"They Held a Climate Summit in the Amazon. They Didn’t Account for the Rain."

The article that I chose to read for the 3^rd blog was from The Wall Street Journal, titled “They Held a Climate Summit in the Amazon. They Didn’t Account for the Rain.” In this article, that talk about the summit, COP30, held in Belém, Pará, Brazil. The chosen area for the summit is significant in this article because this is the gateway city to the Amazon rainforest. While the delegates were there to negotiate climate action, they experienced a taste of what vulnerable regions are currently experiencing with storms and heavy rainfall. The article describes that they had many issues, such as tents leaking, roof holes, water seeping into ventilation, and not being able to hear themselves over the rain. One of the bigger impacts from the weather was a fire breaking out as well. Overall, the article highlights that this summit was one big disaster for all of the attendees. As states in the article, “The high temperatures do help frame conversation on the reality of what we’re dealing with.”

              I thought this article was a perfect example of what we’re researching in this class. As the article highlights, we’re starting to see how the climate is starting to get much worse, especially in places like the Amazon rainforest where it’s becoming more extreme and unsafe to live in. I brought this article up in particular because it’s a perfect example of how people aren’t taking climate change into account yet. For setting up a summit in near the Amazon rainforest, you’d think they would take the weather into consideration when planning to put people in tents. However, for those who aren’t living in these extreme weather situations, they aren't prepared for the harsh reality when it comes for them. Another example I have for this is what happened to Long Beach Island in New Jersey, which is what I’m doing for my final project. When Hurricane Sandy hit the island, a lot of home owners weren’t prepared for the flooding or harsh weather. The storm ended up wiping out a lot of the houses on the island that weren’t above ground. Now, years later, you can see that most of the houses on the island are above ground, especially near the shore, because they don’t want the same thing to happen again.

              Overall, I thought this article gave some perfect insight of how people are currently reacting to the climate crisis. In the future, I hope we are more advanced with predicting our weather so accidents like this one don’t happen again and so we can help keep people safe in cases of extreme weather.

 

Article: https://www.wsj.com/us-news/climate-environment/they-held-a-climate-summit-in-the-amazon-they-didnt-account-for-the-rain-19373680?mod=environment_news_article_pos4