Amazon favelas demand justice amid climate crisis and neglect

In the doorway of her dilapidated house in the Vila da Barca favela, in the Amazonian city of Belém, a mother cools off from the sweltering heat in a small plastic pool with her daughter.

The climate crisis is impacting the city’s iconic working class neighborhoods, the urban heart of the Brazilian Amazon and the location of the UN's COP30 climate conference, which began on Monday.

"The weather has changed a lot; it's intensely hot from nine in the morning," says another resident, Rosineide Santos, 56, who arrived in this favela in Belém two decades ago.

Just minutes away from the negotiation center, the residents of these stilt-house favelas along the riverbank are fighting against the neglect of Amazonian cities. 

Although the Brazilian Amazon is often associated with rainforest, official data shows that more than 75 percent of its 27 million inhabitants live in urban areas, according to official data.

In Belém, the capital of the state of Pará, more than half live in favelas: a record among Brazil's 27 state capitals.

Founded a century ago by fishermen and situated next to the city's most expensive area, Vila is home to 7,000 people. Most live in poverty and their wooden houses are built on top of mud, garbage, and rubble.

"But nobody talks about protecting those of us who live in the urban Amazon, nor is there any discussion about how the climate crisis affects our most vulnerable territories," Gerson Bruno, a 35-year-old community leader and president of the residents' association, tells AFP.

Fighting for water and sanitation

The lack of basic sanitation exacerbates the impact of the climate crisis in the favelas.

In Vila da Barca, residents saw the COP as an opportunity to demand essential infrastructure from the authorities.

They opposed a plan to build a pumping station within the Vila that would treat sewage from a wealthy area of ​​Belém remodelled for the COP, offering no benefits to the residents in the favelas.

Community mobilization and social media attention brought the issue to local news, sparking a debate on what many are calling environmental racism. While the city's wealthiest neighbourhoods received millions in infrastructure, the majority of residents in their favelas continued as always.

According to Bruno, after a "problematic" start, pressure from the neighborhood led to the start of construction of a sewer system for the stilt houses and the installation of an efficient water network, a long-standing demand of the neighbourhood.

Just months before the COP, many families in Vila had to purchase jerrycans in order to bathe or wash their food.

'To live on solid ground'

In a recent scientific study by the University Center of the State of Pará, the maximum temperature in Belém increased by 1.96°C between 1970 and 2023, which increases "vulnerability to heat waves, associated health problems and pressures on infrastructure."

Despite being surrounded by millions of hectares of Amazon rainforest, Belém is one of the capital cities with the fewest trees in the country.

Governor Helder Barbalho acknowledges that "urban Amazonia is a very important challenge; more investment is needed to balance solutions for the rainforest and for the cities," he told AFP at a press conference.

Outside her house in Vila, standing on a shaky wooden doorway, 67-year-old retiree Elizabeth Campos Serra wants to leave the stilt houses. “I would tell Lula to get us out of here, I would like to live on solid ground."