Exclusive: Brazil’s environment minister talks about climate inaction and the course we have to plot to save ourselves and the planet

Soon after I returned home to Altamira from Cop30, I found myself talking about dinosaurs, meteors and “ambassadors of harm” with Brazil’s environment minister, Marina Silva.

No one in government knows the rainforest better than Marina, as she is best known in Brazil, who was born and raised in the Amazon. No one is more aware of the sacrifices that environmental and land defenders have made than this associate of the murdered activist Chico Mendes. And no one worked harder to raise ambition at Cop30, the first climate summit in the Amazon, than her. So what, I asked, had it achieved?