Seeds of Hope
RainforestECO – Regeneration & Youth Impact
COP30: What Belém and the Sociobio Restaurant Taught Me About Climate Action
Do you remember the iGiveTrees team? If not, please visit the page to see who’s written this guest post: Leonardo Andrade. He’s a dear friend who helped to conduct bilingual team meetings and meet in person with planting partners in Brazil, when I was no longer traveling there. As a recent participant in COP30 in Belem, he shared a highlight with us all. Enjoy!
My First COP: What Belém and the Sociobio Restaurant Taught Me About Climate Action
It was my first time at a COP — a climate change COP — in my country, in the Amazon, in Belém. I fell in love with that city when I went there for the first time, 25 years ago. I was totally surprised by a culturally vibrant city that had much more to offer than the natural beauty I expected to find. So, I was really looking forward to being there.
My first impression upon entering the Blue Zone was of a large, formal, fairly typical conference. Many people, formally dressed, were running up and down the corridors. After a couple of hours, other types of characters started to appear: Indigenous groups, activists giving speeches with microphones, and people from all over the world wearing their regional clothes — creating an enchanting atmosphere of diversity and hope to create deep, impactful change for the climate.
I cannot say much about the official negotiations, and much has already been written about their results. However, I experienced the non-negotiated dialogues: a very busy area of the Blue Zone that hosts dozens of pavilions from countries and NGOs (both individual organizations and alliances). I was very impressed by the level of dialogue and coordination among NGOs, which gave me the impression that these people have been meeting at COPs for decades and are seeing their movement gain momentum year after year.
But the message I would like to share with those who didn’t have the chance to be there is called Na Mesa da COP30, in Portuguese — or On the Table of COP30. This was a major landmark for me. In a nutshell, a coalition of NGOs managed to make the COP Presidency apply the same public procurement standards used by Brazil’s National School Feeding Program (PNAE), meaning that at least 30% of the food served should come from agroecological family farmers and traditional communities.
Can you imagine the hard work and political articulation required to make bureaucrats approve a policy like this for a COP? Instituto Regenera lead the way with standing in the shoulders of both the networks for cooperatives and associations and family farmers it has been nurturing for years and very strong advocacy and coalition building skills.
Once the “go-ahead” from the COP Presidency was secured, a massive operation was launched to make the Sociobio Restaurant a reality. Some figures help make this more concrete:
- More than 60 cooperatives and community enterprises engaged
- More than 4,000 meals served per day
- More than USD 1M in purchases from family farming
- More than 100 people working to make it possible
What’s more, eating there cost less than USD $7.50 for an all-you-can-eat meal, including one glass of natural juice and one piece of dessert — also less than I paid for a very small, cold quiche on my first day in the Blue Zone.
All Blue Zone volunteers and COP workers could eat at the Sociobio Restaurant. After 2 p.m., it was opened to all participants. Real food, real taste, real people producing it and making it happen. The contrast with the junk, fast, and expensive food served at ALL previous COPs was so absurd that, as a newcomer, it was hard to believe how innovative this was — and that it had never happened before. In any case, I appreciated it every single day I could.
Finally, speaking about results, I was particularly happy to see that the Food Systems theme — alongside Forest Restoration — played a very relevant role in the non-negotiated pavilions. This visibility was comparable to Energy Transition, which has been the big star of the climate action agenda for far too long. While energy transition can only reduce carbon emissions, Forest Restoration and Food Systems can actually sequester carbon — only they can do that.
Want to learn more about On the Table of COP30?
https://namesadacop30.org.br/english
https://institutoregenera.org.br/
You can find Leonardo here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/leonardo-s-andrade/
Can We Still Learn from Our Elders?
Let me to tell you a story…
In 1971, my first garden mentor was Angelo Pellegrini, a beloved professor at the University of Washington in Seattle. He was the father of a close friend, and hosted me during the time it took to sell my car before my first trip abroad to experience France and the UK. He’d recently published the book “The Food Lover’s Garden” and I sat curled up in his living room reading it from cover to cover, while he’d prepare meals from the ingredients we’d just picked. I was hooked.
I’d been enthralled by the plant kingdom since I was a little girl, trying to grow any vegetable scrap coming out of our kitchen. So now, I truly hope more and more children will see what I saw: MAGIC.
Five year old me, with my friends…
But it wasn’t until I experienced Angelo’s Garden as a young adult that I really understood their truly magical powers. He would crush fragrant herbs beneath my nose, teach me how to pick leaves of kale without damaging the living plant that could grow to be almost as big as a small tree, harvest his famous beans, snack on fresh figs and make compost in a city lot.
While my own father had been the cook in the San Francisco apartment I grew up in, we mostly ate frozen vegetables, canned soups and TV dinners. So this was my first experience of eating FRESH food, seeing how it grew and eating it freshly picked within hours.
When I had a child, I brought her to meet Angelo as a three year old to experience his garden. That day was well recorded in photos, that inspired a mockup for a children’s book. But as a single mom I needed to focus on more pressing matters…
So the book dummy lived in a storage locker until a few weeks ago when my daughter helped me unearth old portfolios of my botanical art. She’s now an award winning video story producer herself, so her opinion meant even more than purely family sentiment. As we looked through the old book dummy together, her eye for visual storytelling encouraged me to bring this story forward now.
Here we go…
Many things have changed in the publishing world over the years. There are now a multitude of ways the material can be presented to actually be educational as well as fun. So now I can see this as a teaching tool, for children to learn how they can do their own growing experiments like I once did, even if they don’t yet have a garden. Better yet if they do. And, I’m excited by it all!
You can now donate!
https://www.zeffy.com/en-US/donation-form/donate-to-rainforesteco
So if you’d like to support the process of my updating the original content to be more compelling for children of this time, please make a donation by clicking on the image above that will take you to the donation page for RainforestECO.
Grateful for the Dead
I will be forever grateful for the generosity of Bob Weir, a founding member of the Grateful Dead. There was one thing we had in common: a passion for rainforests. And his commitment to be of service to them was grounded in the form of financial support for a number of US based rainforest non-profits.
Mine played out by offering occasional geography lessons for brilliant homeschooled youth in Los Angeles, who then put on their own benefit concert to help me buy the first trees given to smallholders in rural Brazil. The event catapulted an endeavor started by youth onto international platforms, inspiring children in São Paulo to replicate the process.
The project started by children’s bake sales and music eventually grew into a small non-profit, iGiveTrees, winning an award from the French Ministry of Environment in 2016, that resulted in our participation in four UN climate change conferences.
In 2023, three teams of the homeschooled youth, were able to attend the final concerts of the Grateful Dead in Los Angeles, Denver and San Francisco, to speak with attendees about the work they’d helped to initiate. That grand finale for iGiveTrees that will always be treasured.
And it’s all thanks to Bob Weir, who was humble enough to pay attention to someone who didn’t even know what a bright star he was, but loved to talk about the rainforest with anyone who would listen.
Kindness never dies.
Living Walls in the Amazon Spheres
The Living Walls in the Amazon Spheres in Seattle genuinely offer a tropical forest experience in the midst of a Pacific Northwest tech hub.
It took me over a year to meet the plant genius behind it all, and was well worth the wait. In 2024 I began a query, seeking out Kara Hurst, Amazon’s Chief Sustainability Officer, to see if she’d like to host an exhibit or event there at the time of COP30 in Brazil. As it turned out, my visit to the Spheres was on the last day of the COP, and was exactly what my spirits needed.
There I was welcomed by Ben Eiben for the most fulfilling plant day I’ve had since last leaving the rainforests of Brazil in 2018. I asked him how this world class botanical experience came to life in the midst of the tech hub, and was amazed to learn that…
“There are over 250 species of epiphytic plants (those that grow on tree branches rather than in soil in nature) on the living walls. Behind the plants is a mesh textile made out of microfiber that wicks water easily, enabling them to have a very simple irrigation system.“
“At the bottom of each is a gutter that captures any effluent the plants don’t absorb, returning it to a reservoir in the parking garage. There the collected water is analyzed for nutrient and PH composition, with corrections made to bring balance back to the system before being pumped back to the top of the grid.“
The Spheres has a coffee bar for employees to enjoy while sitting amidst the greenery with laptops or on breaks, with a free banana stand outside. It’s open to guests of employees and to the general public by booking well in advance.
But personally, I’m going to wait for another guided tour by the grounded visionary behind these Living Walls of Seattle.
The Five Principles for Climate Action
Maurits Dolmans shares his paper proposing that “it is time for finance fiduciaries to adapt to the new climate reality.” https://www.netzerolawyers.com/publications/member-blog-sustainable-fiduciary-duties
Sierra Club Foundation included their findings in their recent newsletter.
Fiduciary duty increasingly requires investors to consider long-term systemic risks, including climate and nature degradation, as central to prudent decision-making. In “Sustainable Fiduciary Duty: Escaping the Climate Prisoner’s Dilemma,” the Net Zero Lawyers Alliance reframes sustainability not as optional values-based investing, but as a core obligation tied to protecting diversified portfolio returns.
Thank you Maurits, for your support and for sharing your work with our audience.
Outrage & Optimism at COP30 Amazonia
“[H]umanity was guided for most of its existence by the ideal of being. It is very recent that we have begun to be guided by the ideal of having. Mercantilism shifted the ideal of being to the ideal of having. Before the Greeks wanted to be wise and free, the Egyptians wanted to be immortal… Unfortunately, with this shift brought by mercantilism, we came to want to have things. The problem is that while there are no limits to being, there are limits to having. The planet cannot support 8 billion human beings with an infinite capacity to desire, all desiring to have things. Today, we only feel happy if we consume. In this urge to produce and consume, we are consuming ourselves, consuming the very conditions that sustain life on the planet.”
~Brazil’s Minister for the Environment and Climate Change, Marina Silva
Marina Silva, Brazil’s Minister for the Environment and Climate Change, joined Christiana Figueres to share her call for an Ethical Global Stocktake – a reminder that sustainability is not only a way of doing, but a way of being: https://www.outrageandoptimism.org/episodes/inside-cop-brazils-climate-leadership-the-cop30-host-takes-centre-stage
Drawdown at COP30 Amazonia
The following excerpts are from an article written by Dan Jasper, a senior policy advisor at Project Drawdown. You can read his entire post here: https://drawdown.org/insights/are-climate-talks-worth-it-six-takeaways-from-cop30
This year’s major United Nations climate talks, COP30, fell short of many expectations.
Despite being held in Belém, Brazil, known as the “gateway to the Amazon,” issues such as stopping deforestation and transforming global food systems received relatively little attention. While some bright spots emerged, overall progress was minimal.
COP30 faced a number of logistical hurdles this year, including limited lodging, formidable humidity and rain, and even a sizable fire that disrupted the last week of negotiations. These logistical issues, paired with a general atmosphere of deteriorating international cooperation, meant the Brazilian presidency was carrying a considerable burden to see the talks through. In some sense, we should celebrate the fact that the UN climate process has not collapsed entirely (a low bar, I know)…
If I had to put my faith in anything, it would be in the power of people to lead, mobilize, and deploy real climate solutions.
The Amazon is falling, but people are rising
After all the media coverage, hot takes, and focus on the conference location, very little was said about the Amazon and its importance to us all. Several points stuck out to me on my first visit to this incredible rainforest:
- First, the scale of people living in the rainforest is much bigger than I imagined – roughly 47 million people, including over 2 million Indigenous people, live in the Amazon.
- Second, its biodiversity – the Amazon is thought to be home to more than 10% of species on Earth, and a new species is discovered there every other day on average.
- Third, its size – the Amazon is over one and a half times the size of India, covering roughly 6.7 million square kilometers.
- Fourth, it’s incredibly vulnerable – according to the latest Amazon Assessment Report, the Amazon has been deforested by about 18%; that is dangerously close to a ‘tipping point’ that could push the rainforest into a savanna ecosystem (a savannah).
Dan Jasper is a senior policy advisor at Project Drawdown with a multidisciplinary background in public policy at the intersection of climate change and poverty alleviation. Read the entire post…
This work was published under a Creative Commons CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license.
iGiveTrees 2010-2025 Rainforest Regeneration
This post is simply to offer the people around the globe, who helped an idea grow into a project that became a non-profit supporting the LIFE of the rainforest more stories. The iGiveTrees organization closed at the end of June 2025.
AND, new inspirations are arriving for ways to maximize the benefits of what occurred in the past, as well as what’s possible in the future. As a first step, I’m bringing this site back to life. Please be patient as the rebuild occurs, the stories pour out and offers are created for ways you can support new growth.
We are determined to continue sharing the stories of the rainforests, focusing always on the most hopeful news we can find. One member of the Brazilian iGiveTrees team was present for COP30. and I’m looking forward to sharing his views here after we speak. I’ve heard and read perspectives from a few different vantage points so far, and am digesting it all before labeling with any opinions!