Climate action is not futuristic talk – 7/3/2023 – Why? Economês in good Portuguese

Gift. This is the tense we should use to talk about the climate crisis. What seems to have been taken from a post-apocalyptic movie script is already reality: higher temperatures, more frequent natural disasters, significant damage to property and people’s lives.

There is no lack of cases to exemplify this statement. I bring here just two pinches of recent news. In the United States, because they are losing money due to increased occurrence of weather extremes, many insurers have stopped offering policies to homeowners or abandoned markets in which they operated. Thus, it becomes more expensive for people to continue living in their homes. In Europe, it is estimated that the effects of climate change led to the death of more than 16,000 people in 2022 and caused financial losses of around US$ 2 billion.

The climate crisis is not something that will only affect the next generations, decades to come or a remote and uncertain future. She’s here now, and climate action can’t wait any longer. In a context that demands effective and immediate action, Brazil plays a unique role. To understand this, we need to step back and explain (very briefly) the origin of the climate crisis. Let’s go.

Greenhouse gases (GHG) are essential for sustaining life on Earth. They accumulate in the atmosphere and form a kind of barrier against the heat loss that occurs when the surface of the planet cools during the night. The system works like a greenhouse, keeping the temperature on Earth warmer and therefore the planet habitable. Although GHGs are not a problem in themselves, their concentrations in the atmosphere have increased significantly and rapidly, driven by human emitting activities. This leads to an increase in average global temperature. Data from NASA shows not only that the earth is getting warmer, but that it is happening faster and faster.

The increase in average global temperature is associated with natural disasters, food and water insecurities, economic uncertainty and violent conflicts, just to name a few developments. This is where climate action comes in. To break with the trend of temperature increase and mitigate its negative impacts, the world needs to reduce emissions – brutally. This fundamentally depends on each country’s “will” and “capacity” to reduce its emissions. My previous column explained why the “will” is such a huge challenge. This time we will focus on “capacity”.

Since the 1990s, Brazil has been one of the ten largest emitters of GHGs in the world. However, its composition of emitting sources is quite different from the prevailing standard. The energy sector (which includes transport and electricity generation) is the main contributor to emissions in most of the other countries in the ranking, but not here. In Brazil, the land use change and agriculture sectors accounted for approximately 75% of total Brazilian emissions in the period. When including energy, the third most emitting sector in the country, this slice jumps to over 90%.

While much of the world faces difficulties (technological, behavioral and political) to make a rapid energy transition, Brazil could cut almost 40% of its annual emissions by acting in just one area: combating deforestation in the Amazon. This is not trivial, but it is possible. The country has even been very successful in using public policies to reduce forest destruction, contributing to the deforestation rate in the Amazon falling 84% in less than a decade. It was also a period of sharp and persistent decline in total Brazilian emissions.

Combating deforestation in the Amazon is crucial and offers a relatively quick way to reduce our emissions, but Brazilian climate action cannot be restricted to this. While protecting the rainforest, the country needs to seek ways to cut emissions by also acting in other biomes, as well as in the agriculture and energy sectors. Encouraging sustainable production via financial instruments, offering technical assistance to disseminate low-carbon production techniques, taking advantage of the enormous potential it has for generating energy from renewable sources… There is much that the country can do now.

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