By Amanda Magnani and Laiza Mangas
The two-bedroom apartment in Belém became Suelen Freitas’s home in 2020, when she moved her family to the same building as her elderly mother. On the edge of the Amazon rainforest, it was where her story played out for five years, from enduring the Covid pandemic, to watching her two children get into the university.
But in March everything changed. An eviction notice gave them and their neighbours 30 days to vacate their apartments. One by one, all 12 families were forced out. “It was very painful,” Freitas said.
This year’s summit, which began with an idealistic dream that the world would come to see the climate crisis for themselves in the rainforest, is increasingly enmeshed in anger and recriminations over sky-high accommodation costs and accusations that poorer countries are being forced out of the meetings.
Freitas’s story has become an all too common one in a city which, even before it was chosen to host the summit, was suffering a housing shortage and the country’s second-highest rental costs.
“Cop30 was just the cherry on top,” said Priscilla Santos, the co-founder of the Rede Amazônidas pelo Clima thinktank. She credits the big real estate companies that operate in the city with triggering the lodging crisis.
“They immediately moved to secure exclusive deals with high-end property owners and promised to rent them out to foreigners at outrageous prices,” she said.
Local government picked up the idea and Cop30 was presented as a money-making opportunity on social media and beyond. Promotional material found by the Guardian encouraged local people to “take advantage of this great opportunity to earn even more”.
Lured by the prospect of once-in-a-lifetime profits, landlords soon started favouring short-term rentals for Cop30 at the expense of the city’s residents.
Freitas’s husband, who is an Uber driver, spent the 30 days after their eviction notice scanning the streets for rental listings. Each time the conversations were the same: “Is it for Cop? No? Then we’re not renting to you.”
It was clear from the beginning that Belém would not have enough hotel rooms for the 50,000-odd people expected to attend the summit, so resorting to private homes was always a condition for the event to happen. But the way it has played out has in some cases been unfortunate.
Giovana Silva* moved with her husband to a three-bedroom house with a back yard in February 2024, when the couple decided to start a family.
A year into the three-year fixed-rate lease, however, the landlord approached them. In exchange for agreeing to vacate the house in November, Silva and her husband were offered about a tenth of the landlord’s expected profits from Cop30 rentals.
The verbal agreement included some remodelling of the property, which was supposed to last a week. Instead, it dragged on for almost three months. “The worst part was being confined to our bedroom, the only part of the house that remained undisturbed,” Silva said.
Silva is pregnant and it pains her to think of what’s to come: stripping the house of anything remotely personal, moving in with the in-laws for a month, and not knowing how the guests will treat her home or what it will look like when she returns. “It’s much too little money for such a heavy burden,” she said.
