Just months before COP30, scheduled for November 2025 in Belém, Brazil is preparing to welcome over 50,000 participants, including world leaders and environmental organizations. To improve access to the city, the government of Pará state has launched the construction of a new four-lane highway that cuts through tens of thousands of acres of protected Amazon rainforest.

The stated goal is to enhance mobility—but the cost is steep: deforestation in one of the planet’s most sensitive regions. The Amazon plays a vital role in carbon absorption and global biodiversity. That’s why building such an extensive infrastructure project right before a major climate summit raises serious questions about the consistency of the strategies in place.

Along the planned route of the new road, the landscape has already begun to change: where lush forest once stood, open clearings and stacked logs now mark the deforestation underway. Cutting down these trees not only destroys habitats for wildlife but also disrupts the continuity of the ecosystem, threatening species' survival and natural migration paths.

The consequences are also being felt by local communities. Claudio Verequete, who lives near the construction site, has lost his main source of income due to the destruction of açaí trees. “Everything was destroyed. Our harvest has already been cut down. We no longer have that income to support our family.” he says. To make matters worse, residents won’t even have access to the new road, which will be fenced off with barriers, cutting off entry and exit. “For us who live on the side of the highway, there will be no benefits.”

Local authorities have promoted the new road—named Avenida Liberdade—as a “sustainable” project, highlighting features like wildlife corridors, bike lanes, and solar lighting. Adler Silveira, Pará’s Secretary of Infrastructure, described it as an “important mobility initiative” that will bring benefits to the local population.

Some business owners, like Dalci Cardoso da Silva, see the influx of visitors as an economic opportunity. “The city as a whole is improving, being repaired, and attracting more people,” he says. But this optimistic view isn’t universally shared—many fear that the city's facelift is coming at the expense of the forest and indigenous communities.

Brazilian President Lulu emphasized that COP30 will be “a COP in the Amazon, not just about the Amazon,” underlining the importance of involving the territory in climate discussions. However, veterinary professor and researcher Silvia Sardinha questions whether local populations are truly being heard, pointing out that the conversations are likely to happen “at a very high level, between business leaders and government officials.”

To prevent large-scale infrastructure projects like this from turning into greenwashing exercises, it’s crucial to adopt models that allow for objective, transparent environmental impact assessments. In this context, tools like those developed by Regg3—which link public investments to measurable sustainability outcomes—could provide a more rigorous evaluation framework for the decisions being made.

Without a structured and verifiable approach, there’s a real risk that COP30 will go down in history not as a turning point for the protection of the Amazon, but as the summit that accelerated its destruction.