From cocoa to climate action: lessons from the Brazilian island of Compo

But this rich harmony carries a caveat: If negotiators at the 30th climate conference in Belém want to protect the world’s forests, they must first ensure the safety of the people who protect them.

Chocolate, community, and a vision for the future

Combu Island is just a 30-minute boat ride from Belém – the host city of this year’s UN Climate Conference – and is home to the ‘Filha do Combu’ (Combo’s Daughter) association, founded by Isette Costa, known as ‘Doña Nina’. Her initiative is proof that community-led solutions can fuel global climate action.

What started as a modest effort to convert traditional knowledge into income, has grown into a thriving enterprise. Doña Nina started out producing chocolate on a small scale using Amazonian cocoa, selling her products at local fairs before completing vocational training to expand her business.

Today, Doña Nina runs a small factory and a tourism program that invites visitors to see how chocolate is made in the rainforest. Of the 20 workers working on the site, 16 are women.

Agro-ecological production system: Indigenous species cooperate to enhance yields. Rows of banana trees, for example, are planted to attract pollinating bees essential for cocoa.

Doña Nina told us: “I usually enrich the forest with what works, because we don’t cut down the forest here to plant trees. We work with the existing forest, looking for trees and planting them where there is natural degradation.”

Use of solar energy

The chocolate factory – whose products are sold throughout Brazil – runs eight hours a day on solar energy. But power outages remain a challenge. When a falling tree knocks out power, machines can remain idle for days. Doña Nina hopes to double solar capacity to prevent damage and keep production stable.

Dealing with an unstable electrical grid is not the only problem on Kombo Island, as climate impacts also exacerbate the problem. Recently, cocoa crops have shrunk; Fruits and trees dry up, shrink and become distorted. The fear of losing access to drinking water increases day by day. Doña Nina said that although it is the rainy season, not a single drop has fallen on Kumbu for more than 15 days.

From local solutions to global action

Amid this fragile balance, Annalena Baerbock, President of the United Nations General Assembly, visited the island. This is her second visit to Combo after she met Dona Nina for the first time when she was German Foreign Minister.

Upon her arrival, Ms. Baerbock expressed her happiness to see the project thriving, generating “production chains in the heart of regional communities so that the benefits remain here for the indigenous people, the local people.”

Speaking to UN News, Ms. Baerbock said the initiative is proof that real solutions already exist – solutions that unite economic growth, sustainable development, and the fight against the climate crisis. She stressed that linking these models on a large scale is necessary to keep global warming below 2 degrees Celsius, and ideally at 1.5 degrees Celsius.

She warned that “Destroying forests is destroying humanity’s life insurance policy.” added: “COP-30 must be a conference where we show the world that the vast majority of countries, people in business, and financial actors are uniting to fight the climate crisis, especially in times of geopolitical challenges, and thus achieve sustainable growth for all.”

Lessons from the forest

After tasting Amazonian fruits and several chocolate recipes prepared on site, Doña Nina led Ms. Baerbock on a tour through the jungle, where they had met a group of women producers two years earlier.

They discussed the project’s focus on empowering women who sell their products through the “Daughter of Combo” association.. Donna Nina highlighted that women bring a unique energy of care and dedication that shapes the quality of chocolate.

During the tour, they watched together as a tapirpa tree slowly died under the grip of a parasitic climbing plant. Doña Nina commented that once the tree died, the climber would die too, because it was deprived of its only source of nutrients. Ms. Baerbock hoped that this was a disguised diplomatic lesson, which could be linked to the emissions that are destroying the planet.

But the forest also offered hope. They stopped in front of the ‘Sumauma’ tree, an Amazonian giant believed to be over 280 years old. These trees can rise to 70 meters and have witnessed centuries of history, and could witness centuries more, if the COP30 is successful.

UN News is in Belém, Brazil, reporting and live coverage of the Climate Change Conference (COP-30).