is a well-managed transition. “What I defend is a fair transition, a transition planned for everyone,” she says. “When I say just and planned, it's because it's not magic.” COP30, with Brazil at the helm, is a good place to start implementing such a transition.
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