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The atmosphere was already tense at the public hearing between state and municipal authorities and the residents of Vila da Barca, the largest stilt-house community in Latin America, held in Belém, Brazil, on April 7, 2025. But the tension reached its peak when one resident brought in a bottle filled with cloudy, yellowish water, clearly unfit for consumption. The water was poured into cups and offered to government officials and the president of the Pará State Sanitation Company (Cosanpa), as the crowd chanted loudly: “Drink! Drink! Drink!”
The Cosanpa president had previously claimed that he drank the same water at home as Vila da Barca residents. To his shock, the government delegation was confronted with this unexpected gesture. He froze—and, as anticipated, refused to drink the water. The act carried heavy symbolic weight, encapsulating the deep contrasts and conflicts underway in Belém, the city set to host the 30th United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP30) in November 2025. The conflict pits a vision of urban development that seeks to transform the city into a global showcase—repeating the old logic of burying rivers under concrete and sealing off the soil—against the needs and voices of local communities, who were left out of planning processes along with environmental specialists.
“We won’t accept being treated like a dumping ground while investments go only to the privileged parts of the city,” declared a representative of Vila da Barca during the hearing. This powerful statement denounced the environmental racism perpetrated by the Pará state government and went to the heart of the conflict that prompted the meeting, convened only after intense public pressure.
Her remarks referred to the “Nova Doca” or New Dock project, located along one of Belém’s most valuable real estate corridors. Lined with luxury buildings, a supermarket, and a shopping mall on Visconde de Souza Franco Avenue, Nova Doca is one of around 30 infrastructure projects being developed in the city ahead of COP30, funded by the municipal, state, and federal governments. The Doca Canal, also known as the Igarapé das Almas, is part of the Una River Basin and is one of 13 canals undergoing urban redevelopment in the city.
Less than two kilometers from the construction site sits the century-old community of Vila da Barca, on the shores of Guajará Bay. Roughly half of the homes there are precariously built stilt houses over the water. The neighborhood spans about one square kilometer and is home to nearly 700 families—more than 5,000 people. Though centrally located in the city, the community has suffered from abysmal sanitary conditions for decades. Its residents have endured a long history of struggle in the face of government neglect. “Vila da Barca is in the heart of Belém, but it’s still treated like a peripheral slum, a ‘baixada,’” says historian Kelvyn Gomes, a local activist and promoter of several sociocultural initiatives in the community.
Residents’ outrage exploded when they discovered—without any prior consultation—that a sewage station was being built in their community to handle the sludge and waste from the Nova Doca project. In December of last year, the state government had quietly approved the expropriation of a long-abandoned tannery. The building was fenced off, and demolition began. Legally obligated to identify the construction, the city labelled the site “Doca Sanitation Station.” That’s when the alarm bells rang, Gomes recalls. “We realized what was happening, right? They’re building a multi-million-dollar project over at the Doca and sending the sewage over here,” he says. The community immediately demanded explanations from the State Secretariat for Public Works (SEOP), leading to an initial meeting and, ultimately, the public hearing.
A striking revelation emerged during the hearing: the new pumping station was designed to serve the entire Una River Basin, including the broader region—but not Vila da Barca. “The project is being built inside the community, but it wasn’t even going to serve us,” Gomes explains. After sustained pressure from residents during the hearing, SEOP representatives agreed to connect the urbanized areas of Vila da Barca to the sewage treatment network.
The Nova Doca project aims to transform the avenue into a postcard-perfect scene by building a linear park along 1.2 kilometers of the canal. It includes drainage systems, landscaping, urban infrastructure, walkways, and replacement of the tidal floodgates, according to state government news sources. It is one of the most expensive COP30-related projects, budgeted at around R$310.8 million (approximately US$60 million), funded through a partnership between the federal and state governments and the hydroelectric company Itaipu Binacional. Altogether, these projects involve massive investments of roughly R$5 billion (around US$1 billion) from the federal budget, Brazil’s National Development Bank (BNDES), and Itaipu Binacional.
Public outrage over the Nova Doca garnered significant media attention, revealing the greenwashing logic behind many of the city’s preparations for COP30.
Public outrage over the Nova Doca garnered significant media attention, revealing the greenwashing logic behind many of the city’s preparations for COP30. Far from addressing environmental collapse and climate injustice, as one might expect from the world’s largest climate summit, the projects reproduce long-standing social inequalities and environmental injustices in Belém, a city of 1.3 million and the second-largest capital in northern Brazil. “Brazil is missing the opportunity to become a global leader in energy and to set a positive example on social and environmental issues,” laments Gomes, whose family was among the first to settle in Vila da Barca.
Both the state government, led by Helder Barbalho of the center-right Brazilian Democratic Movement (MDB) and a member of one of Pará’s traditional political dynasties, and the municipal government, headed by Igor Normando, also of the MDB and part of the governor’s family, have positioned themselves as leaders of the Amazon and central players in global climate discussions. “COP30 is a unique opportunity to show the world that development and sustainability go hand in hand,” Barbalho declares on the SEOP website. “Pará is preparing with modern and strategic infrastructure that will bring direct benefits to the population and project the state as a leader in global climate discussions.” When Normando took office as mayor in January 2025, he revamped Belém’s municipal branding with references to the “Amazon brand”: the color green, açaí palm leaves, and rivers. He also adopted the slogan “Capital of the Amazon,” reinforcing Belém’s hierarchical position in relation to other regional capitals, an approach heavily criticized by scholars and activists.
Despite appropriating environmentalist rhetoric, the political practice of both governments strays far from even minimally sustainable development policies, let alone meaningful climate adaptation measures. While public access to the project plans has been limited, the images shared through official and community channels reveal gray, outdated infrastructure lacking any clear climate resilience guidelines. This raises urgent questions: What kind of legacy will be left for Belém’s population, which already lives in a territory made highly vulnerable by climate crisis and social inequality? Who will benefit from these massive investments and grand promises made by the authorities?
From Mairi to Belém: A Journey of Struggle with the Waters
As Belém prepares to host the COP30 climate summit, one notable feature—beyond the usual promises of jobs and tourism—is the emphasis placed on sanitation in the communications released by both federal and state governments. This stands in sharp contrast to what happened in Brazil’s Southeast, in Rio de Janeiro, where the 2024 G20 summit of wealthy nations prompted a renovation of the Museum of Modern Art and an urban and landscape revitalization of its surrounding areas. The disparity reveals the historic inequalities between Brazil’s regions. São Paulo and Rio, the country’s economic capitals in the Southeast, concentrate much of its wealth and thus enjoy better infrastructure in sanitation, telecommunications, and mobility—conditions radically different from those in the North. Evidence of this can be seen in Belém: in order to host a major event like COP30, massive sums are being poured into basic infrastructure like sanitation, precisely because this is one of the city’s most critical deficiencies.
With vegetation typical of the Amazon biome, Belém features mangroves and floodplain forests along its rivers. The city encompasses 14 hydrographic basins or watersheds, the largest of which is the Una Basin, and a dense network of rivers and streams. In addition to its continental territory, Belém also has 42 islands. Historically, the city’s poorest populations, often of Indigenous, Black, or riverine ancestry, migrated from other regions or were pushed into the city’s low-lying areas along rivers, which later came to be known as baixadas. These areas, among other hardships, suffer from virtually nonexistent sanitation.
Despite being located within one of the planet’s largest reserves of freshwater, Belém ranks—alongside nine other cities in Brazil’s Legal Amazon—among the 15 worst in the country for basic sanitation. Unsurprisingly, according to Brazil’s 2022 Demographic Census conducted by the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE), Belém is proportionally the most favelized capital in the country, with more than half its population living in irregular settlements. The Una-Telégrafo baixada, known as Vila da Barca, is one of the five largest favelas in the city, according to census data, and is composed of a vast area of stilt houses. It has no sewage system, and its piped water—like the sample the Cosanpa president and government officials refused to drink at the April hearing—is completely unfit for consumption.
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Translated from Portuguese by NACLA.
Mariana Guimarães is a socio-environmentalist and holds a Master’s degree in Communications Science from the Federal University of Pará (UFPA). Her work and research focus on basic sanitation, the climate crisis, and the right to the city. She currently serves as an international policy advisor for the COP30 Committee coalition and is co-founder of the NGO Mandí.
Rosaly de Seixas Brito is a journalist and associate professor at the School of Communications and the Graduate Program in Communication, Culture, and the Amazon at the Federal University of Pará (UFPA). She holds a PhD in Social Sciences and Anthropology from the UFPA. She has worked in mainstream media and for the alternative newspapers Resistência and Nanico. She is a leading member of the research group Communication, Politics, and the Amazon (PPGCOM/UFPA).