Canopy Tree Project
Does Money Grow on the Amazon’s Trees?
November 13, 2025
Opinion
As Brazil hosts COP30 in Belém — a summit meant to find ways to mitigate climate change such as protecting the world’s tropical forests — it has been simultaneously accused of bulldozing parts of the Amazon to build a highway.
The 13-kilometer (8 mile), four-lane highway, Avenida Liberdade, cuts through a protected reserve on the edge of Belém. The Brazilian state of Pará insists that the project predates Belém’s selection as host of COP30 and is not a federally project. Nevertheless, critics say the highway evidences the deeper contradiction: While world leaders gather to discuss forest protection, Brazil is apparently clearing rainforest to host them.
The state government claims Avenida Liberdade as a model of “sustainable mobility,” complete with bike lanes, solar-powered lighting, and wildlife crossings. Yet satellite data warns that the building of Avenida will do what another Brazilian highway, BR-163, did by opening the door for capital-intensive producers, such as land speculators, cattle ranchers who raise animals for both beef and the rising collagen trade, soy growers, and miners.
For local families who depend on the forest, this so-called development comes at a cost, such as losing access to açaí berries that once grew on the trees that once thrived here. While Amazonian Indigenous populations are at risk of losing access to the forest that supports their livelihoods, beliefs, and rituals as deforestation continues. Which is why Indigenous leaders are making their feelings known at this COP, perhaps like no other. The highway may claim green design features, but the reality is that it is damaging ecosystems, harming Indigenous land rights and negatively impacting a more naturally focused forest economy.
The Money Tree of the Amazon
The road’s construction is more than an infrastructure story — it’s an economic blueprint. Deforestation in the Amazon is rarely accidental; it follows money. Cattle ranching and large-scale soy cultivation account for the vast majority of forest loss in Brazil, with cattle alone responsible for up to 80 percent as of 2023.
Reporters like Elisângela Mendonça have even traced the global demand for bovine collagen — used in wellness products — to deforested lands and Amazon supply‑chains, showing how distant consumer markets are connected to the machinery of forest clearance. Her reporting uncovered that the supply‑chains for bovine collagen in Brazil were linked to at least 2,600 km² (approximately 1,000 square miles) of forest loss alone.
Roads like Avenida Liberdade are one of the classic triggers for a “fishbone” pattern of deforestation: first a main corridor, the spine, then secondary roads that branch out, the ribs, carving up the forest for profit.
Each cleared hectare represents an economic decision. Land speculation, global commodity demand, and weak environmental enforcement make forest destruction a lucrative enterprise. In Pará, these incentives are reinforced by policies that reward short-term growth over long-term stewardship. Deforestation, in essence, is a business model — one that public funds and local contracts continue to subsidize, even under the banner of sustainability.
The Tropical Forests Forever Fund: Hope or Hype?
At the same time, Brazil is positioning itself as a global leader in forest finance through its planned $125 billion Tropical Forests Forever Facility (TFFF) — the flagship announcement for COP30. The fund proposes to pay nations for keeping forests standing, blending public and private capital into a global endowment. On paper, it’s an elegant solution: a steady income stream that rewards preservation instead of destruction.
But the model’s structure reveals another layer of contradiction. Investors and national governments are first in line for returns, while Indigenous and smallholder communities — the people protecting the majority of the forest — are likely to receive the least.
Critics warn the TFFF risks turning the rainforest into a financial asset class, commodifying conservation without addressing the industries driving deforestation. Meanwhile, Brazil’s agribusiness sector — one of the nation’s biggest greenhouse gas emitters and one of its most powerful political forces — continues to weaken environmental protections, even as Brazil rebrands itself as a climate partner.
Follow the Money
The money trail behind both the highway and the TFFF exposes the same paradox: public institutions and private investors are profiting from the very systems that continue forest loss.
Pará’s government contracted local firms to build Avenida Liberdade with federal funds. Yet, locals worry that the road will attract outsiders and lead to real estate speculation, with properties bought and then resold, at a much higher price, in a short period of time.
In parallel, global financiers are already eyeing the TFFF, hoping to profit from forest protection as an asset. The result is a so-called circular economy and effectively greenwashed growth — where the same political and financial actors that drive deforestation are now marketing themselves as its solution.
Unless Brazil enforces strict land-use limits, protects Indigenous people’s rights, ensures direct payments to them as the real forest stewards, and severs the link between new infrastructure and agricultural expansion, COP30’s climate leadership risks collapsing into spectacle.
The Bigger Picture
Hosting COP30 in the heart of the Amazon should put the forest at the center of climate diplomacy, instead, it has revealed a deeper friction between development and preservation. The highway project offers a concrete symbol of that tension: infrastructure built through intact rainforest, justified by the same language of sustainability that COP30 is meant to promote.
At stake is more than Brazil’s reputation. It’s the future of the Amazon as a living ecosystem, a climate regulator, and a home for tens of millions. If the Avenida Liberdade highway becomes a gateway for further clearing, and if the TFFF becomes just another financial product without enforcement, the world will see COP30 for what it is: a paradox of progress built on cleared ground. If Brazil can align finance, policy, and community power, it might still prove that growth and protection can coexist — and that the money trees of the Amazon don’t have to be felled to bear fruit.
If you want to learn more about how Brazil’s forests are being impacted by deforestation, check out our new three-part series Underreported Earth: “Tree Tales”, presented in partnership with the Pulitzer Center. Hosted by The Guardian’s Tracy McVeigh, three Pulitzer Center-supported investigative journalists discuss how they uncovered powerful stories about deforestation and conservation.
Ana Bottallo explores what led her to the mangrove forests of Brazil and how predatory fishing is putting them at risk; Elisângela Mendonça investigates how farming in Brazil’s rainforests is driven not only by the meat industry, but also by a growing global obsession with collagen; and Josephine Moulds speaks about her journey to the Democratic Republic of Congo to report on the government’s fossil fuel drilling auction that threatens the vital Congo Basin rainforest. The series kicks off next Monday 17th of November, across EARTHDAY.ORG’s social media platforms at midday, EST. With a new episode on the18th and 19th of November.
EARTHDAY.ORG is on the ground at COP30 this year, advocating for climate education around the world. Follow us on LinkedIn to stay up to date for our activities next week. And if you want to do even more, please support our global tree planting campaign, the Canopy Tree Project.
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