The Amazon Rainforest Is Urban, Too

South America’s vast rainforest isn’t just flora and fauna. Tens of millions of people live in cities that are neglected and overlooked.

This is the first article in a series on the challenges and opportunities of the urban Amazon.

Forget for a moment the postcard rainforest with its ten-story trees, dripping lianas and braces of brilliantly painted macaws streaking over the canopy. The precarity of this extraordinary tropical biome’s flora and fauna is only part of the Amazon story.

Lost in conversations about the Amazon is this: The rainforest ecosystem is also home to vast urban areas with tens of millions of human inhabitants, whose needs and trials often rate barely a mention in conversations about the rainforest.

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More than 24 million of the nearly 30 million inhabitants of the Brazilian Amazon — 60% of the South American river basin — live in cities. Their numbers have multiplied seven-fold since 1970. And their well-being is inextricably intertwined with the vitality of the Amazon basin itself.

Perhaps nowhere are the stakes higher than in Belém. The sprawling, sophisticated regional capital of Pará state has been selected to host COP 30, the 2025 edition of the headline global summit.

With an impressive skyline and the world’s largest tropical forest receding at its back, it’s the last major port of call before the Amazon empties into the Atlantic. But 35% of its 1.3 million residents live in extreme poverty, and 83% in homes with unprocessed waste.

In the mistreated north end of the city, a noisome canal black with raw sewage sluices through a floodplain. A half-dozen densely packed inner-city neighborhoods surround the Canal São Joaquim, where tens of thousands of families live in harm’s way.

Tropical rains and surging river tides regularly lash the rows of clapboard houses built on wood stilts. Infectious diseases, trash, staggering poverty and the odd anaconda flourish in the farrago of airless alleys. Unchecked global warming will add to the miseries: Belém is projected to undergo the sharpest spike in extreme heat of any major city by 2050.

Ahead of COP 30, local authorities are tearing up the town with lavish engineering projects — new roads, bus systems, pavilions and parks — in a gambit to remake the city and redeem Brazil’s reputation as an environmental miscreant.

Belém — suddenly awash in federal, local, and private sector funds — might just pull it off. “It is essential that we strive to leave a lasting legacy by making Belém a better city to live in with quality urbanization, greater mobility and the right conditions to strengthen tourism and generate jobs and income,” Pará state Governor Helder Barbalho said in May while launching a new park and dock project in downtown Belém.

There’s even a bold overhaul of the São Joaquim channel, including a handsome waterfront park, on the docket.

Yet the 758,000 city residents who live in “substandard” housing and at the mercy of the weather would be forgiven for wondering. They have seen grand public works over the decades, which have eased chronic flooding and brought septic tanks. But rows of waterlogged alleys, treeless streets and fetid concrete canals remain.

“The planned park looks lovely on paper,” says Maria da Glória Moraes de Almeida, a veteran health worker for channel residents. “But a pretty project does little good if it neglects the people who live here.”

Belém, the Gateway to the Amazon

While Amazonian urbanites live far better than their counterparts in the countryside, multiple studies show there is little to celebrate. Brazil’s rainforest cities are the best of a rum lot. They trail the nation in nearly all the vital metrics of urban well-being and human development.

Public health is precarious; Covid-19 turned the region’s biggest city, Manaus, into a mortuary. In January, Belém’s city hall launched a “D-day” to combat resurgent leprosy. Tuberculosis and dengue fever are spreading.

Jobs are scarce, and mostly in the informal sector. Some 42% of homes in fast-growing mid-sized Amazonian cities lack running water and only 25% are connected to public sewage systems. If not for massive transfers of federal and state cash, few cities could make ends meet.

Urban Amazonia is also a frontier for violent crime. With just 13% of Brazil’s population, the Amazon accounts for a fifth of all homicides and 4 of the country’s 15 deadliest cities.

And for all the alarm over burning forests, urban fires are a headline crisis throughout the Amazon, choking the skies and filling emergency rooms.

It’s not just the residents of these cities that are at risk. A growing number of analysts and scholars say there is no rescuing the rainforest without tending to the towns where some 8 in 10 Amazonians live.

Start with clean water. Brazil boasts one of the world’s largest river systems, led by the bounteous Amazon basin. Nearly all rainforest waterways traverse cities, where they pick up untreated sewage, solid waste and industrial runoff that threaten aquatic biodiversity and water quality. Yet local politicians, keen to expand vote-winning city “improvement” projects, typically exert pressure to roll back protected areas along watersheds in the name of urban sprawl.

Washington Fajardo, a longtime Brazilian urban development specialist and a consultant for the Inter-American Development Bank, says city government must step up.

“There is no solving the planet’s water problems without engaging Amazonian cities,” he said.

As dismal and chaotic as they are today, Amazonian cities top the region’s Social Progress Indicator, an aggregate of 47 measures of well-being compiled by Amazonia 2030 and Imazon, two leading rainforest research outfits. While urban centers cover just a fraction of the river basin, they control most of its wealth, power and votes. In 2022, the 29 most populous rainforest cities generated 41% of Amazonian gross domestic product.

And that may be the best news yet for the besieged tropical habitat. Amazon cities, like cities everywhere, can be catalysts of change. Indeed, without the quintessentially urban ecosystem of think tanks, tech startups, supply chains and consumer markets, there would be scant hope for rolling out so-called nature-based solutions for the vaunted bio-economy that experts tout as critical to reinventing the Amazon’s predatory slash-and-burn extractive industries.

“You can’t have innovation without the exchange of technology and ideas,” said Lucas Nassar, an urban development scholar who runs City Laboratory, a think tank in Belém. “Amazonian cities are where these exchanges take place.”

If big cities create outsize problems, they can also bring salutary transformation as economies diversify and shift from markets linked to depredation and environmental crimes.

Consider Belém: Instead of scraping profits from activities that degrade the countryside — clearcutting, low-yield beef cattle, wildcat gold prospecting — the legacy 17th-century Amazon metropolis has rebooted and prospered. Today services and commerce contribute 65% of municipal GDP, in line with the richest Brazilian cities. Government service, a lifeline across the Amazon, kicks in just 20% of wealth. Fully 56% of Belém’s formal jobs and 48% of wages come from retail.

Growth alone will not set cities on the path to virtuous development. Nor will simply “correcting course in the city save the forest,” says Beto Veríssimo, the cofounder of Imazon. “But a more prosperous and orderly city will ease incentives to pillage and deforest.”

Belém will also benefit from the state of Pará’s proactive climate policy, including the river basin’s first Bioeconomy Plan, to reap wealth from the standing forest, and as the first Amazonian state to sign on to the United Nations’ “Race to Zero” initiative to reach net zero carbon emissions by 2036.

Still, Amazon-sized obstacles remain. Manaus, a megacity with a population of 2.1 million, sprawls over a land area the size of Qatar. São Felix do Xingu, with a population of just 132,000, occupies a space bigger than Austria.

“Brazilian mayors have a lot of power, but how do you govern a municipality the size of a European nation?” says Fajardo. “The challenges are immense.”

That’s old news along the São Joaquim. And as the city prepares to welcome envoys from around the globe with Brazil’s ambitious climate agenda, the families at risk on Belém’s swollen canals have one of their own.

“If Brazil wants to show off to the world,” says Almeida, “we’re obliged to show them the community the way it really is.”