Country Name: Brazil
Author: Mark Lutes (1), Rubens Born (1) and Paulo Moutinho(2)

Three climate change experts from Brazil tell the Ecosystem Marketplace why they think any successful mechanism to address deforestation must be incorporated into the global carbon market.



There is now broad consensus among both NGOs and governments that it is time to move forward with addressing deforestation as part of the global effort to prevent dangerous climate change.

So can we now be confident that efforts to reduce tropical deforestation, which were the subject of such deep conflicts and divisions in the past, will soon be fully integrated into the global climate change regime? Unfortunately, this cannot yet be taken for granted.

In fact, one country—Brazil, with the largest area of tropical forest in the world—continues to oppose both market approaches linked to the Kyoto Protocol, and any other kind of binding, enforceable measures under the multilateral climate change regime. Pressured internationally by the initiative of Papua New Guinea at CoP 11 in Montreal to open up a new discussion on tropical deforestation, and domestically by the Environment Ministry and other actors wanting to see progress on this issue and even a national target for reducing deforestation, the Brazilian government, spearheaded by its Environment Ministry, developed its own proposal for an international mechanism to reduce emissions from tropical deforestation. Brazil formally presented this proposal in Nairobi during November of 2006.

This proposal incorporated key elements of previous proposals for "compensated reductions" (Santilli et al. 2005, Moutinho & Schwartzman 2005), but had to be shoehorned into the restrictions imposed by the Foreign Affairs Ministry, which has been the principal actor in the formulation of Brazil's negotiating positions since 2003. The key restrictions were that any mechanism agreement had to be strictly voluntary for the participating countries; the scheme could not lead to any future commitments, and it could not involve tradable emissions credits within the Kyoto framework.

Given these restrictions, which eliminated the possibility of financing through the emerging global carbon markets, the Brazilian proposal included a voluntary fund to compensate those countries which could demonstrate a reduction of emissions from deforestation below an agreed baseline.

Most other rainforest countries are willing to consider mechanisms linked to carbon markets. But Brazil's refusal is a serious obstacle to such a mechanism. Given its weight in the negotiations, and the fact that it has one of the most advanced systems of monitoring deforestation and the resulting greenhouse gas emissions, Brazil is clearly the most suitable country in the short term for the application of such a mechanism.

The reasons for the restrictions imposed are not entirely clear, but it is likely that they involve some combination of the following: a) a predisposition within Brazil's insular Foreign Affairs Ministry, dating back to the 1972 Stockholm Conference, to defend the rights of developing countries to pollute and deforest as the inevitable price of progress and development, and to accuse developed countries of trying to impose restrictions and "pull up the ladder" to prevent others from achieving their level of development; b) Brazil's resistance to allowing its forests to enter into any kind of international legal regime, often justified as a defense of Brazil's territorial sovereignty; and c) a strategy of insisting that the terms of the Berlin Mandate, which guided the negotiations of the Kyoto Protocol, be carried forward to the current negotiations over the post-2012 climate regime, as a way to avoid any movement towards the adoption of new commitments or obligations under the global climate regime.

Whatever the reasons, Brazil's position on reducing emissions from deforestation is part and parcel of its current defensive approach to the climate negotiations. Despite being held hostage to the conditions imposed by the Foreign Affairs Ministry, it is not difficult to find those in the Environment Department who defend this approach. Perhaps one could be forgiven for suspecting there is a sort of "Stockholm Syndrome" at work here.

At the same time, President Lula and especially Environment Minister Marina Silva have insisted that Brazil is willing to do its part in the global effort to reduce greenhouse emissions. And there are many prominent voices in Brazil calling on the government to take a much more proactive stance in the negotiations, by adopting a target for emissions from deforestation and taking the lead in significantly strengthening the global regime, with specific commitments for some developing countries.

Such initiatives will be crucial to the long-term fate of the forests. Stand-alone mechanisms to reduce emissions from deforestation, even if successful, will be of limited benefit if the forest disappears anyway as part of a savannization process resulting from global warming, as predicted by recent Brazilian studies and confirmed in the IPCC Working Group 2 report.

Clearly efforts to reduce deforestation will be most effective as part of a strong global climate change regime. It's no coincidence that the first country to contribute significant funds to a stand-alone fund of the type proposed by Brazil is one of the countries that has refused to ratify the Kyoto Protocol. And in announcing his contribution, Australian Prime Minister John Howard used the opportunity to further criticize the Kyoto Protocol.

There is a golden opportunity to integrate measures to reduce emissions from deforestation into the existing climate regime, under the UNFCCC and its Kyoto Protocol. Along with providing a reliable source of funding through the carbon markets, such integration would provide an important precedent for expanding the role of developing countries in the multilateral climate regime, help to dispel any remaining doubts about the viability of the Kyoto approach, and increase the credibility and leverage of developing countries in calling on all Annex 1 countries to do their fair share and truly take the lead by significantly reducing their emissions in the second commitment period.

(1) Vitae Civilis Institute for Development, Environment and Peace – www.vitaecivilis.org.br, São Paulo, Brazil
(2) Instituto de Pesquisas da Amazônia – IPAM – www.ipam.org.br, Brasília, Brazil.

First published: June 18, 2007

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