PREFACE

The University of the Amazon (UNAMA) is publishing the first issue of the academic journal Solidariedade & Sustentabilidade precisely as COP30 begins in Belém, Pará, a United Nations event laden with symbolism and challenges.

COP30 has brought to the heart of Brazil, and the Amazon, the discussion between governments and civil society about our common future. This discussion is urgent and fundamental because we are losing the war against the climatic consequences of our way of life, which generates global warming, impacting the economy, the quality of life of the majority, and even justice and democracy; because the concentration of income, wealth, and power reaches levels that, like global warming, put human civilization at risk. Time has been relentless in showing us what happens when we do not act rationally based on science and the living knowledge of communities, including ancestral ones.

Brazil has the scientific and moral authority to indicate paths for a humanity frightened by the catastrophes that may result from acting wrongly or from not acting. This is the purpose of a COP30 in the Amazon: to show that it is possible to keep the forest standing and at the same time make it a space for the production of wealth and a life full of citizenship.

Never has the concept of a society that does not produce, and does not reproduce, sustainably been so true. We understand sustainability as the political-economic strategy that seeks and manages the balance between 3 dimensions of life: Economic, Social and Ecological. The overburdening of nature, reduced to resources, the pollution that reveals the inadequacy of traditional industrial and agricultural technology, as well as the use of non-renewable energy sources, promote the destruction of the natural environment, to the point where we have to ask if a return is still possible. The planet and civilization are out of balance, threatening all forms of life, including and especially the human species.

It is in this scenario that the recovery of the idea of Solidarity, present since the origin of human existence and in living beings, is urgently needed. Solidarity should be understood as synergy, as reciprocity, recognition of the interdependence between individuals, and dynamic equilibrium. Never has the interaction that shares desires and interests, and makes it an action, been so important for the very survival of humanity. It is present in multiple cultures and religions, as well as in various classical theories of societal development.

Solidariedade & Sustentabilidade, which, beyond science, must be recognized, are also present in the foundations of Christianity, as highlighted by the recently deceased Pope Francis, as well as in Buddhism. They indicate that science finds a strong connection with religare, the search for existential reason that science will never resolve.

In Brazil, this complementarity between Sustainability and Solidarity underpins the search for new approaches to the economy, such as those structured around the primacy of value and the right to life, like the Solidarity Economy, based on a new productive and distributive ethic and the practice of Conscious Consumption, which recovers elements of communitarianism for the construction of plural and inclusive metabolisms, proposing new strategies for economies of scale and technological innovations.

The journal Solidariedade & Sustentabilidade takes as its starting point the experience of the embryonic core of its editorial team, which envisioned a gap of opportunity to be filled by this initiative of the University of the Amazon. In this first issue, we present some unpublished articles, as well as republish articles that also use the Creative Commons license. We believe that providing the free horizontal circulation of ideas is part of our responsibility as intellectual workers and organizations committed to republican democracy.

Belém, November 6, 2025.

Betânia Fidalgo

Rector of Unama

Clovis Ricardo Montenegro de Lima

Researcher at the Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation