'Mother Nature needs money,' Lula tells rich countries at summit

Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva urged wealthy nations Wednesday to fulfill their unkept promises to fund developing countries' fight against climate change, at a summit on saving the world's tropical forests.

Wrapping up a closely watched two-day meeting, the eight South American countries that share the Amazon basin joined with other nations from the Caribbean, Africa and Asia to call on the industrialized world to do more to protect Earth's disappearing tropical forests, vital buffers against global warming.

"It's not that Brazil needs money. It's not that Colombia or Venezuela need money. Mother Nature needs money, it needs financing, because industrial development has destroyed it over the past 200 years," Lula told a news conference.

The summit concluded with a stern rebuke of wealthy nations by the participants -- Amazon nations Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, Guyana, Peru, Suriname and Venezuela, plus invitees the Democratic Republic of Congo, Congo-Brazzaville, Indonesia and Saint Vincent and the Grenadines.

"We express our concern regarding the non-fulfillment by developed countries of their commitments," including annual aid equivalent to 0.7 percent of GDP and $100 billion a year in climate financing for developing countries, they said in a joint statement.

Lula vowed the countries would head for United Nations climate talks in December and "tell the rich world that if they really want to save what's left of our forests, they need to put up the money."

But Lula and other leaders at the summit faced criticism themselves over their failure to adopt a pledge to stop illegal deforestation in the Amazon by 2030 and ban new oil exploration, as climate campaigners and Indigenous groups had urged.

Despite Brazil's pledges to launch an ambitious roadmap to save the Amazon at the summit, the South American countries' announcements contained "no clear measures to respond to the urgency of the crisis," said Leandro Ramos of environmental group Greenpeace's Brazil office.

Home to an estimated 10 percent of Earth's biodiversity, 50 million people and hundreds of billions of trees, the vast Amazon is a vital carbon sink.

But scientists warn its destruction is pushing it dangerously close to a tipping point, beyond which trees would die off and release carbon rather than absorb it, with catastrophic consequences for the climate.

South American leaders agreed to launch an alliance to fight the destruction of the Amazon, but struggled to find common ground on issues such as a timeline to end deforestation and the issue of oil exploration.

The debate comes as Brazil eyes opening new offshore oil fields at the mouth of the Amazon river and Ecuador heads for a referendum this month on halting drilling on a strategic oil bloc on the Yasuni Indigenous reservation.

Marcio Astrini, head of the Brazil-based Climate Observatory coalition, said the summit's policy announcements amounted to "just a list of promises."

"The planet is melting, temperature records are being broken every day... It is not possible for eight Amazonian leaders to fail to put in a declaration in bold letters that deforestation must be zero," he said.

The summit was a key test for veteran leftist Lula, who returned to office in January vowing "Brazil is back" in the fight against climate change, after four years of surging destruction in the world's biggest rainforest under far-right ex-president Jair Bolsonaro.

Held in Belem, Brazil, at the mouth of the Amazon river, it was also something of a dress rehearsal for the 2025 U.N. climate talks, which the northern city will host.

It also included representatives from Norway, the top donor to Brazil's Amazon Fund to protect the rainforest, and France, which shares a piece of the region via the overseas territory of French Guiana.

The United Arab Emirates, which will host the next U.N. climate talks in December, sent its special envoy for climate change, Sultan Ahmed al-Jaber.

Al-Jaber, the chief executive of the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company (ADNOC), vowed to "keep the pressure on donor countries" to meet their unfulfilled climate finance pledges, in his first major statement on the need to protect and invest in nature as a core pillar of climate progress.

© 2023 AFP