Marina Silva’s achievements may seem borderline miraculous. Since taking office for a second run as Brazil’s environment and climate minister in 2023, the country has quickly and dramatically reversed deforestation trends with strict enforcement of environment rules that had been abandoned by her predecessor. According to the most recent official account released last fall, Amazon deforestation had fallen to the lowest level in a decade. In 2023 alone, it dropped nearly in half from the prior year.
“When we took office, we had deforestation on an ascending curve that was out of control,” she told me on April 30. “We had to rebuild institutions, command and control organizations, and increase public funding.”
And yet, as we met in her office in Brasília, she was careful not to linger too long on the success. The Amazon rain forest is dangerously close to a tipping point that could rapidly reshape not just the world’s most famous rainforest biome but the whole planet. Once reached, the Amazon would lose the ability to sustain itself and vast swathes would transform into savannah, resulting in the loss of biodiversity and also a massive release of carbon dioxide. To halt it, she says, leaders will need to embrace new mechanisms to stop legal deforestation and catalyze efforts to reforest degraded land—all while continuing ongoing enforcement work. But, she says, saving the Amazon will require work beyond Brazil’s borders: the world will need to slow its burning of fossil fuels.
“Even if we can nullify deforestation, with climate change, if we don’t reduce carbon from fossil fuel emissions, the forest will be destroyed anyway,” she says.
For Silva, who was born and raised to a family of rubber tappers in the remote Amazonian state of Acre, this is the next step on a lifelong journey of Amazon protection. But it’s also a key, potentially make or break moment as Brazil occupies the center of the climate movement this year as it hosts the annual U.N. climate conference, COP30, in November.
“We’re already at the limit, at the changing, shifting point of the climate crisis,” she says. “There was a window of opportunity of not shooting over the 1.5 degree limit, and now it’s just a sliver.”
Even a seasoned climate expert would be forgiven for struggling to track all the work happening in Brazil ahead of COP30. Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, known simply as Lula, has made climate a top priority with ministers across the government focused on tackling the issue. Silva, a national figure in Brazil who finished third in the 2014 presidential election, has turned her ministry into a central node in the effort.
While I was in Brazil, the government announced a $2 billion financing program to reforest up to 1 million hectares (about the size of the island of Hawaii) of degraded land in the Amazon. And in recent months Silva has doubled down on work with her counterpart in the finance ministry on a $125 billion fund aimed at protecting tropical forests around the world. Beyond the rain forest work, the government has rolled out a carbon price for domestic industries—and talked about how it might work with other countries to harmonize equivalent policies elsewhere.
Silva hopes that these efforts all come together at COP30 as part of a broader effort to make the conference a pivotal moment for the implementation of climate initiatives globally. She described the emerging COP30 goal as a “global ethical stocktake”: Lula and U.N. Secretary General Antonio Guterres will hear from a wide group of stakeholders—from philosophers to Indigenous people to political leadership—with an eye to helping the world chart a plan for putting climate solutions into action. “We can’t keep pushing things off,” she says. “We need to implement.”
It goes without saying that this year’s climate negotiations will be rife with challenges—perhaps none more significant than the challenge posed by the U.S. pullback from the international Paris climate engagement. Silva did not mince words on the role of the U.S. and the Trump Administration in muddying global climate discussions. Without my prompting, she criticized everything from his exiting the Paris Agreement to his decision to ice the National Climate Assessment. All of that leaves a massive gap in the necessary climate action, she says: “Things have become more difficult, especially with the decisions of the Trump Administration.”
My visit to Brasilia happened to coincide with a key meeting of the BRICS countries—a group of emerging market countries that cooperate as a counterweight to U.S. and European power. In my hotel, I spotted the Chinese foreign minister walking through the lobby with his entourage along with other country delegations. But Silva says the rest of the world can’t replace the actions needed from the U.S. “We can’t be deniers, not with geopolitics, not with climate,” she told me. “The vacuum created by the U.S. is the U.S.’s vacuum.”
She pointed to challenging geopolitics, in part, to respond to questions about Lula’s own climate leadership. Despite his focus on the issue, some environmental activists have criticized him, saying he is moving too slowly and not doing enough. One area of particular concern: new oil exploration efforts in the Amazon region currently under consideration. Asked about the pending decision, Silva first pivoted to the stone-cold geopolitical realities. Oil demand remains high and supply is strained. The U.S. position has created a sense across the globe that fossil fuels will be around for a while.
The solution, she says, is a well-managed transition. “What I defend is a fair transition, a planned transition for everybody,” she says. “When I say fair and planned, it’s because it’s not magic.” COP30, with Brazil at the helm, is a good place to start implementing such a transition.
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