Flying into the Cop30 host city of Belem, which is around four hours north of the megacities of Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, you can understand why Brazilian president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva chose the city for his “Cop in the Amazon”.
For around the last 45 minutes of the flight, all you can see is thick, green, canopied forest, with the occasional chocolate brown river snaking its way through. The city itself appears through the green almost out of nowhere, a regional hub of 1.3 million perched on the shoreline close to the mouth of the Amazon River.
