Brazil's Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva received a superstar welcome at the COP27 summit in Egypt on Wednesday as he pledged to recommit the rainforest nation to tackling the climate crisis and offered to hold future U.N. climate talks.
Brazil's President-elect Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva attends the COP27 climate summit, in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, November 16, 2022. REUTERS/Emilie Madi REFILE - QUALITY REPEAT
Lula won the presidential election last month against right-wing President Jair Bolsonaro, who presided over mounting destruction of the Amazon rainforest and refused to hold the 2019 climate summit originally planned for Brazil. "There is no climate security for the world without a protected Amazon," he said, explaining he wanted people to see the region. "We will spare no efforts to have zero deforestation and the degradation of our biomes by 2030."
He also slammed global leaders for failing to prioritize climate change, saying they had ignored warnings about the plight of the planet while spending trillions of dollars on war."However, we ignore these alerts. We spend trillions of dollars on wars that bring destruction and death, while 900 million people in the world don't have something to eat."
Lula moved through the conference with a light security detail reaching out to shake outstretched hands. "It's very positive that he's coming here as president-elect because the current president never came to COPs," said Carlos Nobre, a climate scientist at the University of Sao Paulo.
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