by Graziella Albuquerque, for NINJA Coverage at COP26

In this Sunday (31), began the United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP 26) in Glasgow, Scotland. The conference is composed of more than 100 world leaders, several businessmen and environmentalists who will discuss solutions and goals to limit global warming by up to 1.5°C.

President Jair Bolsonaro opted not to go to COP26, because he feared a negative repercussion caused by his presence at the event. Vice-President Hamilton Mourão, who is also the president of the National Council of the Legal Amazon, also had his presence vetoed by Bolsonaro. Brazil will continue to be represented by the Minister of the Environment, Joaquim Leite, who has been in this position for four months.

It is not by chance the absence of Bolsonaro. The country is demoralized by its denial of environmental protection and the high rates of deforestation and illegal fires in the world’s largest rainforest, the Amazon. According to CNN, the Amazon rainforest set a new record for deforestation in September alone, daily losing an area of forest larger than 4,000 soccer fields.

Members of the Brazilian delegation heard by BBC News Brazil classified the negotiation environment at COP26 as “more complex”, “more difficult” and ” more harder” for Brazil, compared to previous conferences. The difficulty for Brazilian delegation will be to reduce the impact of the negative image created by the Jair Bolsonaro government’s environmental policy and to convince about the seriousness of its environmental commitments.

The international isolation of the Brazilian government can generate great economic losses. In 2020, the wildfires in the Pantanal served as a reason for the European Union countries to paralyze negotiations with Mercosur, which continue frozen. Bolsonaro was also denounced to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) on the last 22nd for rights violations against the human rights defenders and of the environment. Civil society entities claim that Brazil is among the most dangerous countries for environmental defenders.

The All Rise group, composed of judges, environmentalists and scientists, presented on October 12th a complaint against the Bolsonaro government at the International Criminal Court in The Hague directly citing its environmental policy, as briefed by ISTOÉ Magazine

Green Growth Program

One environmental policy that the government intends to present at COP26 is the National Green Growth Program, which was launched a week before the conference.

The objective of the program is to systemize Brazil’s actions in the environmental and sustainable development area. However, neither the Planalto, nor the ministries of Environment and Economy, responsible for the initiative, have detailed how these actions should occur in practice.

Report on Climatic Changes

The BBC had exclusive access to more than 32,000 comments and criticisms that governments, companies, and other institutions have made about the report of the IPCC, the main global organ responsible for organizing scientific knowledge about climatic changes and guiding actions to combat them.

In the messages to the IPCC, Brazil strongly opposed the report’s conclusion that the adoption of a diet with less meat and more plant-based foods would be necessary to combat climatic change. The argument was endorsed by Argentina and to a less extent also by Uruguay – other major meat producer.

According to the IPCC, meat production is one of the main reasons for deforestation in the Amazon and the Cerrado, because the native vegetation is, in most times,  overthrow to give way to pastures or soy plantations, which feed  herds.

The  rough draft IPCC report says that “vegetable-based diets can reduce emissions by up to 50% compared with the average emissions of the Western dietary.”

Both Brazil and Argentina have defended that the authors of the IPCC report erase or modify parts of the text that speak of “vegetable-based diets” fulfill a role in managing climatic change or that describe red meat as a “high carbon emission” food.

Paralyzation of the Amazon Fund resources

In the international negotiations, the strategy used by the government is to demand more resources from rich countries as a reward for preserving forests, alleging that not to explore the natural resources of the Brazilian biomes would generate financial losses to the country.

However, according to Marcio Astrini, executive secretary of the Climate Observatory, there is already a program in Brazil that receives remittances of resources from other countries for forest conservation, the Amazon Fund. The Fund was created in 2008 to distribute resources to projects to prevent and combat deforestation, as well as to finance conservation projects and the sustainable use of forests in the Amazon Region.

The principal donors are Norway and Germany, which have suspended funding due to the Brazilian government’s lack of concrete measures to combat environmental crime and decrease forest fires in the Amazon.

Besides, there are about R$ 2.9 billion of the Amazon Fund stopped, without activity since August 2019, according to the Climate Observatory network in a public audience at the Supreme Federal Court, on October 26 last year. In 2021, Hamilton Mourão, affirmed to journalists that there is no deadline for the resumption of the Amazon Fund.

“The government has no moral to request money from other countries, because the money is already here. What is missing in Brazil is not money to protect the forest, what is missing in Brazil is government to protect the forest. Lack of commitment”, criticizes Astrini. “There is no commitment to combat deforestation, but there is commitment to environmental crime. That’s the reason why the Fund was paralyzed and there is no perspective of being retaken”, he adds.

The Paris Agreement

From the Paris Agreement to 2020, instead of reducing, Brazil increased its greenhouse gas emissions by almost 5%, reveals report. Only last year, in the middle of the pandemic, while the world recorded a 6.7% drop in emissions, Brazil went in the opposite direction: a 9.5% increase, the highest since 2006.

Data shows that in the Bolsonaro government, in 2020, the number of fire outbreaks around the territory was the highest in 10 years; the volume of carbon emissions in 2019 was the highest in 13 years and the deforestation of the Amazon reached the highest level since 2008.

In the ranking of countries that most aggravated global warming in 2020, Brazil appears in fifth place, behind only China, the United States, Russia and India. Most Brazilian emissions come from deforestation linked to pastures and agricultural crops.

Alternatives for green economic development

The Jornal Nacional news channel obtained with exclusivity a study from the Brazil Climate, Forests and Agriculture Coalition with 40 of the most successful projects that exploit the green in a lucrative and sustainable way.

One of the projects is located in Garça, in the countryside of São Paulo. The degraded pastures gave way to a huge replanted forest. With the springs protected by the green, the water returned. The company sells 1 million tree seedlings per year and invests in tropical wood with high market value and other lucrative crops.

The executive director of the International Institute for Sustainability, Bernardo Strassburg, estimates that Brazil can earn up to R$ 10 billion per year with the intelligent use of forests. The value of the environmental services provided in just one hectare of forest in the Amazon is equivalent to R$ 3.5 thousand per year. More than the livestock activity would generate profit in the same area or even a soy plantation, according to the column of the National Union of Bioenergy.

The worst choice is not doing anything. Brazil is a country that depends on renewable energy, such as hydroelectric power, and that has an important part of its economy in agriculture, therefore it should be committed to concrete goals for protecting natural resources and fighting climatic change.

Translated by Fatima Ventura – Catálogo de Tradutores

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