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This piece is part of a collection of Anthropology News articles on Climate Governance. Click here to read other articles in the collection.

Since 1995 world leaders have descended each year on a chosen city to discuss the fate of the biosphere at the annual “Conference of the Parties” to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change. But this time they were worried. After the closing of the previous year’s summit in Azerbaijan, climate gurus the world over flung into a panic when they discovered that the selected host for COP30—a mid-sized city in the Brazilian Amazon called Belém do Pará—might be short on hotel rooms. AirBnB markets went haywire, with bunk bed-lined condos batting up to the thousands per night , US dollars. Soon enough, talking heads were airing their anxieties about the reality of hosting a big, important UN conference in a developing city in the Amazon .

In response, the Brazilian government opened a well-known playbook.…