Was Four-Lane Road Through Amazon Forest Construction To Facilitate A (Checks Notes) Climate Summit?

A big highway is being cut through the Amazon rainforest
in northeast Brazil, and according to sources, it's 
hypocritically being built to facilitate a major
UN climate change conference in November. 

 Critics are accusing a Brazilian state of building a four-lane freeway through tens of thousands of acres in sensitive Amazon rain forest to, of all things, facilitate a major UN climate summit.  

The summit is scheduled for November in the city of Belem in northeast Brazil, in the Amazon not too far inland from the Atlantic Ocean. 

Officials in the  Brazilian state of Para where the highway is being built, deny the summit was the impetus behind the highway construction. 

Those officials say construction on the highway started in 2020, before Belem was announced as the location for the climate summit, known as COP30.

Brazilian and  Para state officials also said the nation's federal government is not funding the project. 

Still, locals and environmentalists are highly suspicious, to say the least, noting the sudden, fast progress of highway construction after decades of resistance. That fast pace came after Belem was selected as the COP30 site 

Per Reuters:

"Still, some locals tie recent progress on the long-discussed highway to the approaching UN summit, when tens of thousands of delegates are expected to swarm the Amazon city home to 1.3 million."

 Plus, local officials basically admitted to the BBC the highway was being built to service the COP30 climate summit.  

Per BBC

"Adler Silveira, the state government infrastructure secretary, listed this highway as one of 30 project happening in the city to 'prepare' and 'modernize' it, so 'we can have a legacy for the population and more importantly, serve people for COP30 in the best possible way."

Silveira also said the highway would have wildlife crossings for animals to pass over, bike lanes and solar lighting 

All wonderful, but they're chopping down part of a critical rain forest to do all this.   

There's other projects ahead of COP30 that might harm the Amazon rain forests too, mostly by bringing in more people. The more people there are, the more harm an ecosystem will suffer.  The Belem airport is being expanded, new hotels are under construction and the port is being redeveloped to accommodate cruise ships. 

Like unloading a 1,000 people off a cruise ship into the Amazon, or at least near it, won't harm anything. Jeez! 

As usual, it's the locals who depend on the rain forest that got screwed the most. 

People who live adjacent to the new highway so they weren't compensated for land takings. They also fear the  highway will cause an explosion of new development like warehouses, stores, gas stations and such that would mow down much more of the rain forest. 

As the BBC reports, the road would leave two disconnected areas of protected forests, fragmenting the ecosystem and disrupting the movement of wildlife.

The bottom line:

We're having a big UN conference to combat climate change. And we're flying thousands of people from all over the world to the Amazon to attend this conference. I'm not advocating a ban of air travel, but airliners are a major contributor to climate change, so there's that.

Then, we're cutting a major highway through the Amazon, which is essential a large part of the Earth's lungs. The Amazon is a major natural ally against climate change because it absorbs huge amounts of carbon dioxide.

So, the solution is to cut down some of the Amazon to bloviate about climate change in political setting.

It makes no sense.