ECO is aware that Sharm El-Sheikh is not your best pick for seeing Egyptian antiques, but we have nonetheless found a few old monuments at the site of COP27. One of them is the huge Tomb of the Bolsonaro Government, a 300 square meter empty ruin of a kingdom that should never have been. Right nearby, the smaller Mastaba of the Amazonian Governors looks slightly more modern, but it is actually promoting very ancient ideas – such as not ending deforestation by 2030.
After hinting in Paris at zero illegal deforestation by 2020, a target that was never achieved, some Brazilian Amazon states are now not only backtracking in their pledges, but actually proposing a destruction target: reducing rainforest clear-cutting to 50% by 2035, or to 80% by 2030 in the case of heavily deforested Mato Grosso. The state of Pará is aiming at having “only” 1,300 km2 of forests destroyed every year by 2035 (nearly half the area of Cairo). The question is whether there will be anything left to cut down so far in the future.
Dear governors, ECO is confused: as a country, Brazil has already committed in Glasgow to zero deforestation by 2030. Incoming president Lula has also repeatedly said that he will strive for zero deforestation. So we need to ask what part of the Glasgow Leaders’ Declaration pledge to “halt and reverse forest loss and degradation by 2030” you don’t understand. It is written in plain English, not in hieroglyphs.
And one more thing ECO would like to decipher, how on Earth do you expect to raise money for forest protection without a strong commitment to protecting forests. The judgment of history is as implacable as the pharaoh’s curse: please don’t wander in the desert of lack of ambition, nor think you are fooling anyone with your mummified targets.