BELEM, Brazil — World leaders descending on the United Nations annual climate summit in Brazil this week will not need to see much more than the view from their airplane window to sense the unfathomable stakes.

Surrounding the coastal city of Belem is an emerald green carpet festooned with winding rivers. But the view also reveals barren plains: some 17% of the Amazon's forest cover has vanished in the past 50 years, swallowed up for farmland, logging and mining.

It is here on the edge of the world's largest tropical rainforest that Brazil’s President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva hopes to convince world powers to mobilize enough funds to halt the ongoing destruction of climate-stabilizing tropical rainforests in danger around the world and make progress on other critical climate goals.

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