The Amazon, a crucial tropical forest for regulating the planet’s temperature, seeks a space at the summit that President Joe Biden celebrates this Thursday to formalize the return of the United States to the battle against climate change. The Brazilian Jair Bolsonaro is one of the 40 leaders summoned to a virtual meeting that will be broadcast live on the Internet. Bolsonaro is under strong internal and external pressure because deforestation is at levels not seen in 12 years and his environmental policy encourages impunity. Amazon governors, environmental NGOs, businessmen and opponents seek the complicity of the democrat to save the Amazon.
Preparations for the summit are being followed with great anticipation in Brazil, which is home to the bulk of the Amazon. Some because they feel the pressure of the new Administration; others because they trust that it contributes to a change of course in environmental policy.
The US president proposed in an electoral debate to collect 20,000 million dollars to preserve the Amazon, to which Bolsonaro replied in a sour tone. But now the Brazilian government is trying to pick up the glove to raise money abroad to pay for the fight against deforestation. An agreement that both countries supposedly have been negotiating for months has not materialized until now.
Bolsonaro spread a letter sent last week to Biden in which he pledges to eliminate illegal deforestation by 2030 (something that Brazil already promised in 2016) and proposes to advance the deadline for reaching carbon neutrality by a decade (from 2060 to 2050) if it receives financial support. The US envoy for the climate, John Kerry, responded in a tweet: “We look forward to immediate action and the involvement of indigenous people and civil society.”
The director of the Open Society Foundation in Latin America, the Brazilian Pedro Abramovay, regrets that Biden’s goals to green the politics and economy of his country are much more ambitious than those he asks of his Latin American partners, as he explains in a video call. . Abramovay fears that “Colombia will be presented as the advantageous student (in the environment) even now with glyphosate,” whose use President Iván Duque intends to resume.
The Amazon lost last year it lost 11,088 square kilometers of trees, 9.5% more than the previous year. The deployment of thousands of military personnel has not succeeded in stopping this increase in illegal logging, and at a high economic cost. And while inspectors on the ground are becoming more and more scarce.
Brazil was for years an admired environmental powerhouse. But that ended the increase in deforestation as of 2012 and has culminated with Bolsonaro and his measures against environmental enforcement. So far, the president has resisted the innumerable pressures to change his Environment Minister, Ricardo Salles, who is in charge of specifying how much money Brazil is asking for. He claims a blank check of 10 billion dollars a year to eliminate greenhouse gases by 2050. Of that, he would dedicate one billion a year to combat illegal deforestation, as he has explained in several interviews.
The US has now joined the requests that the European Union has been making to Brazil to offer tangible results. The signs are grim. The Amazonas police chief who confiscated the largest shipment of supposedly illegal timber has just been fired upon after a scuffle with the minister.
Greenpeace, other NGOs and dozens of opposition deputies have expressed in a public letter their concern that the US “gives confidence to a government bent on climate denialism and that considers the Amazon and those who fight for its conservation as enemies.”
The head of the Open Society maintains that “the solution is to include in the negotiations (environmental between Brazil and the US) other actors such as the consortium of governors of the Amazon,” in reference to the group chaired by Governor Flávio Dino de Maranhão.
Many in Brazil and abroad consider the promises of Bolsonaro and Salles a mere public relations operation to relieve pressure on the environmental front at a time when the country is suffering significant damage from the health crisis and the Senate has created a commission of inquiry to analyze how the government manages the pandemic.
This week’s summit is seen as the prelude to the UN climate summit (COP26) to be held in Glasgow in November. Abramovay warns “that there is no possible climate agreement without the Amazon.” It refers to the scientists’ warning that if deforestation continues at this rate, the forest may reach the tipping point where it becomes a savanna. Then “it would stop exercising the role it plays in regulating the planet’s temperature, which would affect the gigantic efforts of the US and China.”
The Bolsonaro government is now demanding an instrument that resembles the millionaire fund that for years helped to combat deforestation and that Salles buried when he took office. The Amazon Fund channeled millions contributed by Norway and Germany under the supervision of Brazilian institutions to projects endorsed by the Government and civil society until it was neutralized.
Subscribe here to the newsletter of EL PAÍS América and receive all the informative keys of the current situation of the region
#Amazon #negotiation #Bolsonaro #asks #billion #dollars #year #stop #destruction
source https://pledgetimes.com/the-amazon-in-negotiation-bolsonaro-asks-for-10-billion-dollars-a-year-to-stop-its-destruction/
Disqus comments