- Brazil is trying to resume its role as a protagonist in the environmental arena by hosting COP30 in 2025 and urging other countries to present ambitious targets to cut emissions.
- However, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s administration failed to openly discuss the country’s nationally determined contribution (NDC) and allocated small budgets for climate transition.
- Experts state that zeroing out deforestation, recovering thousands of hectares of native vegetation and stepping back from oil expansion plans are crucial to meeting Brazil’s commitments.
- UPDATE (11/11/2024): The Brazilian government released its NDC on the evening of Nov. 8, hours after the publication of this story.
Brazil is a heavyweight in the world’s climate balance, for good and for bad. The country is among the 20 largest economies worldwide, the sixth-largest emitter of greenhouse gases, and one of the 10 largest oil producers. At the same time, it harbors the planet’s largest rainforest and a significant share of its biodiversity.
“We are certainly part of the problem, but we also have the potential to help provide quick solutions,” Natalie Unterstell, president of Talanoa Institute, a Brazilian think tank committed to climate policy, told Mongabay.
After four years under the rule of the climate denialist Jair Bolsonaro (2019-22), Brazil now tries to resume its protagonist role in the climate arena with President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. His first step toward showing that Brazil was back in the climate game was taken at COP27 in Egypt, even before Lula was sworn in.
Once in office, he announced Pará’s capital, Belém, as the host of COP30 in 2025. Environmental agents were back on the ground to fight illegal miners and land-grabbers, and deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon reached a six-year low.
“The government has recovered a considerable part of the damage done by the Bolsonaro administration,” said Márcio Astrini, the executive secretary of the Climate Observatory, a network of civil society groups working against climate change. “It brought COP to Brazil, reduced deforestation and created the Ministry of Indigenous Peoples,” he told Mongabay.
Ahead of COP29, starting Nov. 11, Brazil has urged other countries to submit ambitious targets for cutting emissions, the so-called nationally determined contributions (NDCs), to be updated by all Paris Agreement signatories by February 2025 — according to the United Nations, the current commitments are far from achieving the goal of limiting global warming to 1.5° Celsius (2.7° Fahrenheit) in this century.
The campaign is also headed by Azerbaijan and the Arab Emirates, hosts of COP28 and 29, respectively. The troika, as the group is called, claims to be “leading the way and demonstrating their commitment to a sustainable and resilient world.”
But Brazil has its own contradictions to deal with. After a year marked by Brazil’s worst drought ever and a tragic flooding in the South, the fight against deforestation and climate change received the lowest budget among the government’s priorities for 2025. In addition, the creation of a Climate Authority to advise public bodies on climate change issues, promised by Lula in the 2022 electoral campaign, has yet to come off the ground.
A feeling of uncertainty also hovers over Brazil’s own NDC, which has been discussed behind closed doors, according to Unterstell. “This is very frustrating because the government is not trying to build a proposal with legitimacy in Brazilian society,” she said.
In June, the environmental minister Marina Silva said Brazil would present “an ambitious NDC, to lead by example.” Still, the final document, which Lula’s administration may present in November in Azerbaijan, is unknown. The environment ministry didn’t respond to Mongabay’s email.
(Hours after the publication of this article, Brazil released its NDC in a statement, with no ceremony or the presence of the press. The country announced that it is committed to reducing its greenhouse gas emissions by between 59% and 67% by 2035, compared to 2005 levels.)
As it has been doing for the last 10 years, in August, the Climate Observatory published an NDC proposal for Brazil to democratize the discussion and indicate the size of the nation’s challenges. “Our NDC is a dialogue with the planet’s atmosphere,” Astrini said. “We’re looking at what needs to be done, the country’s potential and putting a figure according to need.”
To fulfill its role in the fight against climate change, the Climate Observatory states Brazil would have to cut its emissions by 92% by 2035, compared with the 2005 baseline. A target that, according to Astrini, will hardly be incorporated by the federal government. “We presented the NDC to seven ministries, but they never asked us any questions, and we weren’t called to any meetings.”
Almost half of Brazil’s greenhouse emissions (46%) originate from deforestation. Agriculture, especially the methane released by livestock, accounts for 28% according to the last report of the System for Estimating Greenhouse Gas Emissions and Removals (SEEG), from the Climate Observatory.
Besides zeroing deforestation, which Lula promised to do by 2030, the organization states the country needs to recover 21 million hectares (51,900 acres) of native vegetation and implement agricultural techniques like no-till farming and pasture management.
For Unterstell, Brazil also needs to take a stake in oil production. In contradiction with its climate ambitions, the federal government pledges to make the country the fourth-largest oil producer by 2029 in an expansion plan that includes the controversial exploration of the Amazonas River’s mouth. At the same time, the federal administration reduced nearly 20% of its budget to energy transition in 2025.
“We’re still in a rhythm of expansion, not transition,” Unterstell said. “It’s a government full of contradictions,” Astrini added. “To lead the agenda, you have to have a mobilized country. And Lula may want that, but he doesn’t have it.”
UPDATE (11/11/2024): The Brazilian government released its NDC on the evening of Nov. 8, hours after the publication of this story.
Banner image: Brazil is one of the countries pushing other nations to present ambitious targets for cutting emissions targets at COP, but the Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva administration has its own internal controversies to solve. Image courtesy of Ricardo Stuckert/PR.
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