By Diosmar Filho¹

The negotiations for the approval of Global Goals on Adaptation (GGA) at the 28th Conference of the Parties (COP28) in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) in December 2023 can already be seen amidst uncertainty, facing what we can call neoliberal forest determinism.

Prominently featured in the capitalized targets for reducing the planet’s temperature by 1.5°C, this approach renders invisible the lives of over two-thirds of humanity living in the global urban ecosystems.

The impasse at this moment lies in the actions of national governments that set aside responsibility for the climate vulnerability of urban populations to negotiate natural assets in the market of non-deforestation, non-pollution, non-emission of greenhouse gases, and for the massive exploitation of minerals, winds, solar energy, and the privatization of lands and forests in the Global South.

After seven years of the approval of the Paris Agreement and all the efforts of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), the terrestrial ecosystem has never been so vulnerable to temperature rise and biodiversity loss as it is now. If the terrestrial ecosystem is vulnerable, it means that humanity is experiencing its most dire phase.

In this way, national and subnational governments become violent in the face of knowledge about vulnerabilities, impacts, health conditions, and urban surface warming due to climate change. In the name of neoliberal forest determinism, they silence the deaths, the missing, and the displaced caused by extreme weather events that have led to significant tragedies and deepened inequalities in the cities of South America, Africa, Asia, and Oceania.

“Climate change is projected to negatively impact food security and nutrition, causing an increase of up to 80 million people at risk of hunger by 2050.”

Human lives are affected by climate changes, and data about health conditions are expected to worsen in the coming years if nothing effective and implemented is done to reduce inequalities in territories marked by human rights violations, slavery systems, and socioeconomic exclusion of the majority population. This is evident in the IPCC’s Sixth Assessment Report (2022) on climate mitigation and adaptation.

In this regard, the outcome of the G20 Environment and Climate Ministers meeting in India in July of this year was marked by the failure to approve any documents on climate negotiations. A global silence for the deaths that accumulate with each major typhoon, storm, and El Niño event affects millions of people’s lives in the cities of Africa, Asia, and the Latin American region.

“According to the IPCC, developing countries alone will need $127 billion annually until 2030 and $295 billion annually until 2050 to adapt to climate changes. However, adaptation funds only reached $23 billion in 2017 and $46 billion in 2018, representing only 4% and 8% of climate financing.”

Likewise, it is not possible to comprehend how Heads of State Members of the Amazon Cooperation Treaty Organization (OTCA) can meet in the city of Belém and not consider as serious the data indicating that, in the current year, around 400 thousand people are risking their lives in the Darién Jungle between Colombia and Panama. This is a legion of migrants fleeing extreme events and human violence in “search of hope,” willing to die to reach the racist and xenophobic walls of the United States.

If the state ministers at the G20 did not sign a declaration, the presidents gathered in Belém signed the Presidential Declaration on the occasion of the Amazon Summit – IV Meeting of the Presidents of the States Parties to the Amazon Cooperation Treaty, with recommendations and proposals to save the Amazon rainforest. However, it is embarrassing to know that the urban populations currently dying, displaced, or disappearing due to extreme rainfall and flooding in Amazonian cities have been relegated to inequalities and an “every person for themselves” situation.

According to an analysis of disaster and risk governance in the Northern and Northeastern regions of Brazil conducted by the Iyaleta Research Association (2022), in terms of the occurrence of deaths from the most impactful natural disaster of the year, the Northern municipalities stand out, representing 7.62% of the reporting municipalities. The data shows that 74.65% of the impacted and/or displaced people between 2013 and 2023 inhabited the Northern and Northeastern regions, with 38.29% in the Northern region and 36.36% in the Northeastern region. As for the displaced people, the Northern and Northeastern states account for 55.52% of the national total, representing 27.36% and 28.16%, respectively. The complete research is available for download on the website https://iyaleta.org/plataformas/pesquisa/.

Finally, the Brazilian Government, the host of the IV OTCA Meeting, needs to clarify what it truly means when it talks about ending inequalities and hunger in the face of actions like zero deforestation in the Amazon Biome, the proposal for oil exploration at the mouth of the Amazon River Basin, mineral exploration, wind, and solar energy in the northeastern Caatinga region!

This (un)sustainable economic structure fails to address and still perpetuates the exclusion of urban populations residing in the municipalities of the Northern and Northeastern regions, predominantly Black and Women, occupying areas with high density and in substandard clusters, exposed to social, economic, and environmental vulnerabilities, deepened by climate events and phenomena in the capitals of the Legal Amazon and the Northeastern region of the country.

Tags: Adaptation; Climate Change; Amazon; Northeast; Cities; Inequalities; Amazon Summit; Brazil.

¹Diosmar Filho this is Geographer, PhD student in Geography at the Fluminense Federal University – UFF. Researcher and Scientific Coordination of the Iyaleta Research Association. Leader of the Line of Research “Inequalities and Climate Change”. Coordination of the Research “Climate Adaptation: the Brazil intersection” being developed by the Research Association. e-mail diosmarfilho@iyaleta.org