For all the talk of Cop30 – the international UN climate conference – being in the Amazon, the reality for most of the 1.4 million people living in the Brazilian city of Belém is a far cry from the lush, green tropical forests that most people would imagine.
The last census from 2022 found that 57 per cent of the population, some 745,000 people, live in so-called baixadas: the local name for Belém’s informal favela areas, which are scattered throughout the city. The term is derived from the Portuguese word for “lowered”, and refers to the fact that these areas lie on the low-lying floodplain of the mighty Guamá River, which reaches the city after flowing hundreds of kilometres through the rainforest.
