The Negro River unfurls like a dark artery through the Amazon. When it reaches the city of Manaus, its black waters reflect sky, forest, stilt houses and tall buildings along the riverbanks. It's a Saturday evening, and life pulses in the city: grilled tambaqui fish at floating bars, brega music spilling from the streets, açaí ice cream served on plastic stools at Ponta Negra Beach. 

Warm and humid year-round, Manaus is one of the metropolitan areas that defy the myth that the Amazon is a demographic void. According to Brazil's last national census, about 30 million people inhabit the nine states located in the Brazilian Amazon — 60% of them in urban centers like Manaus, a city of 2.4 million known for its Free Trade Zone, a tax-free industrial hub. 

The rainforest's largest city reveals how an Urban Amazon balances modernization, climate inequality, and cultural resilience.

How Inequality Shapes Climate Vulnerability in Manaus

Manaus wears its paradoxes openly. While the wealthiest live by the river, enjoy colonial opera houses built during the rubber boom, and stay in air-conditioned spaces, many residents live  in informal settlements on the periphery of the main city, lacking basic services and infrastructure. “Inequality is evident in Manaus," says Patrícia Patrocínio, activist and founder of the Perifa Amazônia collective. “There are neighborhoods that receive no public services whatsoever." 

The risks increase significantly when climate-related disasters strike. In the Urban Amazon settlements, the effects of wildfires, drying rivers, flooding, and heat waves hit first and hardest.

In 2023, Manaus ranked among Earth’s most polluted cities as wildfire smoke, fueled by illegal deforestation, blanketed the city in an orange twilight  that  choked streets for months. Last year, the season was no different. Hospitals became overwhelmed with respiratory patients; schools canceled activities; outdoor commerce froze; access to water was rationed, with limited hours to fill tanks; and temperatures went up.

Right under the equatorial sun, the heat in Manaus during the smoke season is unbearable. The cruel irony is that, encircled by the world's largest tropical rainforest, Manaus is one of Brazil’s capitals least covered by trees, intensifying heat stress. The streets’ concrete absorbs warmth like a sponge, creating urban heat islands where temperatures can soar up to 10°C (18°F) above the forest. The wildfire smoke makes such suffocating temperatures even more dangerous.

In wealthy zones, the crisis is experienced differently. Rich neighborhoods have green areas nearby, air-conditioned environments, and reliable access to water supplies. When emergencies arise, they command immediate media attention and institutional response, accelerating policy reforms while  settlements on the periphery still wait for basic help. “Where I live, we don't even have an emergency care center. When smoke hits, those who fall ill because of the air pollution must travel to another neighborhood for care," says Patrocínio. “The problem is that public transport doesn’t reach our community. People must leave the alley to catch buses on the main roads. During the smoke season with extreme heat, walking long distances for transport becomes part of the suffering, exposing people even more to smoke and heat," she adds, describing how the climate emergency deepens existing vulnerabilities. 

When the rainy season arrives, refilling rivers and washing the smoke away, the situation doesn't necessarily improve. Lacking basic sanitation, with poor waste management (only 2% of the city's waste is recycled), rainwater floods dirt streets, swirling with sewage. In some areas, such as Parque das Tribos, an Indigenous neighborhood, uncollected garbage festers for days. “Floods occur almost exclusively in peripheries. Wealthy areas don’t usually experience this," notes Lucas Sarraff, specialist in Sustainable Cities and Public Policy. "When rains come, diseases follow," Patrocínio adds. 

As extreme climate events intensify yearly, progress in adapting Manaus to the climate crisis crawls at what Sarraff calls a ’turtle’s pace.’ With another smoke season imminent, the City Hall has yet to publish the municipal climate plan. Meanwhile, federal adaptation policies crafted in Brasília, over a thousand miles away from Manaus, fail to address the Urban Amazon's regional specificities, “ignoring Amazonian realities of culture, infrastructure, and economy," says Sarraff. In a continental-sized country like Brazil, where biomes, climate conditions, access to public services, and wealth inequality vary drastically, one-size-fits-all solutions of mitigation and adaptation prove inefficient. 

Yet in the city's alleys, a defiant rhythm rises.

Culture as a Catalyst for Climate Justice

Nepal, a neighborhood in Manaus, was hit hard by last year's drought, the most intense one the country has experienced in over 70 years. Spray cans hiss as graffiti blooms and young people rhyme about their realities. Hip-hop in Manaus has absorbed Amazonian textures, connecting climate inequality issues to the rainforest's cultural identity. At Perifa Amazônia, Patricia Patrocínio witnesses culture becoming both a shield and spear for young Amazonians, one of the demographics she describes as most impacted by the climate crisis.

"Hip-hop empowers youth, enabling them to envision new futures and transform their communities, giving them tools to rewrite narratives from the peripheries," she affirms. By voicing struggles from their territories, Patrocínio argues, these grassroots artivists can become frontline climate leaders and ignite systemic shifts. 

In the streets of Manaus, Perifa Amazônia joins over 350 Brazilian grassroots collectives partnered with Amazônia de Pé in a direct policy push: protecting 50 million hectares of undesignated public Amazonian lands — an area matching Spain’s size — by designating them to Indigenous peoples, quilombolas, and conservation units. These lands face ongoing threats from land grabbing and devastation, being the most affected by the wildfires that suffocate the cities — from January to April 2025, 80% of all deforestation in the country occurred there. To secure these lands, nationwide activists collect signatures for a Popular Initiative Bill, a constitutional mechanism requiring 1.5 million signatures to propose legislation to Congress.

Over half these unprotected lands lie in Amazonas State, where the capital city of Manaus anchors resistance. There, initiatives such as Perifa Amazônia use culture as a tool to translate complex climate debates into popular language and to get the community together to sign for Amazônia de Pé's popular bill, strengthening the collective effort to reach the 1.5 million-signature goal.

Cultural resistance in Manaus takes many forms: from Hip-Hop driving policy shifts and Indigenous artisans fostering bioeconomy, to rainforest-based traditional cuisine, riverside leisure, and massive folk festivals rooted in Indigenous and Afro-Brazilian traditions—like the iconic rivalry between the Bois-Bumbá Caprichoso and Garantido. The Amazonian way of life, even in large cities such as Manaus, is an act of climate justice itself, as it sustains food sovereignty, balance with nature, and valorization of ancestral knowledge, proven to be the answer for a breathing future.

Where the smoke suffocates the city and greed bleeds the land, as rap group Bruxos do Norte rhyme, culture becomes both oxygen and compass. Merging the rainforest’s ancient pulse with the streets’ concrete, the Amazonian culture resurrects hope. 

"Te chamo pelo nome e vou, povo do rio, bixo de água doce
Eu cresci na beira, tudo mudou, tudo mudou
Da margem do rio seco, nas margens da cidade eu sigo vivo"

(I call you by name and go, river people, freshwater creature
I grew up on the banks, everything changed, everything changed
From the margins of the dry river, on the margins of the city, I remain alive)

(Vazante 2 - Bruxos do Norte) 

Manaus is more than a case study in climate injustice — it’s a frontline where communities are crafting solutions with creativity, care, and cultural depth. Through grassroots action, Urban Amazon residents are not just surviving the climate crisis — they’re helping reimagine how cities in forest regions can adapt with equity, sustainability, and dignity. As the world focuses on saving the Amazon biome, it must also invest in the people who call it home — because resilience doesn’t only grow in trees, it thrives in lived experience, local knowledge, and shared expression.