One of Brazil’s most celebrated scientists, Carlos Nobre is best known for his warnings of a “tipping point” in the Amazon: a critical threshold beyond which the world’s largest rainforest enters an irreversible collapse. He is in high demand when we meet shortly before the opening of COP30, the UN climate summit under way this week in the Amazonian port of Belém.
A global authority on the interactions between tropical rainforests and the climate, Nobre was a lead author of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) that won a Nobel Peace Prize in 2007 for its reports on global warming. A few years ago, the UK’s Royal Society elected him the first Brazilian member of the scientific academy since Emperor Pedro II in the 19th century.