'Why can't they have a Skype meeting?': Outrage as Amazon rainforest cut down to build road for COP30 climate summit

It aims to ease traffic to the city, which will host more than 50,000 people - including world leaders. The conference is due to be held in November. Along the partially built road, lush rainforest towers on either side - a reminder of what was once there. Logs are piled high in the cleared land which stretches more than 13km (8 miles) through the rainforest into Belém.

Users on social media are outraged and in disbelief at the Amazon rainforest being felled for a climate summit. One wrote on X, formerly Twitter: “It is a sick joke that a country whose plan is to destroy the Amazon rainforest has the sheer brass neck to host another pointless ‘environmental’ talking shop. Anyone who goes is either a hypocrite or an expenses freeloader.”

Another said: “Hahaha. Our leaders are so utterly stupid it could drive you insane dwelling on it too long”. While a third wrote: “Why can’t they all have a Skype meeting!!!!”.

Diggers and machines have carved through the forest floor, paving over wetland to surface the road which will cut through a protected area. The road leaves two disconnected areas of protected forest. Scientists are concerned it will fragment the ecosystem and disrupt the movement of wildlife.

The Brazilian president and environment minister say this will be a historic summit because it is "a COP in the Amazon, not a COP about the Amazon". The president says the meeting will provide an opportunity to focus on the needs of the Amazon, show the forest to the world, and present what the federal government has done to protect it.

The Amazon plays a vital role in absorbing carbon for the world and providing biodiversity, and many say this deforestation contradicts the very purpose of a climate summit. The rainforest is also of vital importance because people around the world, as well as locally, depend on it. According to WWF, the precious ecosystem is already under increasing threat from huge-scale farming and ranching, infrastructure and urban development, unsustainable logging, mining and climate change.