A UF climate activist is leading a 2,693 mile journey across the Amazon that’ll end with a United Nations conference.
A group of climate change leaders are embarking on an expedition down the Amazon River Oct. 29 to Nov. 17 — from Iquitos, Peru, to Belém, Brazil — to film a documentary about the impacts of climate change on the Amazon and the people who live along the river. On Nov. 17, the group will present the documentary at the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Belém.
Rock Aboujaoude, a UF regenerative agriculture Ph.D. candidate, founded Campus Climate Corps in 2015 while an undergraduate. Aboujaoude said he wanted to empower and invite students to participate in the climate change discussion and create change through this group.
Now, he’s leading the team to the Amazon.
“It kind of has this little symbology of holding the world’s biggest climate change conference of the United Nations where the Amazon River exists, which gives life to the entire rainforest, which we call the lungs of the world for a reason,” Aboujaoude said.
Aboujaoude will lead the group across the Amazon and conduct interviews, accompanied by a videographer and translator. He hopes their journey will touch delegates’ hearts and convince them to pass regulations in their countries to reduce carbon emissions, he said.
“We want the world to see what climate change looks like up-close in the lives of the people who depend on these waters every day, beyond what is hidden behind the negligence of policymakers,” he said.
A climate crisis in the “lungs of the world”
The river the Amazon people depend on for livelihood is suffering due to the climate crisis, Ahoujaoude said. Ongoing deforestation and rising global temperatures recently caused a two-year drought in the region.
No easily accessible documentaries exist to tell the story about how people’s lives are being affected by extreme climate change, he said.
Throughout the expedition, the group will be live broadcasting updates on Instagram and Youtube. While the documentary is meant to influence the UN delegates, he said, the group’s second audience is the people watching the daily broadcasts.
“Many of them are young people who, as they go through their programs, they're realizing how big climate change is going to impact them in all of their lives,” Aboujaoude said.
John Capece, a former UF professor and water hydrologist who directs the Campus Climate Corps, said the Amazon Rainforest is “under siege.” The forest is emitting more greenhouse gases than it absorbs, he said.
Capece said agricultural development has caused deforestation, which is often done by tree burning, releasing carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. The soil will continue to release carbon for years, he said, furthering global warming and causing more extreme natural disasters.
The Amazon, like many other tropical regions, have a wet and dry season, he said. Because of climate change, the Amazon’s rainfalls during each season are changing patterns and becoming deregulated. This has a “fundamentally adverse effect” on the Amazon ecosystem, he said, which harms the animals and human inhabitants.
“We cannot continue to be passive observers of destructive global changes,” Capece said. “Young people need to step up. They need to grab the steering wheel from the adults and turn this bus away from the cliff.”
The team’s expedition
Jeffery Dismukes, the group’s translator, will make arrangements for guides, transportation and lodging, as well as translating between English and Spanish during interviews with Amazon locals.
He said he’s worried about understanding the hundreds of Indigenous languages spoken across the Amazon.
He’ll also need to earn the locals’ trust, he said, who might be wary and afraid of government backlash for speaking, in order to successfully carry out the documentary.
Samuel Saum, the group’s videographer, hopes to fill a gap in climate change coverage: visuals. Not many images and videos exist to depict the earth’s changing terrain and its impact on people, he said. If people could see what was happening, Saum hopes, they could better connect with the issue.
“Imagine you’re in a village that only has solar power, and you have all these issues, but you don’t really have anyone to reach out to or ask for help,” Saum said. “I’m hoping that this will bring awareness to these very small fisher villages using solar power in the middle of the Amazon with these problems.”
Preparing for the trip hasn’t been easy. Saum and his companions have had flights cancelled and travel passages closed. At one point, they weren’t sure if they could get their camera gear into Peru. With a lack of internet in the Amazon, it was difficult to plan the trip, he said.
When the documentary is shown, Saum said he hopes UN delegates will understand the harsh effects of climate change and teach them about people who are in need. He also hopes to share the documentary with a wider audience outside the UN conference, Saum said. He and Aboujaoude are contacting potential distributors, he said.
“I just hope that at the end of this, we’ll be able to show what’s really going on and get some really good stories out there,” Saum said.
Contact Angelique Rodriguez at arodriguez@alligator.org. Follow her on X @angeliquesrod.
Angelique is a first-year journalism major and the Fall 2025 graduate school reporter. In her free time, she'll probably be reading, writing, hanging out with her friends or looking through the newest fashion runway shows on Vogue.
