Move along! Nothing to see here. All in the name of equity.

The two-bedroom apartment in Belém became Suelen Freitas’s home in 2020, when she moved her family to the same building as her elderly mother. On the edge of the Amazon rainforest, it was where her story played out for five years, from enduring the Covid pandemic, to watching her two children get into the university.

But in March everything changed. An eviction notice gave them and their neighbours 30 days to vacate their apartments. One by one, all 12 families were forced out. “It was very painful,” Freitas said.

The reason, she was told, was that the building’s owner planned to convert all of the flats into short-term rentals for Cop30, the annual climate summit which is scheduled to take place in the Brazilian city in November.

It gets better.

This year’s summit, which began with an idealistic dream that the world would come to see the climate crisis for themselves in the rainforest, is increasingly enmeshed in anger and recriminations over sky-high accommodation costs and accusations that poorer countries are being forced out of the meetings. …

“Cop30 was just the cherry on top,” said Priscilla Santos, the co-founder of the Rede Amazônidas pelo Clima thinktank. She credits the big real estate companies that operate in the city with triggering the lodging crisis.

“They immediately moved to secure exclusive deals with high-end property owners and promised to rent them out to foreigners at outrageous prices,” she said.

Local government picked up the idea and Cop30 was presented as a money-making opportunity on social media and beyond. Promotional material found by the Guardian encouraged local people to “take advantage of this great opportunity to earn even more”.

There are a lot more examples too.

This school was renovated for room rentals and this will impact the students and their families greatly (not in a good way).

From the outset, Belém obviously lacked sufficient hotel capacity for the approximately 50,000 summit attendees, making the use of private homes a necessity for the event. However, the implementation of this solution has, in some instances, been less than ideal (that’s being kind).

Remember, this road was built in the Amazon Rainforest so UN elites attending the upcoming COP30 climate summit in Belem, Brazil so they can avoid traffic. Cop30 attendees are so concerned about climate change that they’re displacing residents. That’s one way to reduce their carbon footprint, huh?

Then there are the numerous private jets that will be used to fly elites in.

But, don’t worry, Cop30 attendees are really concerned about climate change. No, really!

PHOTO CREDIT: – Ver-O-Peso Market in Belem By Mauricio Mercer [2] – Flickr [1], CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=2783153