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SUMAÚMA's editorial director, Eliane Brum, explains how our coverage intends to dispute the COP in the field of journali...
05/11/2025

SUMAÚMA's editorial director, Eliane Brum, explains how our coverage intends to dispute the COP in the field of journalism. “A lot of people have very low expectations for this COP, and it'll be pretty tough, but the COP hasn't been decided. The COP is up for dispute. We're here in the dispute for the COP,” she says.

SUMAÚMA's coverage will be carried out by a team of around 40 people, half of whom are in Belém, where the UN conference is being held. We will have a live radio station, with daily programming, hosted by Eliane Brum and Paulina Chamorro, as well as a daily newsletter, in three languages (sign up here), and intense live coverage here and on our social media. The forest journalists in our Micélio co-development program will be active participants, collaborating with mini-documentaries, videos and texts, along with reporting.

“For us, the protagonists are the forest-peoples. The humans, as we call them, and the other-humans too. So, we'll have coverage of the COP from the Forest, from the perspective of the Forest,” Eliane said.

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We at SUMAÚMA are war correspondents, reporting on the war waged against Nature. It is a lopsided conflict, in which Nat...
04/11/2025

We at SUMAÚMA are war correspondents, reporting on the war waged against Nature. It is a lopsided conflict, in which Nature is being slaughtered and humans are not walking but running toward extinction. We are arriving at COP30 ready to challenge lobbyists from the oil, mining, soy, and carbon credit sectors. For an Amazon-based news organization, this dispute means covering COP through the best practices in traditional journalism—investigation, accuracy, respect for exact words, honesty—while approaching from the perspectives, values, and language of peoples who will have little space in the negotiations but without whom there would be no Forest or biome left standing. Were it not for them, for these people who defend Nature with their bodies and who are all too often murdered for it, we would not even be here having this conversation, because the planet would already be uninhabitable.

SUMAÚMA has, since its foundational manifesto, defended the position that the legitimate centers of the world are where life is: the Amazon, other tropical rainforests, the oceans—all biomes. It is not where the market is, that is, the political and economic centers that are most responsible for climate collapse. At SUMAÚMA, Nature comes first. And that includes Nature’s peoples, not just the ones the non-Indigenous call humans but animals, plants, fungi, mountains, rivers… This is the horizontal perspective, which stands in opposition to anthropocentrism; it is a form of understanding found in most Indigenous cosmogonies and also how SUMAÚMA understands the world. “The Forest first” forms the trunk of our coverage. Based on this value, rooted in ancestral knowledge, we release flying rivers to irrigate the debate that will define our lives. And this is what we will do at COP30.

Read more on sumauma.com/en

By Eliane Brum, Jonathan Watts and Talita Bedinelli

30/10/2025

Global leaders need schooling from Indigenous communities on the importance of a harmonious relationship with nature, the United Nations Secretary-General has told SUMAÚMA in a world exclusive ahead of COP30.

António Guterres said the voices of first peoples are vitally important if the world is to avoid climate catastrophes, including a tipping point in the Amazon Rainforest.

The UN said this was the first time the secretary-general has given an exclusive interview to an Indigenous journalist – Wajã Xipai, a SUMAÚMA forest-journalist of the Xipai people. Alongside him, journalist Jonathan Watts, one of the founders of SUMAÚMA, took part in the interview.

Read more on sumauma.com/en

30/10/2025

In his only scheduled media interview before COP30, United Nations secretary-general António Guterres tells SUMAÚMA that humanity must change course or face ‘devastating consequences’

“Let’s recognize our failure,” he said. “The truth is that we have failed to avoid an overshooting above 1.5 degrees in the next few years…We must do everything possible to make that overshoot as short as possible and as low in intensity as possible to avoid tipping points like the Amazon. We don’t want to see the Amazon as a savanna. But that’s a real risk if we don’t change course and if we don’t make a dramatic decrease of emissions as soon as possible.”

Read more on sumauma.com/en

By Wajã Xipai When the river meets the ocean: my historic conversation with the UN Secretary-GeneralAt 19, I was the fir...
29/10/2025

By Wajã Xipai

When the river meets the ocean: my historic conversation with the UN Secretary-General

At 19, I was the first Indigenous person to exclusively interview António Guterres and I imagined what it would be like to take him to my territory in Terra do Meio, where collapse is already evident in extreme drought, thirsty rivers, and the pain of visible and invisible people

There we were at the edge of the forest. The computer screen had been up for a long time, everything arranged so that nothing would go wrong; that the internet wouldn’t go down, that the computer battery wouldn’t die, and a glass of water and ice in front of me so I wouldn’t be left without words. The camera flickered on, silence filled the other side of the camera until a figure appeared, and there he was—António Guterres, the man who speaks for the nations, the Secretary-General of the United Nations (UN).

Some weeks earlier, I had received an invitation from Jonathan Watts, co-founder of SUMAÚMA and global environment correspondent for The Guardian newspaper, requesting an interview with the Secretary-General and wanting me to do it with him. I accepted! The next part was the hardest and easiest; I wondered what to ask. It would be my first time speaking—even if not in person, but through Zoom —with someone with that level of authority. But what would I ask him?

Read more on sumauma.com/en

Global leaders need schooling from indigenous communities on the importance of a harmonious relationship with nature, th...
28/10/2025

Global leaders need schooling from indigenous communities on the importance of a harmonious relationship with nature, the United Nations Secretary-General has told SUMAÚMA in a world exclusive ahead of COP30.

António Guterres said the voices of first peoples are vitally important if the world is to avoid climate catastrophes, including a tipping point in the Amazon rainforest.

The UN said this was the first time the secretary-general has given an exclusive interview to an indigenous journalist – Wajã Xipai, a SUMAÚMA forest journalist of the Xipai people.

Guterres said: “Political leaders at the global level must assume the defense of the rights of indigenous communities as an essential priority in their internal and external policies. It is absolutely indispensable that a world-wide awareness is gained that indigenous communities are our defenders of nature, they are our defenders of the planet.”

Speaking by video link from the UN headquarters in New York to SUMAÚMA and Guardian journalists in Altamira, in the Xingu river basin of Pará, he said COP30 needed to mark a change of direction by humanity. If not, he warned global warming will bring “devastating consequences” to the world, including tipping points in the Amazon rainforest, the Greenland ice sheets and coral reef systems.

Read more on sumauma.com/en

By Jonathan Watts and Wajã Xipai
jonathan

It was the first time young Khumta Suya, of the Khisêtjê people, had entered a museum. He imagined he would find objects...
25/10/2025

It was the first time young Khumta Suya, of the Khisêtjê people, had entered a museum. He imagined he would find objects displayed on shelves. Yet after stepping into the Museu Paraense Emílio Goeldi (commonly called the Goeldi Museum), in Belém, and coming face to face with an entire block of forest bursting from the concrete so commonly hosted by major cities, Khumta had found home – a home that, despite housing the world’s biggest collection on the Amazon, is at risk of closing during COP30 because of a lack of funding.

Just shy of its 160th birthday, the Museu Paraense Emílio Goeldi is the oldest research institute in the Amazon and one of the oldest in the country. Its dual condition as a museum and research institute makes the Goeldi Museum strategic in producing and spreading knowledge about the world’s largest rainforest. This house of peoples and of science is the steward of the largest set of collections on the Amazon: 4.5 million items with legally protected status in 19 scientific collections.

The Goeldi Museum’s relevance to society and Nature in the Amazon and on the planet seemingly fails to interest the federal government and the national Congress’s budget commission when it comes time to draft the annual budget bill. Month to month, the research institute, connected to Brazil’s Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation, has been begging for supplementary funding to keep its doors from closing in 2025. This is in the same year when the COP30 is being held in Belém, which should turn the museum into a showcase.

Read more on sumauma.com/en

The sun hangs in the sky like the blade of a guillotine. It is almost noon when 19-year-old Júnior Neri crosses the thre...
23/10/2025

The sun hangs in the sky like the blade of a guillotine. It is almost noon when 19-year-old Júnior Neri crosses the threshold of his house. Apart from his flip-flops, his body is completely covered: long-sleeve shirt, leggings plus shorts, and a baseball cap. This choice of clothing might seem strange in the 30-degree heat, but when the young man leans his bike against the side of the house to adjust a bulky thermal backpack, it all makes sense. Minutes before, his cellphone had blared insistently: “iFood!”

Just like thousands of other young people devoured by the city, delivering meals to strangers is how Júnior helps put food on the table. A table he shares with his mother, brother, uncle, and grandmother in a modest two-story house in the Benguí neighborhood, in the marginalized periphery of Belém.

Júnior grew up unsupervised, running through Benguí’s streets, climbing mango and plum trees to eat their fruit, and swimming in the stream where his grandmother washed clothes. But this childhood was replaced by an adolescence on a treeless street next to a canal polluted by runoff from a dead tributary whose name no one can remember.
According to data from the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics, IBGE, only 18% of residents live on streets with at least one tree. In other words, 82% of residents walk in full sun, on roads without shade.

The numbers, calculated for each neighborhood at SUMAÚMA’s request and now published for the first time, come from the Survey of Urban Housing Environments, part of the IBGE’s 2022 census. More than just statistics, the numbers expose the inequality of access to shade in Belém, the geography of heat, and the contrast in color between the center and the marginalized periphery of the COP30 capital.

Read more on sumauma.com/en

With 21 days to go until COP30 in Belém, Brazil’s environmental regulator, Ibama, has issued Petrobras a license to dril...
20/10/2025

With 21 days to go until COP30 in Belém, Brazil’s environmental regulator, Ibama, has issued Petrobras a license to drill a deepwater oil well in Block 59, located in the Foz do Amazonas Basin, an extremely environmentally sensitive area rich in biodiversity. SUMAÚMA gained access to the document, shared by Ibama president Rodrigo Agostinho, on Monday, October 20, just after 12:00 PM.

Follow coverage on our social media and at sumauma.com

For three years, researcher Carolina Levis, a professor at the Federal University of Santa Catarina and a researcher aff...
19/10/2025

For three years, researcher Carolina Levis, a professor at the Federal University of Santa Catarina and a researcher affiliated with the Brazil LAB at Princeton University, in the USA, was asked by the journal Science, one of the world’s preeminent science publications, to revise a paper containing some of the results and perceptions of the Scientific Panel for the Amazon, a regional initiative comprised of over 300 scientists. The paper examined what was needed for the Amazon to remain standing, from a structural standpoint, while also discussing legal and political changes. Yet when Carolina scrutinized the paper, she felt a fundamental piece of the discussion was missing: What were Indigenous scientists and intellectuals saying about the subject?

“There will be no future for the Amazon if we don’t recognize that the populations continually living there, for at least 12,000 years, caring for the spaces that exist, should be included in this dialog, fully recognized and put at the forefront,” the researcher argued. So, the journal opened a common ground for dialog between Western and Indigenous sciences.
Five Indigenous scientists from the Tukano, Tuyuka, Bará, Baniwa and Sateré-Mawé peoples joined nine Western researchers to think about the importance of recognizing Indigenous sciences, with their philosophical, scientific and political elements and their contributions to sustainability in these times of climate emergency. After nearly two years of dialog between original and ancestral knowledge, the paper Indigenizing conservation science for a sustainable Amazon was published. And it became the first in Science authored by Indigenous Brazilians.

Carolina Levis and two of these Indigenous scientists who took part in the project – Justino Rezende, a Tuyuka researcher, and Francy Baniwa, a member of the Baniwa people, both of whom are from the Upper Negro River region, in the northwest of Brazil’s Amazon – spoke with the SUMAÚMA team during a series of meetings held in preparation for our coverage of COP30, taking place in November in Belém.

Read the interview on sumauma.com/en

On August 27, Nelson Ananias Filho, sustainability coordinator for the Brazilian Agriculture Confederation, was one of t...
17/10/2025

On August 27, Nelson Ananias Filho, sustainability coordinator for the Brazilian Agriculture Confederation, was one of those invited to speak at a public hearing about the national Climate Plan, convened by the Senate’s committee on agriculture and agrarian reform. With a wry smile on his face, he pointed at a graph of greenhouse gas emissions in Brazil, where the largest slice was attributed to livestock raising and agriculture, including the effects of deforestation to clear land for pastures and crops. “Just one look at a graph like this, and we’ve found those responsible for deforestation in Brazil and perhaps in the world,” he noted sarcastically. “This reallocation of emissions has a direct impact on the agricultural sector in the short term, because we’re entering the period of the conference of the parties [COP30], where the agricultural sector comes in as the biggest emitter in the country and maybe in the world,” he said. “In the short term, there’s a very big impact on image,” he complained. Ananias Filho was not wrong: only six countries, including Brazil, exceed emissions by the Brazilian ag sector.

The public hearing was one of the pressure tactics deployed against the current administration in late July, when proposals for distributing efforts to reduce emissions of gases responsible for global heating were put up for public consultation. The agribusiness lobby and their representatives in Congress refused to assume any responsibility for the reduction of deforestation by privately owned ranches. This is their way of sabotaging Brazil’s national Climate Plan, a work in progress for the last three years. As part of their offensive, they are attempting to dodge accountability by complaining about the energy sector’s resistance to committing to more ambitious targets for replacing fossil fuels.

Read more on sumauma.com/en

It has been a long time since a speech by Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva gathered as many compliments inside and outside of B...
08/10/2025

It has been a long time since a speech by Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva gathered as many compliments inside and outside of Brazil as his opening speech at the United Nations General Assembly did. The Brazilian president with the most UN appearances, as he is now in his third term, was lauded as a statesman. Yet what does being a statesman mean in a world in collapse? What is the profile of a statesman when we’ve already blown the chance to limit global heating to 1.5 degrees Celsius and we are living with worse and worse heat waves and more and more extreme weather events? What sort of statesman does the planet need when the Amazon is rapidly and dangerously approaching the point of no return?

It is true that Lula’s speech was strong, solidly built and inspired. He made an important statement against the genocide perpetrated by Israel in Gaza and took correct positions on several points, emphatically defending multilateralism. However, Lula devoted less than three minutes of his 18-minute speech to the threat placing humankind at risk of extinction, as indicated by the Climate Observatory. With less than 40 days until COP30, the first held in the Amazon, there was nothing more than a perfunctory mention of the climate collapse from the host country’s president.

So, a speech like Lula’s, one using subjects, verbs and predicates and grounded in the truth, is a relief because the world once again makes sense. Yet we are not in times that demand the bare minimum. If we keep demanding nothing more than the minimum, the planet will keep heating faster and faster and, soon, we won’t have any of the options currently on the table, between a harsh planet and a planet hostile to humankind. So, it isn’t enough to be grounded in truth, in humanitarian principles, and in common sense. We must also be grounded in action.

Read the editorial written by Eliane Brum on sumauma.com/en

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