In a letter addressed to President Jair Bolsonaro, the Minister of the Environment, Joaquim Leite, stated that the global climate crisis was accentuated in 2021 and calls for an urgent update of the policies developed in this area by the government – a recurring target of criticism for problems in environmental management.
The minister’s statements are part of a draft obtained by Reuters with the exposition of the reasons for a bill to be signed by Bolsonaro and sent to Congress to restructure the National Policy on Climate Change (PNMC).
“In 2021, the global climate crisis was accentuated, especially with the post-pandemic economic recovery of Covid-19”, says the minister in the document signed on February 2.
“The aforementioned National Policy on Climate Change, instituted at the end of 2009, is currently obsolete and needs urgent updating, especially to cover the new goals assumed by the country recently at COP26 and to meet the wishes of the entire civil society on this topic of growing importance”, he said.
In an excerpt from the document, the minister tells the president that the new legislation will promote a balance between climate change mitigation policies and adaptation actions to changes that have already occurred in the climate, giving more weight to the area of adaptation.
According to the draft bill attached to the letter, adaptation refers to initiatives to “increase climate resilience and the ability of a natural or human system to adjust, seize opportunities or deal with and respond to the consequences of climate change”.
Sought after, the Ministry of the Environment said that the document is under construction and will go through the process in the portfolio before the minister’s final approval.
In October and November of last year, the Senate approved and sent to the Chamber projects that amend the PNMC. Among them, there is a text that anticipates the goal of reducing greenhouse gas emissions and deforestation.
Simultaneously, the government approved the opening of a public consultation to evaluate its own bill on the subject.
The Executive’s text underwent 60 days of consultation and the final version is now ready to be evaluated by ministers and presented to Bolsonaro. The measure defines that national policy must establish guidelines to achieve climate neutrality by 2050 and zero illegal deforestation by 2028.
According to Leite’s official letter, the project seeks to modernize norms, concepts and guidelines related to climate change. According to him, the goals are in line with those announced by the country at the 2021 United Nations Conference on Climate Change (COP26), at the end of last year.
Before Bolsonaro’s approval, the project will undergo analysis by the Interministerial Committee on Climate Change and Green Growth. The first ordinary meeting of the collegiate is scheduled for Wednesday, February 23. The approval of the draft proposal is on the agenda of the meeting.
If it is confirmed that the text is sent to Congress, the period for processing must be tight. This is because in election years, the Legislature usually concentrates votes on projects in the first semester, in addition to limiting the analysis of proposals considered controversial. In the second half of the year, parliamentarians usually leave for electoral campaigns in the states, which puts a brake on the plenary agenda.
In a campaign to join the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), the Brazilian government has been announcing measures related to sustainability. In a letter sent to the organization in January, Bolsonaro defended his management in the environmental area, stating that Brazil is committed to implementing public policies in line with the goals of combating climate change.
Since the beginning of the Bolsonaro administration, the government has been charged with strengthening the environmental preservation agenda. Criticism is mixed with political pressure and has an impact on diplomatic relations, such as when European countries made the implementation of the agreement between Mercosur and the European Union conditional on a concrete reduction in deforestation in the Amazon.
In January of this year, Brazil had the highest deforestation ever recorded in the Amazon rainforest for the month. There were 430 square kilometers, five times more than in January 2021, showed preliminary data from the National Institute for Space Research (Inpe).
