The Brazilian delegation arrives at COP26 with a skeleton in the closet explaining: why it weakened its carbon emission reduction targets under the Paris Agreement (2015), when the commitment of all countries is to vitaminize them.
But this corpse, at least, is not the fault of Jair Bolsonaro (no party): Dilma Rousseff (PT) started the stratagem, and Michel Temer (MDB) continued it. The maneuver is non-partisan.
Thanks to it, until Sunday Brazil could continue increasing its emissions, despite the nominal goal of reducing them by 37% by 2025 and 43% by 2030. In 2020 alone, deforestation resulted in an increase of 9.5% in the production of greenhouse gases. greenhouse effect, according to the consortium of NGOs The Greenhouse Gas Emission Estimation System (SEEG).
Now, at the eleventh hour, the government announces that the new commitment is to reduce emissions by 50% by 2030. In absolute terms, however, it would continue to emit the same amount of pollution promised in 2015 by the government of Dilma, 1.2 billion tons – carbon dioxide equivalents (GtCO2and). The country goes back to square one.
The reduction is calculated on the climate pollution of base year 2005. But the count of emissions for that year, the baseline, has changed. One more time.
As of April 2016, the month before the president’s impeachment, they were officially 2.1 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent (GtCO2e), when they were then revised to 2.8 GtCO2e.
The change in the calculation base in 2016 created an accounting slack of 400 million tons for Brazil to comply with by 2030. This represents half of what Saudi Arabia, the power of fossil fuels, emits in a year.
In 2020, already under Bolsonaro, the 2005 emissions account changed again to 2.4 GtCO2e. The bonus for the national target assumed in the Paris Agreement then shrank to 200 million tons.
At the origin of the accordion are methodological limitations in the first national inventories of greenhouse gases. There were no good biomass density maps in the Atlantic Forest biome, for example.
As new data and satellite images were emerging and being incorporated into the methodology, the inventories were progressively improved, as authorized by the UN. All countries, including Brazil, were learning to set up carbon inventories.
The first and biggest difference in calculation was made official in the third national inventory, published in April 2016, four months after Paris. However, as the sheet he learned, upon arriving in the French capital, the Brazilian delegation headed by the Minister of the Environment, Izabella Teixeira, was already aware of the changed numbers.
The third report, produced by the Ministry of Science and Technology, was ready. The federal government, however, did not decide on the publication. It would not look good as the country prepared for the Paris negotiations, the most important summit on the climate crisis in many years.
Brazil is again in a similar situation, even though the 2020 correction has reduced the size of the climate pedaling. Only this time, the country’s international reputation is destroyed by the force of Bolsonaro’s anti-environmental agenda and by the increase in destruction in the Amazon and in the cerrado.
In Glasgow, the president would have been charged for this had he not fled the summit. Right here he is being sued in court for maintaining the scriptural artifice that attenuates the national target in favor of the climate, when Brazil is expected to strengthen it.
To preserve credibility at the negotiating table, the government would be more productive in raising the percentages of emission reductions, so as not to weaken the commitment in absolute terms (millions of tons of CO2). They would have to rise to 46% and 51%, respectively in 2025 and 2030, instead of 37% and 43%, for the total emissions to be the same as announced in 2016.
Another possibility would be to abandon the 2005 numerical milestone, as a lot has happened since then. Deforestation in the Amazon fell from 19,000 km² that year to 4,500 km² in 2012, with Lula and Dilma; with Bolsonaro, it returned to the level of more than 10 thousand km² per year. The destruction of the cerrado continues unabated.
The correct thing, if there were a real commitment to contain the warming of the atmosphere by 1.5ºC, would be to consider the trajectory of national emissions in recent decades, set an ambitious target for the next one that is compatible with the Paris Agreement and draw a detailed route to reach it.
But what did the current government do? It maintained the commitment adopted by Dilma in absolute terms, anticipated carbon neutrality from 2060 to 2050, transferring the responsibility to future presidents, and just days before COP-26 announced a Green Growth program that does not specify anything about how it intends to get there.
The climatic pedaling started with Dilma, true, but with Bolsonaro she went from negotiating, in Paris, to a true planetary swindle, in Glasgow, selling something that doesn’t belong to her.
*This analysis has been updated to reflect new targets announced by the Brazilian government on Monday morning (1st)
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