Last chance for the Amazon

The agreement reached by almost 200 countries at the United Nations climate summit in Sharm el-Sheikh (COP27) to finance a new fund to compensate for “loss and damage” caused by natural disasters in developing countries, marked a milestone in the history of those conferences of the parties, although almost everything remains to be defined, among other things, who will contribute to the fund and how much and who will distribute to whom the money collected.

He was not the only one. The summit was the best possible framework for Brazil’s return to the front line of the fight against climate change, announced in the Egyptian city on the Red Sea by the newly elected Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. Around those same days, at the G20 summit in Bali, Brazil signed with Indonesia and the Republic of Congo, which together house 52% of tropical forests, a kind of “OPEC of trees” to cooperate in their preservation.

“Loss and damage” (loss and damage) was a tentative concept at the 2007 summit in Bali. In 2013 in Warsaw it was included in its institutional architecture and in 2015 it was integrated into article 8 of the Paris Agreement. In Glasgow, the developed countries evaded the demand by offering another dialogue table as a palliative. Ahead of the Sinai summit, US special envoy John Kerry dismissed the idea as “unrealistic.”

“Until 2030, climate change will lose the Global South some 428,000 million dollars annually and 1.67 trillion in 2050 if the average global temperatures rise 3°”

The change, at least in attitude, is remarkable. Terms like “legal liability” (liability) or offsets, were a red line for rich countries. According to Saleemul Huq, one of the few experts who have attended the 27 COPs, the consensus on his inclusion in the debate will allow, at least, to talk about the matter.

Until 2030, climate change will lose the Global South some 428,000 million dollars annually and 1.67 trillion in 2050 if the average global temperatures rise 3°, according to estimates by Climate Action Tracker. Between 1998 and 2017, Latin America and the Caribbean concentrated 53% of these losses, 1.5% of its GDP, according to the UN.

Peter’s plans

No less important was the proposal by Colombian President Gustavo Petro to recover the Amazon Cooperation Treaty Organization, created in 1995 at the initiative of Brazil and which brings together eight countries in its basin. Colombia and Brazil account for 70% of the Amazon territory.

Bogotá is aware that it needs the geopolitical weight of Brazil, which has 60% of the lungs of the world. According to Glenn Hurowitz, director of Mighty Earth, Brazil exerts a powerful gravitational pull on other forest countries, especially if it adds political credibility to its already formidable dimensions —economic, territorial…—. At COP27, Lula met with Kerry and the Chinese envoy, Xie Zhenhua, who know that without Brazil on board nothing is possible.

Latin America and the Caribbean, which represent 8% of global emissions, are home to 60% of biodiversity, 50% of primary forests and 28% of land with agricultural potential due to its freshwater reserves, greatest in the world

Colombia generates 80% of the electricity it consumes from renewable sources, especially hydroelectric, but oil represents 20% of government revenue, half of foreign direct investment and 10% of GDP, figures that Petro wants to reduce substantially. And he knows that he has Lula on his side, today closer to the green left that governs Bogotá and Santiago than to the extractivist that rules in Mexico City and Buenos Aires.

Bogota wants to integrate the three A’s: Andes, Amazon and Atlantic. In Sharm el-Sheikh, Petro told Folha de Sao Paulo that he will propose to Lula to create a corridor from the Andes to the Atlantic that would connect 309 protected areas, a mosaic of biodiversity in multinational natural reserves. According to Catalina Góngora, from The Nature Conservancy, never before have so many countries in the region shown such affinity and harmony on ecological issues.

the voracity of the dragon

In Bali, Eve Bazaiba, the Congolese environment minister, said that South-South agreements must establish minimum standards for the conservation and sustainable exploitation of their tropical forests. Since 2020, Indonesia has lost 25% of its forest and the DRC 485,000 hectares, according to the World Resources Institute.

There is a lot at stake and less and less time before a point of no return is crossed that would turn the Amazon plain into a deforested savannah. China is today the largest importer of the raw materials produced in the region.

“Today, according to ECLAC, Chinese demand triples that of the US, Canada, the UK and the EU together”

The voracity of the dragon has multiplied the rate of mining, oil and agricultural extraction. In the 1960s, the region exported 156 million tons of primary goods to Western Europe and North America. In 2016, China and other Asian countries imported 527 million tons from the region and the countries of the industrialized North 157 million.

Today, according to ECLAC, Chinese demand triples that of the US, Canada, the UK and the EU combined. Brazil now only directs 22% of its agricultural exports to these destinations. 38% and 58% of soybeans go to China, half produced by multinationals such as Cargill, Bunge, Archer Daniels Midlands and Louis Dreyfuss in the Cerrado, which covers some two million square kilometers, 25% of the Brazilian territory . Today it is one of the largest granaries in the world after losing 20% ​​of its vegetation between 1985 and 2020 due to the advance of agribusiness.

the labors of hercules

This model is hardly sustainable: the region bears the economic and social costs of environmental deterioration. Between 2019 and 2021, the Brazilian Amazon forest lost 34,000 square kilometers, according to the images captured by its satellites. In those same years, the homicide rate increased by 13.8% in the Amazon areas, at the same rate as deforestation.

The city that emits the most gases is not São Paulo, but the Amazonian São Félix do Xingú, with only 90,000 inhabitants but which in its surroundings, in an area equivalent to that of Portugal, concentrates two million head of cattle, the largest bovine herd from the country.

After arriving at the Planalto palace in 2018, one of the first things Jair Bolsonaro did was refuse to host the 2025 COP30. During his tenure, deforestation shot up 78%. During those of Lula, on the other hand, it was reduced by 75%. In Washington Quarterly Brian Winter attributes this success to the financial resources, technical experience and good teams that Lula used and that he will have to reintegrate, but under much more adverse fiscal conditions.

“I have come here to collect what was promised at COP15,” Lula said in the Egyptian city. In September 2021, before the UN, Joe Biden promised aid of 11.4 billion dollars a year in aid, but Congress has not approved the funds. On the ground, things are even more difficult.

In the State of Roraima, on the border with Venezuela, there are more than 20,000 garimpeirosillegal gold prospectors, who pollute the rivers of the Yanomami lands with mercury, for which they hope that the next government will speed up the demarcation of their protected areas.

Everything seems to indicate that Lula will once again entrust Marina Silva with environmental management, the axis of Brazil’s relationship with the rest of the world. According to Winter, part of the business elite supports the idea of ​​turning Brazil into a “green superpower.” But no one thinks it will be easy. Bolsonaro leaned on sectors that benefit from slashing and burning forests, believing that deforestation creates wealth and jobs, so they will not be sympathetic to the return of federal environmental inspectors.

The Bridgetown Diary

There’s big money at stake. In Glasgow, financial institutions and agro-industrial groups pledged to invest 4 billion dollars until 2025 to promote the green transition in South American countries, among other things by reducing the ecological footprint of livestock and soybean crops.

In Bali, the US, Japan, Canada, the UK, the EU and Norway announced a plan – the Just Energy Transition Partnership – that will grant aid worth 20,000 million to Indonesia, the world’s third largest producer of coal, to accelerate its transition to renewable energy. Before, it had already reached a similar agreement of 8,500 million dollars with South Africa and it is preparing another with Vietnam.

Mia Mottley, Prime Minister of Barbados, has called under the Bridgetown Agenda for the IMF to issue $500 billion in Special Drawing Rights to increase investment in clean energy in the Global South.

Brazilian misgivings

Most Brazilians attribute climate change to human action but, at the same time, mistrust foreign intentions in the Amazon and a kind of right of ecological interference. Germany and Norway did not invest a billion dollars between 2005 and 2012 in the Amazon Fund with the intention of dictating policies, but many do not believe it.

Bolsonaro closed the fund, which has already been rehabilitated by the Supreme Court. Norway and Germany have announced that they are willing to collaborate again with the new Brazilian executive. In his 2018 campaign, Bolsonaro promised not to dedicate “another inch” to indigenous lands and kept his word. Lula, instead, has promised to create a Ministry of Native Peoples to protect the Amazon, home to almost 30 million Brazilians, most of whom are very poor.

Rulers and activists

Between 2003 and 2008, the programs that Marina Silva implemented reduced deforestation by 83% in a decade. In Sharm el-Sheikh, Silva met with Colombian Vice President Francia Márquez. Both are black women who came to politics after surviving the violence of illegal mining on their land.

At COP27, Petro and Márquez spoke as rulers, but also as activists. Among his proposals are converting the IDB and CAF into “green banks” to finance projects of 25,000 million dollars in five years, the creation of a regional carbon market and a marine corridor in the tropical Pacific.

The race against time is run at different speeds. In the Peruvian jungle, the biggest environmental problems come from oil spills. Between September and October there were four new ones in the Loreto regions. Ucayali and Amazonas, which are home to several indigenous peoples, including the Awajún and Shipibo-Konibo.

According to Liliana Ávila, from the Inter-American Association for the Defense of the Environment (AIDA), the losses and damages are also cultural, of traditions, languages ​​and ways of life. In May 2021 in The AtlanticDavid Treuer, an ethnic Ojibwe writer, wrote that an appropriate retribution to the native peoples of the US would be to give them control of the country’s system of parks and nature reserves.

In Canada, which is home to 566 million hectares of boreal forests, the largest forest ecosystem in the northern hemisphere, where 70% of the country’s native peoples live, the Ottawa government gave them funds so that they can take charge of their conservation. Quebec’s Cree communities already manage protected areas similar in size to Switzerland.