Revoking decrees, reinstalling councils, resuming environmental inspection and fighting the invasion of miners in indigenous lands are some of the 62 emergency measures that the next president-elect must take in the first 100 days of his government, according to a proposal launched this Thursday (19) by the Climate Observatory, a network that brings together 73 socio-environmental organizations.
The document starts from the premise that the current government should not be reelected. “All the actions listed are feasible and can be carried out by a government that is willing to lead Brazil towards safe and competitive development — once the Jair Bolsonaro regime is supplanted at the polls,” the report says. “With Bolsonaro there is no future for environmental policy in Brazil”, emphasizes the text.
The document was delivered to the main pre-candidates for the Planalto, with the exception of the current president.
Under the title “Brazil 2045 – Building an environmental power”, the document proposes that Brazil can bring forward the global goal of zero greenhouse gas emissions by five years, set by countries and organizations around the world to be achieved by 2050.
The plan was prepared based on consultations with the 73 organizations that make up the network and coordinated by Suely Araújo, senior specialist in public policies at the Climate Observatory. She presided over Ibama in the pre-Bolsonaro administration.
The proposals cite the implementation of existing policies and their expansion in eight areas: climate policy and international agreements, combating deforestation, bioeconomy, climate justice, energy, biodiversity, industry and, finally, governance and financing.
Among the measures, Araújo highlights the correction of the climate pedaling in the Brazilian goal in the Paris Agreement; the restructuring of environmental agencies; the disintrusion of indigenous lands and quilombola territories, with great urgency in lands such as that of the Yanomami; and also reducing dependence on fossil fuels, including the removal of subsidies from these sectors.
“There will be a debate on the normative basis next. A package of revocations of the herds will be necessary and, it is important, the presentation of measures that fill the gaps generated with these revocations”, says Araújo.
The NGO network plans to deliver to the elected government a list of legal instruments (such as decrees, normative instructions and ordinances) that must be revoked if the government of Jair Bolsonaro (PL), marked by a declaredly anti-environmental management, is not reelected.
The dismantling of public environmental policies affected programs that had already achieved historic results, such as the PPCDAm (Action Plan for the Prevention and Control of Deforestation in the Legal Amazon), which, launched in 2004, caused deforestation in the Amazon to plummet by 82% in a decade.
His stoppage in the Bolsonaro government is the subject of one of seven environmental lawsuits on trial by the Federal Supreme Court, which last month also overturned Bolsonaro’s decrees that excluded civil society from boards of environmental funds.
The dismantling strategy was centralized in the hands of ex-minister Ricardo Salles (Environment) and nicknamed by him as “passing the herd”, in reference to the Executive’s swipes in matters that did not depend on Congress.
However, the concentration of power in the federal Executive is also used by the opposite strategy: the recomposition of environmental policies in a possible new government depends mostly only on the political decision of the new president, according to the proposal of the Climate Observatory.
In addition to the emergency measures, the plan lists 74 other proposals to be adopted in the first half of the next government. They would complete a course correction, resuming the promise that Brazil offered to the world at UN environmental conferences of being an environmental power.
“Our country could become the first major economy in the world to sequester more greenhouse gases than it emits, becoming carbon negative as early as 2045,” reads the Climate Observatory’s plan.
Today, Brazil ranks sixth among the countries that most emit gases that cause global warming. However, while much of the world depends on these emissions to generate energy (from fossil sources), the country still relies on mostly renewable energy sources and concentrates its emissions on deforestation – the fight against which does not affect the country’s economic engines.
“Brazil is in a better position than many other countries to take advantage of the economic and social justice opportunities that the transition to a clean economy offers,” says the Brazil 2045 plan.
