President Joe Biden, left, arrives on Marine One at Manaus-Eduardo Gomes International Airport after a tour over the Amazon, on Nov. 17 in Manaus, Brazil.Manuel Balce Ceneta/The Associated Press
Joe Biden toured the drought-shrunken waters of the Amazon River’s greatest tributary Sunday as the first sitting American president to set foot in the legendary rainforest, while the incoming Trump administration seems poised to scale back the U.S. commitment to combatting climate change.
The massive Amazon region, which is about the size of Australia, stores huge amounts of the world’s carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas that drives climate change when it’s released into the atmosphere. But development is rapidly depleting the world’s largest tropical rainforest, and rivers are drying up.
Flying over a stretch of the Amazon in a helicopter, Biden saw severe erosion, ships grounded in the Negro River tributary, and fire damage. He also passed over a wildlife refuge and the expansive waters where the Negro River joins the Amazon. He was joined by Carlos Nobre, a Nobel Prize-winning scientist and expert on how climate change is harming the Amazon.
Biden met indigenous leaders – introducing his daughter and granddaughter to them – and visited a museum at the gateway to the Amazon as he looks to highlight his commitment to the preservation of the region. Three indigenous women shook maracas as part of a welcoming ceremony.
“I’m proud to become the first sitting president to visit the Amazon,” Biden said before he signing a U.S. proclamation designating Nov. 17 as International Conservation Day.
His administration announced plans last year for a $500 million contribution to the Amazon Fund, the most significant international co-operation effort to preserve the rainforest, primarily financed by Norway.
So far, the U.S. government said it has provided $50 million, and the White House announced Sunday an additional $50 million contribution to the fund.
“It’s significant for a sitting president to visit the Amazon. … This shows a personal commitment from the president,” said Suely Araujo, former head of the Brazilian environmental protection agency and public policy co-ordinator with the nonprofit Climate Observatory. “That said, we can’t expect concrete results from this visit.”
She doubts that a “single penny” will go to the Amazon Fund once Donald Trump is back in the White House.
The incoming Trump administration is highly unlikely to prioritize the Amazon or anything related to climate change. The Republican president-elect already said he would again pull out of the Paris agreement, a global pact forged to avert the threat of catastrophic climate change, after Biden recommitted to the accord.
Trump has cast climate change as a “hoax” and said he will eliminate energy efficiency regulations by the Biden administration.
Still, the Biden White House on Sunday announced a series of new efforts aimed at bolstering the Amazon and stemming the impact of climate change.
Among the actions is the launch of a finance coalition that looks to spur at least $10 billion in public and private investment for land restoration and eco-friendly economic projects by 2030, and a $37.5 million loan to an organization to support the large-scale planting of native tree species on degraded grasslands in Brazil.
Biden also plans to highlight that the U.S. is on track to reach $11 billion in spending on international climate financing in 2024, a sixfold increase from when he started his term.
The Amazon is home to Indigenous communities and 10% of Earth’s biodiversity. It also regulates moisture across South America. About two-thirds of the Amazon lies within Brazil, and scientists say its devastation poses a catastrophic threat to the planet.
The forest has been suffering two years of historic drought that have dried up waterways, isolated thousands of riverine communities and hindered riverine dwellers’ ability to fish. It’s also made way for wildfires that have burned an area larger than Switzerland and choked cities near and far with smoke.
When Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva took office last year, he signalled a shift in environmental policy from his predecessor, far-right Jair Bolsonaro. Bolsonaro prioritized agribusiness expansion over forest protection and weakened environmental agencies, prompting deforestation to surge to a 15-year high.
Lula has pledged “zero deforestation” by 2030, though his term runs through the end of 2026. Forest loss in Brazil’s Amazon dropped by 30.6% in the 12 months through July from a year earlier, bringing deforestation to its lowest level in nine years, according to official data released last week.
In that 12-month span, the Amazon lost 6,288 square kilometres (2,428 square miles), roughly the size of the U.S. state of Delaware. But that data fails to capture the surge of destruction this year, which will only be included in next year’s reading.
Despite the success in curbing Amazon deforestation, Lula’s government has been criticized by environmentalists for backing projects that could harm the region, such as paving a highway that cuts from an old-growth area and could encourage logging, oil drilling near the mouth of the Amazon River and building a railway to transport soy to Amazonian ports.
While Biden is the first sitting president in the Amazon, former President Theodore Roosevelt travelled to the region with the help of the American Museum of Natural History following his 1912 loss to Woodrow Wilson. Roosevelt, joined by his son and naturalists, traversed roughly 15,000 miles, when the former president fell ill with malaria and suffered a serious leg infection after a boat accident.
Biden is making the Amazon visit as part of a six-day trip to South America, the first to the continent of his presidency. He travelled from Lima, Peru, where he took part in the annual Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit and met with Chinese President Xi Jinping.
After his stop in Manaus, he was heading to Rio de Janeiro for this year’s Group of 20 leaders summit.