He President Gustavo Petro and the Brazilian, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, met this Saturday to prepare for the Amazon Summit next month in Brazil in a push to accelerate the preservation of the Amazon and make a call for environmental urgency.
“Caring for the Amazon is both a privilege and a responsibility,” Lula said on his first visit to Colombia, which was specifically to the country’s Amazonian heart: Leticia.
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From this Amazonian town, located on the triple border with Brazil and Peru, the Brazilian president, together with Petro, made an appeal to the countries of this basin to unite in around the defense of this natural reserve both in international forums and in the fight against those who destroy the forest.
“We must join efforts so that in international discussions our voice is heard with force in conferences on climate, biodiversity and desertification, and in debates on sustainable development,” said the Brazilian president.
That is why he asked the eight countries present in Leticia -Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, Guyana, Peru, Suriname and Venezuelarepresented by their Environment Ministers- “decide how to give our people a dignified life and how to preserve our forests and our biodiversity”.
Along the same lines, Petro, showing off his environmental leadership, went a step further and called for a “revolution”, since in his opinion “transforming the entire world economic system” is what is necessary to avoid reaching the point of no return on climate.
“On oil, on coal and on gas, only the sixth extinction of life can be built, the opposite of development,” bellowed the Colombian president, who considered that for this reason the “rational” thing to do is to change the economic system to decarbonize it .
Colombia and Brazil – which has left Jair Bolsonaro’s period of denial of the climate crisis behind – arrive at the Amazon Summit in Belén do Pará, on August 8 and 9, with their homework done.
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Colombia, as Petro recalled, has stopped deforestation by 76% in the first quarter of 2023 compared to the same of the previous year (although the estimates of the Ministry of Environment project a reduction of 15 to 25% in 2022), while in the In the Brazilian Amazon, deforestation alerts had a reduction of 33.6% in the first half of this year, according to Lula.