Lula’s pick to host COP might not be ready

On January 11, President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva announced that the city of Belém, the second-largest in the Amazon, would be Brazil’s candidate to host the UN Climate Change Conference (COP) in 2025. Flanking the president, Pará Governor Helder Barbalho thanked Lula for trying to bring COP30 to the capital of his state.

However, the federal and local governments’ plans to prepare Belém for hosting duties are still unclear, The Brazilian Report has learned.

Belém is a warm, rainy city in the eastern Amazon, home to around 1.5 million people. According to the most recent federal estimate, it has only 15,266 hotel beds, less than half of the more than 35,000 people who took part in COP27, in the coastal Egyptian city of Sharm el-Sheikh — granted, not everyone was in the city at the same time over the course of the two-week event.

Every October, Belém hosts Círio de Nazaré, a large Catholic festival in devotion to Our Lady of Nazareth that attracts over 2 million pilgrims to the streets. However, the Pará state government estimates that only about 50,000 of them are tourists from other states, and several thousand of them stay at homes of relatives and friends.

The most recent numbers for lodging in Belém and the state of Pará are from a 2016 survey by federal statistics bureau IBGE. The state government was not able to provide more recent estimates, and in fact replied with data from an even older 2011 survey.

To make matters worse, according...