The 2025 United Nations Climate Change Conference, or COP30, will bring 50,000 people to the city.
Local resident Claudio Verequete lives near the highway and previously made a living harvesting acai berries.
Those trees are gone now, cut down to make way for the UN Climate Conference.
Aerial view of an acaí palm plantation in Abaetetuba, Para State, in the Brazilian Amazon Forest, on August 4, 2023.© Photo by Evaristo SA / AFP
Our fear is that one day someone will come here and say: Heres some money.
We need this area to build a gas station, or to build a warehouse.
And then well have to leave, he told the BBC.
What was once a whole area will soon be two halves blocked by pavement.
Verequete told the BBC his village wont even have an onramp to the highway.
They will just live abutting its looming noise-blocking walls.
But environmental protections around the Amazon rainforest have always prevented it.
And so the Amazon was felled.
The highway will be called Avenida Liberdade or Liberty Avenue.
Avenida Liberdade is part of a much bigger infrastructure project that Para hopes will revitalize Belem.
Its spending $81 million to expand the airport and build a five-million-square-foot park.
Belem was chosen on purpose.
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