The COP30 Climate Conference is due to start on 10 November 2025 in Belém, Brazil – a city regarded as the Capital of the Amazon, a region which is not just forest, but also river, sea, city, urban area, quilombo, villages. Not all the peoples of the Amazon will be represented at the COP, especially the women for whom climate change is no longer a threat, but a daily reality, and from which they are the first to suffer. Indigenous, Quilombola, and Black women from the city periphery all confront obstacles to participate, with no guarantees that they will be heard. Agência Pública’s Cecilia Amorim has spoken to women from each of the three groups.
LAB partner Agência Pública has published this account, translated from the Portuguese by Mike Gatehouse. You can read the original here.
COP30 is almost here. Belém has been getting ready for the Climate Conference with public works transforming the city and speeches which echo global commitments around the climate crisis. The conference will be the scene of grand diplomatic negotiations trying to establish targets for reducing carbon and plans to slow down global warming of the planet.
Meanwhile, Indigenous, Quilombola and marginal women are waging a double battle: against the climate crisis which is affecting their daily lives and to be genuinely included in those arenas of power which have throughout history silenced them.
Despite being those most affected by the climate crisis, on the front line of action to care for their land, women are still a minority in all the centres of global decision-making.
Data from the Gender Panel of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) show that the presence of women in national delegations to Climate Conferences remains unequal: on average, barely 30 to 35 per cent of the representatives are women. The advance towards gender equality has been slow. Between 2008 and 2019, the number of delegations headed by a woman rose from 12 to 27 per cent. By 2022, at COP27, the proportion had risen to 34 per cent – progress, certainly, but still far from parity.
This inequality is reflected also in the top leadership positions. In the 28 COPs to date, just five women have reached the post of president of the event. While the Nordic countries and the EU bring delegations with more equal gender balance, other nations stick with a solidly masculine majority. This shows that the representation of women in decision-making about climate change remains a challenge, despite women having to carry the heaviest burden of the impact of environmental crisis on their communities.
It is women who, living in the villages, the quilombo communities, on the banks of the rivers and the margins of cities, are the first to feel – and feel more acutely – the impacts of climate change: extreme heat, destructive rains, threats to food security. Women come to this conference not as mere spectators, but as the bearers of ancestral knowledge and practical solutions, challenging a system in which machismo is the rule. Their struggle lays bare the central paradox of this global meeting: how can delegates discuss the future of the Amazon without listening to those who have always kept it alive – women?
Marinete Tucano defends ecofeminism, ancestralism, and resistance
In Belém, the countdown to COP30 has brought major changes to the routines of a city which has become a giant building site. But behind the grand diplomatic negotiations and discussion of global targets, are the voices of the women of Amazônia who urgently demand to be heard in the decisions which affect their lives. Among them is Marinete Tukano, Indigenous leader and coordinator of the Union of Indigenous Women of the Brazilian Amazon (UMIAB), who puts into words what it really means to be an Amazônian woman at a time of climate collapse.
‘We women carry our land on our backs. Our struggle is for life, for the forest and for our existence and peoples,’ says Tukano. For her, the idea which depicts nature as the figure of a woman goes beyond mere metaphor: it is embodied in the practice of tilling the soil, fishing, protecting the river and creating and caring for life.
For an Indigenous woman, COP is a place where she should be visible, but also a place from which she is excluded. She reminds us of the barriers that Indigenous women confront if they want to take part: expensive passports and bureaucratic requirements, difficulties to obtain credentials, the burden of paying for long journeys and the lack of facilities for mothers who are forced to leave their children for others to look after.
‘Just to reach these places is a major battle. Many give up because they can’t afford it, and that limits who can speak for Amazônia’ she explains. Her organization is planning to take nine women to Belem. The high costs of travel in Amazon are one of the principal barriers that stop more people coming to the event.
UMIAB, which coordinates women from the different Amazônian peoples, has been organizing to ensure that Indigenous women can be present at COP30. For Tukano, the presence of women is vital, because women are the first to feel the impact of climate change in their communities.
As she explains, climate change is no longer a distant threat, but something lived through every day – in the drying up of the rivers, the fall in fish populations, and agriculture devastated by drought or extreme heatwaves. ‘Our ability to feed our communities is at risk. Where there used to be abundance, now everything is uncertain. And this is causing physical sickness and mental illness,’ she explains.
And it is women, traditionally responsible for the feeding and health of their families, who are the first to feel the consequences of this. Many are resorting to selling artesanía in the cities as a survival strategy. But there they confront racism, the lack of public services and their own invisibility. ‘There are Indigenous women living on the outskirts of Belém, who are forgotten. Yet they exist, they struggle, and they too are part of Amazônia,’ says Tukano.
One of the points Tukano emphasizes is the plural nature of the Amazon. ‘The Amazon is not just forest. It is river, sea, city, urban area, quilombo, villages. It is Indigenous and also Afro-descendant,’ she stresses. This vision broadens the debate about climate change, showing that the Amazônian territory is made up of a diversity of ways of living, all of them threatened by the environmental crisis and by the advance of extractive projects. That is why it is vital that the discussions take account of this plurality.
Preparations for COP30, which will bring together thousands of people in Belém, lay bare both the urban contrasts and the challenges emerging from the communities. For Marinete, the conference will only be meaningful if it opens spaces for these voices: ‘It’s not enough to use the Amazon as a shop window. It’s essential to listen to those who live here, especially the women, who are on this front-line of the climate crisis.’
‘No climate justice without Quilombola women’
Those are the words of Carlene Pristes, gender diversity co-ordinator of the MALUNGO/PA.
While the world is discussing targets and agreements to slow the climate emergency, a group of Quilombola women from different parts of Pará is organizing so that their voices, their physical presence and their living experience can be present in this thirtieth Climate Conference. Their participation is being organized by a partnership of various social movements, with the aim of creating a forum for global discussion of the ancestral knowledge of those who live in and protect the forest.
Their strategy started by setting up a collective stand to act as a point of gathering and dialogue. In this space they will hold collaborative sessions on gender, the rights of women, political, social and economic participation, interweaving all these themes with the specific findings of the quilombola peoples.
‘The aim is to guarantee our visibility and to strengthen the voice of quilombola women, putting our experiences and struggles at the centre of the discussions about climate justice and human rights,’ explains Carlene Pristes, gender coordinator of Malungo, the Federation of Quilombola Associations of Pará, an organization which is defending the rights of more than 600 communities across the state.
This initiative is not just symbolic; it is strategic. For Pristes, the presence of these women in the processes of climate decision-making is fundamental, because they are the ones with ancestral solutions and practices to confront the crisis.
‘We are directly affected by the climate crisis,’ she states, ‘yet at the same time we are the guardians of ancestral practices for looking after our territory and the lives of our people. Our quilombos live in Amazônia, looking after the forest, the rivers and the land and women have the central role in this, both in collective working and in the preservation of knowledge.’
The federation aims to take a delegation of 100 Quilombola women to COP30. This group of women will carry the political message that the fight for the preservation of the planet is indivisible from the fight for social justice, human rights and gender equality.
‘When Quilombola women come forward, we are not just talking about the defence of the environment, but also about social justice, human rights, and recognition of our leading political role,’ stresses Pristes. ‘To be at the COP means that the struggle against climate change needs to consider the voices of those who are on the front line, those who feel the impacts on a daily basis, and who have real proposals to look after the earth in a way that is both sustainable and just.’
‘It is we who know the Amazon’
As heatwaves grow and the rains batter the cities with ever more force, in urban areas it is the women from the periphery who first feel on their own skin the effects of the climate crisis. ‘The impression that people have is that our winter was shorter this year. And we are feeling the extremes of burning temperatures all the time,’ says Flávia Ribeiro, a journalist, researcher and Black feminist activist, one of the voices to have come out of the Amazon ravines.
When the rains come, they bring no respite, but instead damage to roofs, flooding and overflowing streams. It is these communities, with less access to public services and scarce financial resources, that are impacted more by the climate emergency; and they are also the ones with least capacity for recovery, and who receive least public assistance – all of which reflects environmental racism.
These voices confront historical barriers that prevent them from accessing decision making bodies. They face the same age-old obstacles: the perverse conjunction of racism, machismo and homophobia. ‘Where these women are represented, it is only a few of them, and those who do succeed in taking part in decision making face violence on a daily basis,’ says Flávia Ribeiro. ‘They are constantly reminded that they do not belong. These structures are racist and sexist and not considered to be “for them”.’
This obliteration is so thorough that, even in official documents published in the region, the largest demographic group in Amazônia – those who define themselves as Black – is not even mentioned. ‘The draft Declaration of Belém has come out,’ says Ribeiro, ‘and it never uses the words black man or woman, negritude or race. The largest demographic group is simply not mentioned. The power of naming people and groups is important, because if you don’t name a group, you cannot make public policy that takes account of them.’
The Declaration of Belém is a document based on the Amazon Summit of 2023. Its over 100 paragraphs detail the challenges in relation to protection of territory. Themes are included such as sustainable development, health, illegal extraction of timber and minerals, science and technology, the social situation of families living in the forest, the protection of indigenous peoples, protection of the biome – all with the aim of reducing inequalities and fighting hunger.
‘Indigenous women are quoted almost 200 times. This is not meant to be a criticism of Indigenous peoples: they should be there. But Black men and women are not quoted. Black people living on the urban margins are not quoted,’ says Ribeiro.
The main criticism is that COP30 is being planned by people who live elsewhere, remote from the reality of the Amazon. ‘Who gets to plan this event? It’s people from the south-east of the country, most of them white, who get to tell us and the world what Amazônia is,’ she says. ‘Reading between the lines you find an internal colonialism which treats Amazônian voices as inferior and keeps quiet about their knowledge.’
Yet it is precisely these historically excluded groups who have the knowledge which is essential if we are to confront the climate crisis. ‘We know best what is happening here, and we have a solution,’ Ribeiro says. ‘People need do be heard from the planning stage onwards, not just brought on for a photo opportunity. Brazil and the world have Amazônia because we, the people of Amazonia, are here.’
This article was produced under a partnership between Agência Pública, Amazônia Vox, Carta Amazônia and Lupa for coverage of COP30. The material can be republished without editing and with full credits.
