COP30: Amazon countries announce joint forest monitoring
The Amazon Cooperation Treaty Organization (ACTO) will receive BRL 55 million from the Brazilian Development Bank (BNDES), via the Amazon Fund, to improve national rainforest monitoring systems and strengthen technical capacities to prevent and control deforestation and forest degradation.
The announcement was made on Thursday (Nov. 13) during an event at the United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP30) in Belém. ACTO members include Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, Guyana, Peru, Suriname, and Venezuela.
“The Amazon is a vast system, a biome, and, like any puzzle, damaging one piece harms the whole. Everything matters; every tree matters. We need monitoring so that we can act preventively or curatively, depending on the situation,” said Colombian ethnologist Martin von Hildebrand, secretary general of the organization.
The project will be carried out in partnership with the National Institute for Space Research (INPE), which will be responsible for transferring the technology to the other member countries.
“An important issue that has already been addressed is the technical-scientific panel focused on monitoring the Amazon, which will serve as a basis for formulating public policies related to climate change, biodiversity, water resources, and fishery resources,” said Brazilian Minister of the Environment and Climate Change Marina Silva.
According to Silva, the Amazonian countries will establish a commission of environment ministers to align common strategies for protecting the forest and combating cross-border organized crime.
“Above all, we also want to focus on a sustainable development agenda - in terms of green and resilient infrastructure, combating crime, and protecting biodiversity - especially by creating mechanisms for accessing genetic resources that do not result in biopiracy and that ensure the fair sharing of benefits,” said the minister.
In total, the Amazon covers 6.7 million square kilometers (km²), with more than one million km² of riparian ecosystems and a population of almost 50 million. To care for this biome - fundamental to global climate regulation, including the preservation of the moisture currents that bring rain to other parts of South America - ACTO functions as an intergovernmental body promoting sustainable development in the region.
Each country has its own methodologies and instruments for controlling and monitoring its territory, but ACTO’s goal is to standardize these procedures.
“If we don’t include information from the entire region, there’s no point in trying to fix one side while the other is being destroyed,” Hildebrand noted.
One of the instruments that can be strengthened through this initiative is the Amazon Regional Observatory (ORA), which already integrates several databases and provides information on the biome in areas such as biodiversity, water resources, forests, fires, indigenous peoples, and protected areas, among others.
“The project will develop interoperability. This is a collective construction process. Brazil will not impose anything on other countries, and other countries will not impose anything on Brazil. But if we do not unify the methodology, organized crime will win,” warned BNDES Socio-Environmental Director Tereza Campello, explaining the objectives of the project to be financed by the development bank.
