The Paradox of Progress
Just a 10-minute boat ride from COP30’s gleaming conference venue in Belem, Brazil, Combu Island presents a microcosm of environmental injustice that challenges simplistic narratives about economic development and climate action. The island’s case reveals how well-intentioned economic growth—in this case, eco-tourism—can paradoxically accelerate environmental degradation while deepening inequality within the very communities it purports to benefit.
The Mechanics of Erosion: Physical and Social
The Physical Impact
Lana Pantoja’s family story encapsulates the crisis. Where her family home once stood, only a toilet remains at the river’s edge—a haunting monument to displacement. The mechanism is straightforward yet devastating: increased vessel traffic from tourism boats creates stronger and more frequent wave action, accelerating the natural erosion that once progressed slowly over generations.
The riverine communities, who have lived sustainably on these islands for over a century, now face an existential threat not from their own practices, but from external economic forces. The constant parade of motorboats—ferrying tourists eager for “authentic” Amazonian experiences—literally washes away the foundations of homes and livelihoods.
The Economic Divide
The response to this crisis illuminates a deeper injustice. Wealthier establishments—the big restaurants catering to tourists—can afford to build retention walls, protecting their investments. Meanwhile, families like the Pantojas must abandon their ancestral homesites and rebuild further inland, bearing the full cost of displacement.
This creates a vicious cycle: tourism generates economic activity that flows primarily to those with capital to invest in infrastructure (restaurants, tour operations, protective barriers), while those who provide the “authentic” cultural backdrop for this tourism bear the environmental costs without commensurate benefits.
The Riverine People: Identity and Vulnerability
The residents who identify as “riverine people”—a community that subsists through fishing and harvesting from the forest—represent a way of life intrinsically tied to the natural environment. Their traditional practices have proven sustainable over generations, yet they now find themselves vulnerable to changes driven by external economic forces.
This vulnerability stems from several factors:
Resource Dependence: Their livelihoods depend directly on natural resources (fish, acai berries, miriti palms) that are increasingly affected by both climate change and tourism-driven environmental degradation.
Limited Financial Capital: Without resources to build protective infrastructure, they cannot defend against erosion or participate meaningfully in the tourism economy as business owners.
Cultural Displacement: As they’re forced to move inland and adapt to changing circumstances, the very way of life that makes them interesting to tourists is under threat.
Singapore’s Relevance: Distance and Connection
The Illusion of Separation
For Singaporean youth delegates, particularly Riddhi Manoj Mehta’s observation is crucial: “In Singapore, we can be quite removed from where food comes from as most of our food is imported, and how climate change can affect crops.”
Singapore’s model of development—highly urbanized, import-dependent, technologically advanced—creates physical and psychological distance from environmental impacts. This distance can breed several misconceptions:
- The Homogeneity Fallacy: As Brendan Toh noted, there’s a tendency to view overseas communities as monolithic, particularly in climate negotiations where one delegate represents an entire nation’s position.
- The Environmental Hero Narrative: The assumption that everyone in the Amazon is a staunch environmentalist ignores the reality that many prioritize immediate concerns like infrastructure and income.
- The Invisibility of Supply Chains: When acai appears in Singapore’s trendy cafes as a superfood bowl, the complex social and environmental story behind each berry remains hidden.
Singapore’s Parallel Vulnerabilities
While Singapore’s challenges differ in scale and nature, the island nation faces its own environmental justice questions:
Climate Adaptation Inequality: Rising sea levels threaten Singapore, but the capacity to adapt varies significantly. High-income residents can afford homes in less vulnerable areas or properties with advanced flood protection, while lower-income communities may lack such options.
Economic Development Trade-offs: Singapore’s development model has sometimes prioritized economic growth over environmental conservation, raising questions about whose voices are heard in planning decisions.
Food Security Dependence: Singapore’s reliance on food imports (importing over 90% of food) means that climate impacts on agricultural regions abroad—like the acai harvests in Brazil—directly affect Singaporean food security and prices, with lower-income households disproportionately affected by price increases.
The Tourism Dilemma: Destroying What It Seeks to Preserve
Combu Island exemplifies a global paradox in sustainable tourism. Visitors come seeking authentic experiences of Amazonian life and pristine rainforest environments, yet their very presence—multiplied across thousands of tourists—degrades the authenticity and environment they seek.
This creates several tensions:
Economic Need vs. Environmental Cost: Communities need income, and tourism provides it. Yet unregulated tourism growth accelerates environmental damage that undermines long-term sustainability.
External Benefits, Local Costs: Tour operators and restaurants in Belem may profit while Combu residents bear environmental costs.
The Commodification of Culture: “Authentic” riverine life becomes a commodity for tourist consumption, potentially distorting traditional practices and relationships with the environment.
Lessons for Climate Policy
Beyond National Delegations
Brendan Toh’s realization about the diversity within communities challenges how climate negotiations function. The UNFCCC process operates on national delegations, but this structure can obscure internal differences:
- Urban vs. rural perspectives
- Indigenous vs. settler communities
- Tourism industry vs. traditional livelihoods
- Wealthy vs. poor within the same region
Effective climate policy must account for these differences, ensuring that solutions don’t benefit some groups while harming others within the same community or nation.
The Myth of Win-Win Solutions
The phrase “a rising tide lifts all boats”—invoked by locals in the article—is revealed as false. Economic development, even “green” development like eco-tourism, doesn’t automatically benefit everyone equally. Without intentional redistribution mechanisms and protective measures, development can deepen inequality.
For Singapore, this suggests that climate adaptation and sustainability initiatives must explicitly address distributional impacts:
- Who benefits from green economic opportunities?
- Who bears the costs of environmental degradation or climate adaptation measures?
- How can policies ensure that vulnerable communities aren’t further marginalized?
The Importance of Ground Truth
The field trip’s value lay in confronting assumptions with lived reality. This suggests several implications:
Policy Design: Effective climate policy requires deep understanding of local contexts, not just technical solutions or economic incentives.
Stakeholder Engagement: Meaningful participation by affected communities—not just formal representation—is essential.
Ongoing Learning: Climate awareness isn’t a fixed state but requires continuous engagement with evolving realities.
Moving Forward: From Awareness to Action
For Singapore’s Climate Movement
Brendan Toh’s reflection about focusing on those already aware of climate issues while dismissing others as “lost causes” points to a crucial challenge. Building broad-based support for climate action requires:
Meeting People Where They Are: Understanding that concerns about income, infrastructure, and immediate needs are legitimate and must be addressed alongside environmental goals.
Building Coalitions: Recognizing that effective climate action requires diverse perspectives, including those who prioritize different values.
Avoiding Elite Environmentalism: Ensuring that climate advocacy doesn’t become the province of the privileged while excluding those most vulnerable to climate impacts.
Institutional Changes
The Combu Island case suggests several policy directions:
Tourism Regulation: Implementing carrying capacity limits, mandatory environmental impact assessments, and requirements that tourism revenues support local adaptation measures.
Equitable Adaptation Finance: Ensuring that those least able to afford protection receive priority in climate adaptation funding.
Supply Chain Transparency: Helping consumers understand the environmental and social impacts of their consumption choices, from acai bowls to other imported goods.
Just Transition Frameworks: When economic shifts are necessary for climate action, ensuring support for communities and workers who depend on carbon-intensive industries.
Conclusion: The View from Combu
The toilet standing at the river’s edge—the last remnant of Lana Pantoja’s childhood home—serves as a powerful metaphor. It represents both loss and resilience, the failure of unregulated development and the determination of communities to adapt and persist.
For Singapore’s youth delegates, the lesson from Combu Island extends beyond academic understanding of climate change. It reveals that environmental challenges are inseparable from questions of justice, equity, and power. The erosion of the island isn’t just a physical process but a social one, reflecting how economic forces—even those marketed as “sustainable”—can deepen inequality when not carefully managed.
As Singapore grapples with its own climate vulnerabilities and sustainability challenges, the Combu Island experience offers crucial insights. True climate action must go beyond technical solutions and emissions targets to address fundamental questions: Who benefits? Who pays? Whose voices are heard? And how can development truly lift all boats, not just leave some stranded as the waters rise?
The field trip’s greatest value may be in nurturing a generation of climate advocates who understand that the fight against climate change is inseparable from the fight for justice—and that both begin with listening to communities like those on Combu Island, whose homes are literally washing away while the world gathers nearby to negotiate their future.