The idea of forming a coalition of Brazilian civil society organizations to discuss climate change came up in 2001 in Salinópolis, on the coast of Pará, during a dinner. It was a break from an annual meeting of the USAID (the US government’s cooperation agency), and four environmentalists taking part in the meeting took advantage of their free night to escape to a beachside bar and talk about work.
Miguel Calmon (The Nature Conservancy), Mario Monzoni (Amigos da Terra Amazônia Brasileira), Paulo Moutinho (Instituto de Pesquisa Ambiental da Amazônia) and Fernando Veiga (ProNatura) met to continue a conversation that had started that morning at the Belém airport, about the direction that the debate around forests and climate was taking in Brazil. There was great dissatisfaction among various organizations regarding how the government handled the issue of deforestation in the context of the Kyoto Protocol, the first climate agreement signed in 1997.
More than 20 years have passed, and today, the Climate Observatory (OC), a network of 73 civil society organizations, is responsible for the System of Estimates of Emissions and Removals of Greenhouse Gases (SEEG). This initiative comprises the production of annual estimates of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions in Brazil, analytical documents on the evolution of emissions, and an internet portal to make available simply the methods and data of the system, which can be accessed through the link:
The OC outlined a vision whereby Brazil will go beyond carbon neutrality by 2050: by taking advantage of its comparative advantages. Our country can become the first major economy in the world to sequester more greenhouse gases than it emits, becoming negative into carbon as early as 2045.
This vision guides the strategy Brazil 2045—Building an Environmental Power, which can be accessed through the following link:
https://www.oc.eco.br/brasil-2045-construindo-uma-potencia-ambiental-vol-1/
Brazil, the sixth largest emitter on the planet, is responsible for cutting greenhouse gases. But it is also in a better position than many other countries to take advantage of the economic and social justice opportunities the transition to a clean economy offers.
The proposals have eight main themes: 1. Climate policy and international agreements; 2. Prevention and control of deforestation; 3. Bioeconomy and agrosilvopastoral activities; 4. Climate justice; 5. Energy; 6. Biodiversity and coastal areas; 7. Industry and urban management; 8. Governance and financing of the national environmental policy.
For each of them, actions are considered priorities for the first cycle of the new government (2023–2024) and, among them, a subset of urgent proposals to be adopted in the first hundred days of government. Most of them depend only on the president’s political decisions. There are 74 proposals for the first two years and 62 emergency actions for the first one hundred days.
Several of these short-term proposals and very short-term actions consist of reversing the toxic legacy of the previous government. They involve the repeal of decrees and other normative acts and the publication of updated rules, with the resumption of extinct policies diverted or weakened by the past president. Others are about restoring participation and social control in public policies and recovering and expanding transparency in the federal administration, which was significantly reduced in the mandate that ends this year.
With this first map of the path for the reconstruction of Brazilian environmental policy, the organizations of the Observatório do Clima aims to help the government get rid of the legacy of socio-environmental destruction of the past government in the shortest possible time, regaining the country’s leading role in this agenda and the confidence of Brazilian society and the international community.
It also seeks to remedy emergency problems, such as the land grabbing of public lands, invasions, especially of indigenous lands, and violence in the countryside.
And, last but not least, we want to make progress towards stopping and reversing the scourge of deforestation in the country, our most significant source of greenhouse gases, putting Brazil on the path to zeroing it out by 2030, changing our emissions curve as soon as possible to make it compatible with the objective of the Paris Agreement.
This Post was submitted by Climate Scorecard Brazil Country Manager Carlos Alexandre de Oliveira.