South America Archives https://www.climatechangenews.com/category/world/south-america/ Climate change news, analysis, commentary, video and podcasts focused on developments in global climate politics Thu, 11 Jul 2024 13:03:44 +0000 en-GB hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.6.1 A simmering conflict over one of Latin America’s biggest wind hubs confronts Mexico’s next president https://www.climatechangenews.com/2024/07/09/a-simmering-conflict-over-one-of-latin-americas-biggest-wind-hubs-confronts-mexicos-next-president/ Tue, 09 Jul 2024 17:20:02 +0000 https://www.climatechangenews.com/?p=52016 Claudia Sheinbaum will have to deal with violent divisions over wind power projects on the Isthmus of Tehuantepec

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Following years of violence surrounding one of Latin America’s largest wind energy projects, local residents in southern Oaxaca state are cautiously optimistic that Mexico’s incoming president understands their anger over what they call poor consultations and environmental damage.

Claudia Sheinbaum will be sworn in as Mexico’s first female president on October 1 with a broad electoral mandate. Before entering politics, she was a scientist studying renewable energy, including the ongoing conflict over wind farms on the Isthmus of Tehuantepec. The tensions have spawned deadly violence, and lawsuits from Oaxaca City to Paris.

One of Mexico’s windiest areas, energy companies have flocked to the strip of land between the Gulf of Mexico and the Pacific Ocean since 2006, making it one of the most important locations for renewable energy in the world’s 13th largest country.

Supporters say projects like this are crucial for transitioning Mexico away from fossil fuels and creating green jobs based on renewable energy. Opponents are concerned about wind turbines harming migratory birds, land access, revenue sharing and – most importantly – problems related to Indigenous community consultations over the investments.

Bloody conflict

In several cases, anger sparked by the projects has turned bloody, including at least 15 killed in a dispute over the wind farms in 2020.

Today, more than 2,000 turbines cover the land, according to data from Amnesty International, leading to “dispossession” and violations of the “collective rights of Indigenous communities”, the rights charity says. Hundreds of millions of dollars have been invested in the projects, mostly by European energy companies.

Anti-wind farm activist Guadalupe Ramirez poses for a picture inside her home in Union Hidalgo, Mexico. (Leon Pineda/Climate Home)

Guadalupe Ramirez is an Indigenous Zapotec farmer who grows pumpkins and corn on a communal plot in the town of Union Hidalgo, a hub for wind energy.  She told Climate Home that “at first, they (wind companies) said they would just take a little piece of the land but they ended up destroying a big piece”.

“The companies started dividing families,” said Ramirez, who also complained about local environmental disruption from the projects. “We were very mad about this. I have hope with Sheinbaum.”

Ramirez expects the new president and former Mexico City mayor may have some unique insights on the problems her community faces. The academic turned politician co-authored a study analysing the unrest over wind projects in Oaxaca state.

“Although wind energy has numerous benefits, [the] concerns of the local people have to be taken seriously,” Sheinbaum wrote in 2016. “Far from the old-fashioned thinking of looking at social acceptance of renewable technologies as a NIMBY (not in my backyard) problem… information, consultation, and participation are key elements to the success and acceptance of wind farm projects.”

Mexico's next president faces a growing conflict over one of Latin America’s largest wind hubs

Sheinbaum celebrates her election victory in Mexico City on June 3, 2024. (REUTERS/Raquel Cunha TPX)

Those are exactly the elements Ramírez and many of her neighbours say were missing when they were first approached by energy companies back in 2009.

From there, the conflict escalated, said Carlos Lopez, who has experienced it firsthand. As an activist and community journalist in Union Hidalgo, he said he was threatened by masked men toting automatic weapons. He suspects they were hired by landowners or corrupt local politicians who wanted windmills erected in the area in order to receive rent from companies.

“They were killing people here,” Lopez told Climate Home, during an interview in a crumbling building which had been a community radio hub in Union Hidalgo as it underwent renovations.

In 2013, for instance, he said local fishermen and hunters were working in an area near Union Hidalgo coveted by wind investors, when they were accosted by masked men with heavy weapons. The fishermen then fled to the radio station, so Lopez could broadcast what was happening.

Deadly violence

“They [investors and their supporters in government] don’t respect the vision and culture of the original peoples of the Isthmus and want to push through these megaprojects,” said Lopez, sitting on a plastic chair  next to pictures of Che Guevara and posters for protest movements.

Posters are displayed inside a community radio station in Union Hidalgo (Picture: Leon Pineda)

Residents later set up barricades around six areas they considered sacred sites to stop encroachment by companies, he added, as threats continued and violence simmered.

In 2020, for instance, at least 15 people were killed in San Mateo del Mar, a coastal community in Oaxaca and a hotbed of Indigenous opposition to wind projects. Campaigners said they were stopped at a coronavirus checkpoint and shot at by supporters of a local mayor who backed the wind projects.

Last month, a French court allowed a civil case against the energy giant EDF to proceed after Indigenous people in Oaxaca argued the company failed to prevent violence and intimidation of wind farm opponents.

The violence has quietened down in the past few years due to national government policy changes and several court cases limiting new wind investment in the area, said local residents, including both critics and supporters of the projects.

Opposition is “political”

Not everyone in Union Hidalgo is opposed to the wind farms. On a rainy Saturday on his mango, avocado and guava farm, Dueter Toledo Ordonez told Climate Home: “These projects aren’t bothering me.”

“Some people don’t like it,” he said, with wind turbines in the distance, “but it’s all political … It’s clean energy; it’s the future.”

His father, who farms a nearby plot, had a contract with an energy company to install windmills on his land, added Ordonez, “but something happened with the politics and people said they were polluting” so the company stopped construction.

Deuter Toledo Ordonez tends to crops on his land in Union Hidalgo on June 8, 2024. (Photo: Leon Pineda)

Juqulia Elizabeth Lopez Ruiz, a spokesperson for the secretary of renewable energy for Juchitan district, told Climate Home the 28 wind parks in Tehuantepec bring a lot of jobs.

But she acknowledges some farmers aren’t happy about the projects. “To respond to these concerns: we have Indigenous assemblies where we decide the correct way to act with these wind farms,” she said.

As for concerns raised by wind farm opponents that some municipal lawmakers have been corrupted by energy companies, Lopez Ruiz said this was “just speculation”.

“At one point there was a candidate who had the support of the companies but he stopped being a candidate,” said the local government spokesperson, without naming the politician or discussing specifics of the case.

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Eduardo Martinez Noriegua is  an ecologist with the environmental group Ecological Forum in Juchitan, which has conducted some monitoring around the projects.

He said local anger over potential disruptions to migratory bird populations from wind farms, increased litter, and soil and water contamination from the oil lubricating the turbines is justified.

“I believe the government is being very permissive with the quality control for these operations,” he said.

Energy nationalisation

When Sheinbaum takes office, she will be leading a country that gets nearly 80% of its electricity from fossil fuels and is one of only two G20 countries without a commitment to reach net-zero carbon emissions.

Her key political backer – the popular current president, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador (AMLO) – invested heavily in new oil infrastructure, and asserted greater national control over the electricity market.

Mexico nationalised its oil industry in the 1930s, and AMLO has taken a similar approach to key materials for the energy transition, cancelling lithium mining concessions granted to foreign firms and creating a new national company to extract the critical mineral.

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The Federal Electricity Commission (CFE), a state agency, was also given more control over power generation and distribution.

Sheinbaum has signalled she will continue her predecessor’s policies of state dominance in the energy sector.

Despite the government’s “quest to nationalise electricity generation”, Marilyn Christian, an advisor to the Mexican Centre for Environmental Law, an advocacy group, said the CFE doesn’t currently have the technology to rapidly increase renewable power production. Instead, as demand grows, it has turned to fossil fuels to generate electricity.

“Emissions in the electricity sector … have been on the rise since 2021 – that is bad news for our commitments on reducing carbon emissions,” she said. “We have many expectations with Claudia Sheinbaum. She has a solid academic background in environmental issues … [but] Claudia is also a politician. She has a clear position and ideology.”

Christian said she supports the idea of public control over electricity in principle, an effective option in some European countries, but it will only work if the CFE has the capacity to deliver.

Back in Union Hidalgo, most wind farm critics said their views wouldn’t change if a public institution like the CFE, rather than private companies, managed the projects, posing another complication for generating more renewable power.

But some of the changes recommended by Sheinbaum in her study on Oaxaca – including deeper consultation with communities living nearby and taking their concerns seriously – could help smooth things out, Ramirez said.

“We are not totally against this kind of green energy,” she said as hundreds of white windmills whirred in the distance. “It’s about how they do business.”

(Reporting by Chris Arsenault and Philippe Le Billon, editing by Joe Lo and Megan Rowling)

The travel and reporting for this story were funded by a grant from the Global Reporting Centre and Social Sciences Humanities and Research Council.

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Calls for responsible mining fail to stem rights abuses linked to transition minerals https://www.climatechangenews.com/2024/05/16/calls-for-responsible-mining-fail-to-stem-rights-abuses-linked-to-transition-minerals/ Thu, 16 May 2024 15:15:28 +0000 https://www.climatechangenews.com/?p=51090 As demand grows for critical minerals used in clean energy supply chains, new data suggests more protection is needed for communities affected by their extraction

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As the rapid deployment of clean energy technologies fuels demand for their components, human rights abuses linked to the supply of critical minerals show no sign of letting up.

New data from a Transition Minerals Tracker compiled by the Business & Human Rights Resource Centre (BHRRC) shows that more than 630 allegations of human rights violations have been associated with minerals mining since 2010. Of those, 91 were made in the last year alone.

The tracker monitors human rights abuses associated with the extraction of seven minerals including copper, lithium and bauxite, which is new in this year’s update. These elements are essential for the production of solar panels, wind turbines, electric vehicles and electrification more broadly.

The latest BHRRC data points to widespread violations of Indigenous peoples’ rights – such as forced relocation, water pollution and denial of access to traditional land – as well as attacks on human rights defenders and workers’ rights abuses.

BHRRC also registered 53 allegations of work-related deaths since 2010, with 30 percent of those newly reported in 2023.

Supply chain FAQ: What you need to know about critical minerals

Caroline Avan, BHRRC’s head of natural resources and just transition, said the situation is not improving. “The sector is blatantly failing at protecting those who generate its profits, and this is only the tip of the iceberg,” she said.

“We are probably only capturing a fraction of abuses because we rely on public data and so many issues don’t get reported,” she added. The BHRRC gives companies an opportunity to respond to the allegations it documents.

Just ten companies are associated with more than half of all allegations registered since 2010 – including China Minmetals, Glencore, Grupo Mexico, First Quantum Minerals and Solway Group – while 46% of the total originated in South America.

Allegations of human rights abuses linked to transition minerals by category 

Avan explained that many abuses follow a pattern that begins with environmental violations –  such as water or soil pollution – compounded by inadequate consultation with local communities, which then leads to protracted conflict.

This has been the case at the Las Bambas copper mine in Peru, now owned by MMG Ltd – whose major shareholder is China Minmetals Corporation (CMC) – and formerly controlled by Glencore. It received the most allegations of rights abuses not only in 2023, but across the tracker’s full 13-year monitoring period.

The mine’s infrastructure, activities and expansion plans have led to a series of social and environmental impacts, provoking protests and blockades by Indigenous communities. Most recently, last November, 1,500 workers went on strike to ask for a larger share of profits.

CMC, MMG and Las Bambas have not responded to the BHRCC over the reported allegations.

New global principles

The persistence of human rights abuses in mineral mining is set to attract more attention, with the International Energy Agency estimating that mineral demand for clean energy applications is set to grow by three and a half times by 2030.

The BHRRC’s report notes that the mining sector is under pressure from civil society, Indigenous peoples and global policymakers alike to strengthen human rights protections.

For example, the new EU Batteries Regulation, adopted last July, obliges end users of battery minerals to carry out thorough supply chain due diligence.

“We are seeing the automotive industry asking more of the upstream mining sector, and that is good news,” said Avan. “But we are not seeing enough from the renewable energy sector in terms of asking mineral suppliers to ensure their operations are not linked with abuses.”

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Last month, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres launched a high-level Panel on Critical Energy Transition Minerals tasked with developing a set of global principles to “safeguard environmental and social standards and embed justice in the energy transition”.

Guterres said supply chains must be “managed properly” to ensure that developing countries get a fair share of benefits and that the environment and human rights are protected.

“Too often, production of these minerals leaves a toxic cloud in its wake: pollution; wounded communities, childhoods lost to labour and sometimes dying in their work. And developing countries and communities have not reaped the benefits of their production and trade,” the UN chief said in comments at the launch.

“This must change… The race to net zero cannot trample over the poor,” he added. The panel is expected to deliver initial recommendations ahead of the UN General Assembly in September.

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The BHRRC’s Avan told Climate Home it was “concerning that countries in the Global North are rushing to sign strategic partnerships with resource-rich countries in the Global South because they want to secure their mineral supply chains, but the companies who will be involved in delivering those minerals are not asked much in terms of requirements for human rights protections”.

For companies, recommendations from the centre’s new report include adopting human rights policies and giving affected communities access to the benefits and governance of projects.

Avan said government regulation and better business practices are essential “to ensure that the global energy transition is a just one, centred on respect for human rights, fair negotiations and shared prosperity”.

“The alternative is rising resistance, conflict, and distrust – all threatening to slow the pace of the transition,” she added.

(Reporting by Daisy Clague, editing by Megan Rowling)

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Argentinian scientists condemn budget cuts ahead of university protest https://www.climatechangenews.com/2024/04/22/argentinian-scientists-condemn-budget-cuts-ahead-of-university-protests/ Mon, 22 Apr 2024 17:14:39 +0000 https://www.climatechangenews.com/?p=50716 Right-wing President Javier Milei has taken an axe to funding for education and scientific bodies, sparking fears for climate research 

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As a budget freeze for Argentina’s public universities amid soaring inflation leaves campuses unable to pay their electricity bills and climate science under threat, the country’s researchers and students are taking to the streets in a nationwide demonstration on Tuesday.

The dire outlook for Argentina’s renowned higher education system under President Javier Milei, a right-wing populist, was highlighted on April 22 – Earth Day – by Argentine plant ecologist Pedro Jaureguiberry, who was announced as a finalist in the prestigious Frontiers Planet Prize.

​“The current budget for universities in 2024 is insufficient, adding to the fact that in recent years we have only received 20% of the budget we asked for conducting research at our lab,” Jaureguiberry,  an assistant researcher with the Multidisciplinary Institute of Plant Biology at the National University of Córdoba (UNC), told Climate Home.

The 44-year-old scientist, who has spent his entire academic career in Argentina, was shortlisted for the award as one of 23 national champions drawn from science research teams across six continents, in recognition of a study he led on the drivers of human-caused biodiversity loss.

Dr Jaureguiberry conducting fieldwork in central western Argentina. (Photo: Diego Gurvich)

Of the finalists, three international winners will be announced in June in Switzerland, receiving prize money of $1.1 million each for their role in groundbreaking scientific research.

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With annual inflation running close to 300%, this year’s freeze on Argentina’s government budget for universities and scientific research amounts to a spending cut in real terms of around 80%, according to the University of Buenos Aires, which this month declared itself in an “economic emergency”.

On Tuesday, university teaching staff and students, backed by trade unions, will march in Buenos Aires and other cities “in defence of public education”, which they say faces a grave threat from the budget squeeze.

Met office hit by layoffs

Argentine meteorologist Carolina Vera, former vice-chair of a key working group responsible for the latest assessment report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, said that in four decades of teaching and research she had never seen “such a level of dismantling through the reduction of research grants and programs with such disdain for knowledge”.

“This is very serious for atmospheric and ocean sciences, key to issues such as climate change, placing a whole new generation of meteorologists and climatologists in danger,” she told Climate Home from Trevelin, in the southern province of Chubut.

There has been widespread condemnation of 86 layoffs affecting administrative and other contractors at the National Scientific and Technical Research Council (CONICET), while Vera added that she is concerned about the situation at the National Meteorological Service, where 73 technicians have been let go. That, she warned, would affect the functionality of early warning and disaster prevention systems.

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Climatic and meteorological challenges are increasing in Argentina, from heavy rains due to the El Niño weather phenomenon – which has caused an ongoing dengue epidemic – to extreme heat and wildfires.

A significant drought is forecast for the southern hemisphere summer of 2024-2025, from November to February, as El Niño gives way to an expected La Niña, with the National Meteorological Service having a key role to play in predicting conditions and disseminating information about them ahead of time.

Vera added that the budget restrictions on CONICET would also limit its research capabilities, particularly relating to climate change. “​We hope that this will be reversed soon,” she added.

Greenlight for extractive industries

Milei has branded climate change a “socialist lie” since 2021 and has also questioned public education for “brainwashing people” with Marxist ideology.

Sergio Federovisky, deputy minister of environment during the previous presidency of Alberto Fernández, said Milei is not only disdainful of scientific views on global warming but also on broader environmental protection. For example, Milei – a former university professor and television pundit – said during his presidential campaign that “a company can pollute a river all it wants”.

“Climate denialism is not a scientific position, but rather an argument used to release all types of extractive actions that could be hindered by an environmental policy on the use of natural resources and the concentration of wealth,” Federovisky told Climate Home from Buenos Aires.

Meeting between Argentine President Javier Milei and Elon Musk in Texas, United States, at the Tesla factory on April 12 2024, forging a partnership through which the government is betting on attracting investment to Argentina. (Photo: Prensa Casa Rosada via / Latin America News Agency / Reuters)

In an economic review published on February 1, which unlocked $4.7 billion to support the new government’s policies, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) expressed its support for investment to increase the exploitation of oil and gas reserves and metals mining in Argentina, in order to boost exports and government revenues.

World Bank head Ajay Banga told journalists before last week’s Spring Meetings that the Argentine economy is going through a “whole economic realignment”. The bank “is supportive of the direction of that economy” and looks forward “to working closely with their leadership to help them as they go forward”, he added.

Yet he also noted that the bank’s latest review of economic prospects for the region highlighted challenges, including the impacts of Argentina’s correction, with regional GDP projected to expand by 1.6 percent in 2024, one of the lowest rates in the world and insufficient to drive prosperity.

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The IMF’s support for Milei’s neoliberal economic policies has been strongly criticised by the International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC), which said on Friday that fiscal austerity “is not the answer when people’s lives and their democratic rights are at stake”.

“The IMF is celebrating the budget surplus in Argentina, but it’s indefensible to ignore the human cost of this economic shock therapy,” the ITUC’s General Secretary Luc Triangle said in a statement.

“Pensions have been slashed, thousands of public sector workers fired, public services are on the verge of collapse, unemployment is growing and food poverty spreading.”

Last week the government attempted to head off Tuesday’s protest by announcing a last-minute budget increase for maintenance costs for universities. But that was rejected by a national council of rectors and has not deterred the movement against the austerity measures, with large numbers set to come out onto the streets as planned.

(Reporting by Julián Reingold; editing by Megan Rowling)

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As donors dither, Indigenous funds seek to decolonise green finance   https://www.climatechangenews.com/2024/04/17/as-donors-dither-indigenous-funds-seek-to-decolonise-green-finance/ Wed, 17 Apr 2024 16:44:52 +0000 https://www.climatechangenews.com/?p=50677 Tired of waiting for donor dollars for climate and nature protection to trickle down, Indigenous rights groups are creating new funds to do things differently

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For over a decade, Indigenous and local communities have demanded a bigger share of international funding to protect nature and the climate, as well as easier access to that money. But progress has been limited, with only 1-2 percent of such finance reaching them directly, reports show. 

Now frustrated Indigenous rights groups are trying a new tactic to speed up change: creating their own funds in a push to boost the flow of money to frontline communities and shift away from what some see as an outdated colonial-style model driven by donors in the Global North. 

Since 2020 – and especially last year – more than half a dozen new Indigenous-led funds have sprung up, largely in forest-rich Brazil but also in developing countries from Indonesia to Mexico.  

Many are still in a start-up phase, but a few have already begun pushing money to frontline communities. They include the Mesoamerican Territorial Fund (MTF), which invested $1.3 million in 32 projects – from chocolate production to tourism and protecting traditional knowledge – in communities from Mexico to Panama last year. 

“We are aiming not only to make the funds reach the real guardians of the forest and the real guardians of mitigating and adapting to climate change, but also to support sustainability, democracy and good governance of all these territories,” said María Pía Hernández, a lawyer and regional manager for the MTF. 

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Multilateral funds can take years to approve projects and often struggle to funnel big pots of nature and climate finance into the smaller-scale projects communities need, Indigenous leaders said.  

The new funds aim to fill the gap by gathering large amounts of money, distributing it nimbly and leap-frogging the barriers faced by forest communities in dealing with traditional funds, such as onerous paperwork. 

“We aim to improve not just the condition of the territories and people who live there but also promote global climatic justice,” Hernández said on the sidelines of last week’s Skoll World Forum, a gathering of social innovators.  

Bypassing the giants 

As the World Bank and International Monetary Fund hold their Spring Meetings in Washington this week, focused in part on reshaping lending for climate action, Indigenous communities are already rethinking how to better access the resources they need to protect nature and the climate – and to ensure those on the frontline benefit from changes such as new clean energy infrastructure. 

Along the way, they are setting up new rules and structures in line with their own traditions and beliefs, after years of chafing against constraints imposed by big donors, some of them former colonial powers. 

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In Canada, for instance, many Indigenous governing bodies now run their own renewable energy utilities, providing a fifth of Canada’s renewables, said Joan Carling, executive director of Indigenous Peoples Rights International. 

“If we transform the business-as-usual and create the enabling environment and conditions to put Indigenous people at the centre of this, then we can have a truly just, equitable renewable energy for all,” she said. 

A new dashboard released last week by the Rights and Resources Initiative and the Rainforest Foundation Norway shows climate finance for indigenous and local communities rose between 2020 and 2023 to about $517 million per year, a 36 percent increase over the previous four years. 

That increase comes after governments and charitable donors promised $1.7 billion back in 2021 to Indigenous and local communities by 2025 for their role in protecting land and forests, which are considered key to protecting both the climate and biodiversity. 

Yet with much new funding still moving through big international environment organisations and other intermediary agencies, rather than directly to communities, “there is no evidence yet indicating a systematic change in funding modalities,” the groups noted in a report.

Connecting communities with cash 

Solange Bandiaky-Badji, coordinator of the Rights and Resources Initiative, said improving direct access to funding is the key issue. At least $10 billion in finance for Indigenous and local communities will be needed to meet a global pledge to protect at least 30 percent of the planet’s land and oceans by 2030, she added. 

Indigenous-led funds believe they can be pivotal to achieving that ramp-up. 

Shandia, established by the Global Alliance of Territorial Communities uniting 35 million people from 24 countries, is still in a start-up phase but aims to serve as a conduit for much larger-scale finance to Indigenous and other frontline groups. 

“Millions of dollars are moving in the world. We want to connect claims on the ground to those millions,” said Juan Carlos Jintiach, a Shuar indigenous leader from Ecuador and the alliance’s executive secretary, who was shortlisted for the Nobel Peace Prize last year for his work on behalf of Indigenous communities. 

Indonesia’s main Indigenous alliance similarly in 2023 helped establish the Nusantara Fund, while in Brazil a range of Indigenous-led vehicles, including the Podáali Indigenous Amazonian Fund, were launched last year.

Guardians of the forest – and finance?  

Anthony Bebbington, who runs the Ford Foundation’s international natural resources and change change programmes, said the last few years had seen the emergence of substantial new funds, with the potential to grow, that are challenging the traditional ways donors have worked.  

“Funds are saying to us, ‘If you trust us to be guardians of the forest – a role for which we are often harassed and sometimes killed – then there is no justification for you to also not trust us to be guardians of the finance’,” he told an event on the sidelines of the Skoll World Forum. 

In projects backed by the Mesoamerican Territorial Fund, for instance, indicators of success are changing from a simple focus on hectares of forest replanted to include things like whether more water is flowing through key rivers, said Hernández, whose fund so far gets 80 percent of its support from philanthropies. 

An Indigenous Ramas man lifts a crayfish trap in the Rio Indio river, San Juan de Nicaragua, Nicaragua on February 16, 2022.(Photo: Reuters/Antoine Boureau/Hans Lucas)

The MTF also actively seeks out and helps prepare applications from Indigenous and local communities that could benefit from its support rather than just accepting grant proposals, as traditional donors often do.  

David Rothschild, senior director of partnerships for Nia Tero, a US non-profit that works with Indigenous groups, said avoiding heavy paperwork was key to enabling the new funds take off. 

“What they don’t want is to become another entity in the system operating in a colonial way. How do they not fall into the same patterns that have been destructive, while still reporting to donors?” he asked. 

Hernández said new ways of working are developing, if sometimes too slowly. “We are not asking for blank cheques,” she emphasised. “But we deserve a little bit of consideration.”

(Reporting by Laurie Goering; editing by Megan Rowling)

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Forest carbon accounting allows Guyana to stay net zero while pumping oil https://www.climatechangenews.com/2024/04/08/forest-carbon-accounting-allows-guyana-to-stay-net-zero-while-pumping-oil/ Mon, 08 Apr 2024 17:46:57 +0000 https://www.climatechangenews.com/?p=50466 Experts say UN rules around forests and oil are open to abuse, so that countries like Guyana can claim to be carbon-negative without cutting emissions

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The densely forested South American nation of Guyana is fast becoming the world’s newest petro-state, allowing fossil fuel giants like ExxonMobil to hunt for what researchers have referred to as “carbon bombs” on its seabed.

International oil companies, led by US firm ExxonMobil, plan to extract 11 billion barrels of oil from Guyana’s ocean floor and sell it abroad to be burned, thereby worsening global warming. The country pumped its first oil in 2020.

Despite this, late last month Guyanese president Irfaan Ali defended his country’s green credentials in a heated interview with the BBC’s Hardtalk programme, which went viral on social media. “Even with our greatest exploration of the oil and gas resources we have now, we will still be net zero,” he said, referring to the country’s greenhouse gas emissions.

The case of Guyana shows how countries with large forests can use unclear rules on counting national carbon emissions to justify fossil fuel production.

Michael Lazarus, a scientist with the Stockholm Environment Institute (SEI), told Climate Home it is “absurd” to claim that capturing and storing carbon dioxide (CO2) in forests offsets the emissions impact of oil production, as “they have nothing to do with each other than geographic proximity”.

Official United Nations carbon accounting rules, drawn up nearly 20 years ago by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), allow Guyana to claim net-zero status because they do not specify which types of forest governments can take credit for preserving – and also because the emissions from oil are counted in the country where it is used and burned, not where it is produced.

Experts said governments are taking advantage of having barely-touched forests on their land that suck up CO2, and argued that fossil fuel-rich nations like Guyana should bear part of the moral responsibility for the emissions of their polluting products.

“The problem is that within the country, you are allowing the emissions to continue or even to rise, and then you are trying to balance that out internally by saying that we have this forest,” said Souparna Lahiri from the Global Forest Coalition.

Carbon-negative club

Around 93% of Guyana is covered in forest – more than any other nation but its neighbour Suriname. The population numbers just 800,000, mostly clustered on its coastline, and those people on average emit slightly less than the global average per capita.

Although the country’s non-forestry emissions are growing steadily, CO2 absorption by its vast forests more than compensates for that.

In its emissions inventory sent to the United Nations, the government claimed: “Guyana is a net carbon sink, with its lush managed forest cover removing up to ten times more than the emissions produced in the country up to the year 2022”.

Other small, sparsely-populated forest-covered nations like Suriname, Panama and Bhutan assert they are carbon-negative too.

While not claiming the same accolade, leaders of bigger forest nations like Russia and Brazil have also used their forests to defend their climate record.

In 2021, Russian President Vladimir Putin told a US-hosted summit: “Russia makes a gigantic contribution to absorbing global emissions – both ours and from elsewhere – owing to the great absorption capacity of our ecosystems.”

Despite rising Brazilian deforestation under Jair Bolsonaro, the former president told the same summit that the Amazon’s carbon absorption was evidence that “Brazil is at the very forefront of efforts to tackle global warming”.

Managed vs unmanaged

International carbon accounting rules essentially leave it up to governments to decide how much credit they claim for CO2 absorption by national forests, with many opting to count it all.

In 2006, scientists working with the IPCC came up with a distinction between “managed” land – where greenhouse gas emissions and removals should be attributed to humans and nations – and “unmanaged” land where forests are natural and governments should neither be credited nor blamed for emissions levels.

The IPCC defined “managed” land as “land where human interventions and practices have been applied to perform production, ecological or social functions”. Those could include planting a commercial forest, protecting a forest from fire, or designating it for conservation.

In its national emissions inventory report, Guyana does not differentiate between “managed” and “unmanaged land” – and claims credit for CO2 sequestration by all of its forests.

Guyanese forestry expert Michelle Kalamandeen told Climate Home the government is doing well at protecting the rainforest but should not classify it all as managed by the state. Much of it – particularly in the south – is inaccessible, so “they’re just relying on remoteness for protection of it”, she explained.

The Global Forest Coalition’s Lahiri agreed, saying that most of Guyana’s forest seems to be intact old-growth forest “so it is not a plantation or managed forest in that sense”.

A global issue

From this perspective, Guyana is by no means the only country that appears to be over-counting its emission sinks. A 2018 study in the journal Carbon Balance and Management found that over fourth-fifths of the 101 countries analysed counted all their land as managed.

Even those countries that make a distinction often counted all of their forest – but not all their land – as managed. Australia is one example.

Even the rare few that consider some of their forests “unmanaged” have drawn the line in different places.

Russia counts most of its forests as managed with a few exceptions, the US counts everything outside of Alaska (and much inside it) as managed, and Canada counts everything it tries to protect from fires.

The USA’s “managed” land (blue) and “unmanaged” land (grey) (Photos: Carbon Balance and Management)

Brazil stands out as the exception, counting just under half of its huge forests as managed and foregoing a carbon accounting boost from the other half.

Oil emissions

The other carbon accounting orthodoxy Guyana relies on is attributing emissions from burning fossil fuels like oil to the countries where they are burned, not where they are produced.

The vast majority of Guyana’s oil will be exported to regions like Europe and Asia or to neighbouring Brazil, meaning that emissions from its use will be counted there.

This way of measuring emissions prevents them from being double-counted – but it lets extracting nations off the hook for the carbon pollution caused by the fossil fuels they sell abroad.

Kalamandeen said oil-producing countries have some responsibility for the emissions created by the consumption of their fossil fuels, while the home nations of fossil fuel companies should also step up. In Guyana’s case, that would be the US and China, as the oil extraction consortium is made up of ExxonMobil, Hess Corporation and the China National Offshore Oil Corporation.

SEI’s Lazarus described the current system as an “essential accountability framework for governments and civil society” – but agreed that producers should be held morally accountable too.

Without that, he said, “we’d turn a blind eye to… the lock-in effects of long-lived fossil fuel supply investments that impede the global clean energy transition”.

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Argentine resistance hinders Milei’s forest and glacier destruction https://www.climatechangenews.com/2024/02/13/argentina-resistance-hinders-mileis-environmental/ Tue, 13 Feb 2024 17:13:51 +0000 https://www.climatechangenews.com/?p=49988 Ultra free-market president Javier Milei has not so far been able to get cuts to environmental regulations through Congress

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Argentina’s new free-market president Javier Milei is pushing for a rollback in environmental regulation, endangering forests and glaciers.

Milei, who has called climate change a “socialist lie”, has tried to ease restrictions on mining near glaciers and remove protections for forests.

But the moves have sparked protests, petitions and open letters. Milei has been forced to withdraw the wider free market reform bill that they are contained in, as it became clear he lacked the votes in Argentina’s lower house to pass it in its entirety.

Although he was elected president in November with 56% of the vote, Milei’s party holds less than a fifth of the seats in the lower house and less than a tenth in the Senate, making passing legislation a big challenge and reliant on a large block of independents.

Milei has yet to outline the next step for the reform bill. The government could choose to resubmit the law for another vote in parliament, incorporate aspects of it into an executive degree or put it to a referendum of the people.

Red tape cuts

After decades of mainly left-wing rule, Milei was elected on a promise to drastically cut government spending, tackle rampant inflation and boost economic growth.

Indonesia turns traditional Indigenous land into nickel industrial zone

Lucas Ruiz, a glaciologist at Argentine government scientific agency Conicet told Climate Home that Milei’s environmental agenda was “about relaxing regulations or reducing the area under protection with the argument that they go against economic development”.

Enrique Viale, who heads the Argentine association of environmental lawyers said that Milei “is part of an international trend that views environmentalism as an enemy”. Milei has praised former far-right presidents Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil and Donald Trump in the USA.

Although he committed Argentina to staying in the Paris climate agreement and keeping its net zero by 2050 target, Milei quickly abolished the environment ministry and proposed a huge and radical reform bill.

The bill contains hundreds of items pushing his agenda in a broad range of industries, from tourism and wine to mining and farming. But the two items which most angered environmentalists were easing restrictions on economic activities in glacial areas and forests.

While some items in the bill received support from legislators, these two were more controversial after scientists and environmental associations widely rejected them.

Forests and glaciers

One item would allow provincial governments to authorise deforestation in areas where it is currently banned. It would also cut the budget for tackling illegal deforestation and forest fires.

Greenpeace estimates that, with this change, about four-fifths of the country’s forests would have been left without any legal protection.

Greenpeace forest campaigner Hernán Giardini called it a “serious setback in terms of environmental regression”, which would lead to an “uncontrolled increase” in forest destruction.

Ecuador’s new president tries to wriggle out of oil drilling referendum

Milei also proposed to change the legal definition of glaciers so that smaller glaciers, and those not previously accounted for in an offical log, aren’t counted. This means they would not be legally protected from the gold, silver and copper miners that have been eyeing up deposits in the Andes.

Giardini said the idea that you could mine on the fringes of glaciers without damaging the glaciers themselves as like “removing the door from the refrigerator and expecting the freezer not to defrost”.

The Perito Moreno glacier in Los Glaciares National Park (Photos: Amanderson2)

Argentina has almost 17,000 glaciers, spanning an area bigger than Palestine. They provide drinking water to cities and help Argentina adapt to climate change.

Glaciologist Ruiz said they help mitigate the effects of drought by providing water. “The greatest risk we now face [with mining] is contamination of the very areas where many rivers originate”.

The fate of these measures and the reform bill is uncertain. But Giardini warns that their passing would be “a shameful setback”.

The laws the reforms would water down “took many years of work”, he said, and wrecking them “would mean throwing away many years worth of effort”.

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Junk offset sellers push to enter new UN carbon market https://www.climatechangenews.com/2024/01/18/junk-offset-sellers-push-to-enter-new-un-carbon-market/ Thu, 18 Jan 2024 13:36:50 +0000 https://www.climatechangenews.com/?p=49863 Renewable energy schemes make up four-fifths of Kyoto-era projects hoping to keep selling offsets under Article 6, sparking concerns over the credibility of the new market.

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Developers are trying to keep selling offsets from hundreds of controversial projects through a revamped United Nations mechanism, sparking fears that worthless credits will allow companies and countries to pollute.

Climate Home analysis shows that renewable energy investments make up four-fifths of all projects seeking a transfer from the old Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) to the new system under article 6.4 of the Paris Agreement.

Experts have long written off the vast majority of credits produced from renewable energy as junk because they often already provide the cheapest sources of power in most of the world and selling offsets to fund them does not have any additional impact on emissions.

Some of these projects have also been accused of human rights violations such as forced evictions for the construction of large dams.

Harry Fearnehough from New Climate Institute told Climate Home that “it could definitely undermine the credibility of the mechanism because, while there’s still uncertainty over what it will look like, as a starting point you have a huge supply of low-quality offsets that are potentially available at a very low cost”.

Established in 1997 by the Kyoto Protocol, the UN’s CDM allowed rich countries to meet some of their climate obligations by financing emission-cutting projects in poorer ones.

The programme has received widespread criticism for its patchy human rights record and for failing to deliver promised climate benefits. Supporters of a new mechanism currently being developed under article 6.4 of the Paris Agreement say it is an improved, higher-integrity successor to the CDM.

Winning a lifeline

Countries are still wrangling over many aspects of the future market, but one much-debated issue was settled at Cop26 in Glasgow.

Under pressure from Brazil, Russia, China and India, countries agreed that a vast number of projects originally created under the CDM were allowed to migrate to the new mechanism. This handed them the chance to significantly extend their lifespan and their potential credit sales.

Project developers had until the end of December 2023 to fill in a simple two-page form and submit their transition requests.

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Of the nearly 3,500 eligible projects, over a third (1,284) seized that opportunity.

In total, the projects that have requested transition by the deadline could supply 1.4 billion tonnes of carbon credits between 2021 – the start year for accounting purposes set by the regulation – and 2035, according to a preliminary analysis by NewClimate Institute shared with Climate Home. That is more than the annual CO2 emissions of Germany.

While a relatively small share of the projects opted in, they account for approximately three-quarters of the potential supply of carbon offsets.

That’s because some of the programmes seeking to move could produce an outsized volume of credits. The two biggest ones – a hydro plant and a nitrous oxide emission reduction scheme, both in Brazil – each have the potential to issue around 6 million tons of offsets a year. That’s similar to the annual emissions of Sierra Leone.

Fearnehough says that “very few, if any, of these credits are genuinely likely to be additional”, going beyond what countries would do anyway without the carbon finance.

“A key reason for this is that the CDM was really only scheduled to run up to the end of 2020,” he added. “No investor would have made a decision purely based on expecting revenues from credits in the 2020s because, quite simply, there was no political indication that the possibility to move over to a new mechanism would exist”.

Climate and social concerns

That is particularly true for the renewable energy projects vastly dominating the list. Experts say they are highly likely to fail the additionality test, meaning their credits do not bring any climate benefit. When used to compensate for real emissions elsewhere, they result in more greenhouse gases entering the atmosphere.

The reason is simple. Many renewable offsets came into existence just as solar and wind power were becoming the cheapest source of energy in most countries. After years in operation, they are likely to be profitable from the sale of the electricity alone, without the need for additional revenues from carbon offsetting.

A 2016 study commissioned by the European Commission concluded that the vast majority of these projects “are not providing real, measurable and additional emission reductions”.

Jirau dam Brazil carbon credits

The Jirau hydropower plant is located on the Madeira River, in Brazil. Photo: UHE em Jirau/Flickr

Hydropower projects carry even more concerns as their implementation is often marred by human rights problems. Vulnerable communities relying on rivers for their livelihoods are particularly at risk of forced displacement.

The largest project applying for the transition to the new mechanism – the Jirau mega-plant in Brazil’s Rondonia state – is a case in point.

Over the years the project has faced multiple accusations of stoking tensions, pushing indigenous people away from their territories and breaching the rights of the workers that built it. Engie, the project’s developer, previously rejected any accusations.

Other categories of activities featuring prominently on the transition list have raised major concerns in the past.

Credits from projects which claim to cut or stop the emission of industrial gases such as nitrous oxide (N20) and trifluoromethane (HFC-23) were banned by the EU in 2013 for use in its emission trading system.

That’s because, according to studies, they created “a perverse incentive” to increase the production of gases depleting the ozone layer.

Countries’ authorisation dilemma

While the CDM projects have now made their move and requested transition, they are not automatically through to the new system.

Standing in their way is the need to receive a formal authorisation to proceed from the countries where their activities are located. Governments have until 2025 to make a decision and, experts predict, it won’t be a straightforward one.

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“It’s not a guarantee that all host countries will want to approve all of these projects”, according to Jonathan Crook from Carbon Market Watch, who said there would be contrasting forces at play.

“If they authorise them, they have to do corresponding adjustments, which they might not be so keen on since those emission reductions will be deducted from their [NDC climate plans]. But, at the same time, most projects are located in very large countries and it may not make a big difference to their plans”.

The answer to this dilemma will rest primarily in the hands of China, India and Brazil. Between them, the countries host around three-quarters of all projects that are looking to migrate under article 6.4.

Spotlight on three countries

Observers of climate talks said their governments all pushed for rules that would grant a lifeline to as many CDM projects as possible when those negotiations took place at Cop25 in Madrid and Cop26 in Glasgow. But, since then, they have been conspicuously quiet on the topic.

Climate Home approached the respective carbon market authorities in the three countries but did not receive a response at the time of publication.

Trishant Dev is a carbon market expert at the Delhi-based Centre for Science and Environment. He expects there will be “a lot of pressure on the Indian government to let projects through from the carbon industry, which is thriving in the country”.

But, at the same time, he thinks the government will take time to properly understand all the pros and cons of allowing such authorisations. “It’s a chaotic process. Countries want to make sense of what the final outcome of the article 6 discussions will be and how that will interact with domestic carbon markets they are constructing”, he said.

Who will buy the credits?

Article 6 talks collapsed at Cop28 last December after attempts led by the EU to introduce tighter controls and further integrity safeguards had been rebuffed by the US. Negotiators will try again this year to hammer out a deal on many technical issues that need to be resolved before trading of offsets can begin.

Meanwhile, questions also remain on who will be interested in using those credits, once the market is up and running. Countries, corporations and individuals could all be potential buyers.

Comment: High stakes for climate finance in 2024

New Climate Institute’s Fearnehough said there doesn’t seem to be much appetite from countries based on what they are saying in public. “But it’s hard to predict what will happen when suddenly the offsets are available and you have an easy option to meet your NDC targets”, he added.

The credits may gain more interest from polluting companies. Banks, airlines and industrial heavyweights keep buying large volumes of questionable renewable energy offsets despite the known concerns, a Bloomberg investigation found. Dressing them up with the UN stamp of approval may add to the appeal.

Carbon Market Watch’s Crook believes much will depend on the transparency of the system – something still largely unknown. “If there is a very transparent register disclosing who purchased how many credits and for what purpose, that would disincentivize companies from transacting low-quality credits out of reputational fears,” he said. “But if it isn’t transparent, buyers may not be as careful with due diligence or may be even encouraged to buy bad credits since there won’t be scrutiny”.

A previous version of this article stated that projects requesting transition could provide 700 million tonnes of credits until 2035, while the correct figure is 1.4 billion tonnes. That was due to a computational error in the model used by NewClimate Institute for their analysis of which we were informed after publication.

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Germany and US warn Brazil against using Amazon Fund to pave rainforest road https://www.climatechangenews.com/2024/01/10/germany-and-us-warn-brazil-against-using-amazon-fund-to-pave-rainforest-road/ Wed, 10 Jan 2024 19:12:52 +0000 https://www.climatechangenews.com/?p=49830 The Brazilian government wants to tap forest protection funds to pave a major highway. Western donors say that goes against the fund's rules.

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Western donors to the Amazon Fund have warned against the Brazilian government’s plans to use it to pave a major road in the rainforest.

A spokesperson for the German government, the fund’s second-biggest donor, told Climate Home that support for such a project “is not possible” according to the rules of the fund, which was specifically set up to reduce forest destruction in the Amazon.

The United States is “confident” the fund will use its resources “consistent with its governing regulations”, a US State Department spokesperson told Climate Home.

Environmentalists fear the project would trigger an explosion in forest destruction by giving illegal loggers easier access to remote areas of the rainforest.

First ever Paris Agreement offsets face integrity questions

Investment in large-scale infrastructure projects is not listed among the target actions of the 2008 presidential decree that established how the fund should spend its money.

But officials in the Lula administration want to tap the green funds for the paving of the 900-kilometre long BR-319 highway, cutting through the rainforest and connecting Manaus and Porto Velho.

The lower house of the Brazilian Congress voted last December in favour of a bill that would allow for the use of conservation funds to finance public works aimed at “recovering, paving and increasing the capacity” of the road. The bill needs Senate approval before becoming law.

The German government said it “is observing the developments closely”. A spokesperson added that, if the bill was conclusively approved, the German government would affirm to the Amazon Fund’s managers that its resources cannot be used to pave the road.

‘Tremendous consequences’

Research shows every major highway project in the Amazon has set off a surge in land grabbing and illegal deforestation.

Philip Fearnside, a scientist at the National Institute for Amazonian Research in Manaus, told Climate Home “the consequences would be tremendous”.

He added that trees would not only be cleared on the roadside, but the project would create an interconnected network of major roads giving deforesters access to a much larger area.

Built in the 1970s by a military government, the BR-319 was abandoned a decade later due to a lack of maintenance.

Since disintegrated into a dirt road, much of the route is now impassable during the rainy season. Vehicles that attempt it during dry months crawl along the broken pavement.

BR 319 Amazonas Brazil

A section of BR-319 in the Amazonas state of Brazil. Photo: Agencia CNT de Noticias

The Brazilian government has been sketching out plans to restore the highway on economic and social development grounds.

The transport minister, Renan Filho, announced last August that he was planning to pitch the Amazon Fund’s governing board a project to pave the road.

This would turn the road into the world’s “most sustainable highway” and would allow easier access for police patrols to monitor and prevent deforestation, the ministry argued.

But environmentalists argued that this is not the kind of project that the fund is meant to support. One of the fund’s creators, forest scientist Tasso Azevedo said the project “does not fit into any of the fund’s planned support lines”.

Amazon Fund revived

Created in 2008, the Amazon Fund has over $1.2 billion available for projects that prevent, monitor and combat deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon. The fund’s largest donors are Norway, Germany, the US, Switzerland and state-owned oil company Petrobras.

They have promised to inject an extra $800 million into the fund since President Lula revived the mechanism on his first day in office in 2023 after three years of inactivity.

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Western donors had stopped money transfers in 2019, under the previous government of Jair Bolsonaro, after the former president unilaterally suspended the board of directors and the technical committee of the fund.

The Brazilian Development Bank (BNDES) manages the fund and decides how to allocate its resources.

Last September it told Climate Home that any requests are processed “in accordance with the strategic vision, guidelines and focuses” outlined in the 2023-25 ​​Biennium, a new set of guidelines created by the Amazon Fund’s Guiding Committee. It has not replied to further requests for comment.

Donors sceptical over plans

A spokesperson for Germany’s Ministry for cooperation and development, said the use of Amazon Fund resources “is clearly defined and restricted” by the presidential decree underpinning the fund’s creation. “Based on these rules and regulations, the use of financial resources for paving a road through the rainforest is not possible”, they added.

A US State Department spokesperson said they “are confident” the BNDES will use the fund’s resources “consistent with its governing regulations and Brazil’s public commitment to cease all deforestation in the Legal Amazon by 2030”.

Brazil cracks down on illegal gold miners

A spokesperson for the Norwegian embassy in Brazil said it is for the Brazilian government through BNDES to decide on the specific use of the resources in the Amazon Fund. “The Norwegian Government has no say in the selection of projects”, it added.

The Brazilian government controls BNDES and appoints its head. “It is not an independent institution and the government has put pressure on its decisions in the past”, says Fearnside. “It just depends on how high a priority the project is for the government. The indication is that, except for the Ministry of Environment, the rest of the government is in favour of this highway”.

Fast-tracking process

Meanwhile, a group of parliamentarians from the Amazon regions brought a new bill to Congress aiming to fast-track the construction project. The text, approved under a special ‘urgency’ procedure, calls the highway “critical infrastructure, indispensable to national security”. 

The bill would authorize the use of donations received by Brazil to help conservation of the Amazon for the repair works on BR-319.

“We want a road that gives us the right to go back and forth, to transport goods, to buy food. This is the only highway in Brazil that is not paved, we cannot treat people from the North as second-class citizens”, said Alberto Neto, the author of the bill, after its approval in the lower chamber.  

The article was updated on 11/01 to add a comment received after publication

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Brazil lawmakers approve using green fund to pave road through Amazon rainforest https://www.climatechangenews.com/2023/12/21/brazil-lawmakers-approve-using-green-fund-to-pave-road-through-amazon-rainforest/ Thu, 21 Dec 2023 15:17:03 +0000 https://www.climatechangenews.com/?p=49759 Donations meant to preserve the Amazon rainforest may be spent paving the road, which critics say will worsen the forest's destruction

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The lower house of Brazil’s Congress has approved a bill to relax environmental licensing to pave a highway cutting through the heart of the Amazon that scientists say will threaten the future of the world’s largest tropical rainforest.

The bill, which was voted late on Tuesday and still needs Senate approval, allows for the use of conservation funds donated to Brazil to finance the highway project, such as the $1.3 billion Amazon Fund backed by the U.S. and European allies.

The highway was built in the 1970s by a military government pushing to populate the Amazon, but it was quickly abandoned. By the late 1980s, most of the highway running some 900 kilometers from Porto Velho in Rondonia state to Manaus in Amazonas state, had disintegrated into a rutted dirt road.

The BR319 highway (Photo: Reuters)

Much of the route is now impassable during the rainy season. Vehicles that attempt it during dry months crawl along the broken pavement, dodging huge potholes and jungle debris.

Amazon researchers say the repaved road would trigger an explosion of deforestation in Amazonas state, home to most of Brazil’s best-preserved rainforest state due to a lack of roads.

Every major highway project in the Amazon has set off a surge in land grabbing and illegal deforestation. Researchers say BR-319 would open a new frontier for logging that could push the rainforest past a point of no return.

One of the Amazon Fund’s creators Tasso Azevedo told Climate Home in September that the money shouldn’t be spent on the road.

“I don’t think it makes any sense. This project does not fit into any of the fund’s planned support lines,” he said.

Countries go ahead with carbon deals despite Cop28 standoff

Sila Mesquita is civil society’s representative on the Amazon Fund committee. She said the fund “is meant to keep the forest anding, to maintain its biodiversity and to fight climate change. I don’t see its resources being used for paving”.

The ministry, however, argues that the paving of BR319 would turn the road into the world’s “most sustainable highway” and would allow easier access for police patrols to monitor and prevent deforestation.

Defenders of the project call it necessary to reduce the isolation of the two connected states, Amazonas and Rondonia. With BR-319 out of service much of the year, Manaus is often accessible only by river and air travel from the rest of Brazil.

The bill calls the highway “critical infrastructure, indispensable to national security, requiring the guarantee of its trafficability.” It would authorize the use of donations received by Brazil to help conservation of the Amazon for the “recovery, paving and increasing the capacity of the highway.”

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Colombia’s big green plans run into headwinds https://www.climatechangenews.com/2023/11/08/colombias-big-green-plans-run-into-headwinds/ Wed, 08 Nov 2023 16:57:19 +0000 https://www.climatechangenews.com/?p=49411 Tricky politics have hampered renewable growth and plans to stop oil and gas exploration have sparked economic fears

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Colombia’s ambitious green plans have hit headwinds, as tricky politics hampers renewable growth and plans to stop oil and gas exploration spark economic fears.

Last June, left-winger Gustavo Petro was elected president, vowing to make Colombia a “world power of life” in his four-year term.

He promised to scale up renewables, end fossil fuel exploration and ensure that workers are protected from the transition.

Climate campaigner Andres Gomez from CENSAT said it was an ambitious strategy that “no other country in the world is trying to do”.

Forests, methane, finance: Where are the Cop26 pledges now?

Over half of Colombia’s export revenue is from fossil fuels and richer nations like the US, UK and Canada have yet to commit to stopping fossil fuel exploration.

But Petro’s ambitious strategies are experiencing turbulence. Foreign energy firms have pulled out of renewable projects and plans to restrict fossil fuel exploration have sparked a backlash from some economists.

Beyond oil and gas?

At the start of the year, the then Colombian energy minister Irene Velez told the World Economic Forum in Switzerland that no new oil and gas exploration licenses would be granted.


Since then, none have been. The Colombian Senate passed a motion in April banning fracking for gas and no new coal exploration licenses have been granted either.

But this end to exploration has not been put into law, meaning the next government could issue licenses when it comes into power in 2026. Colombia restricts presidents to one four-year term.

It could happen sooner. In August, Velez was replaced as energy minister by Omar Camacho. He and finance minister Ricardo Bonilla have made overtures towards the oil and gas sector.

In August, Bonilla told a congressional commission that he was not ruling out future licensing but would first look at how much could be produced within areas already licensed for exploration.

Economic fears

Pressure to issue licenses was increased when Colombia’s Hydrocarbons Agency found that existing reserves are slightly smaller than previously estimated – enough for just over seven years.

Milton Montoya, a professor at Universidad Externado, warned that lower production could be economically damaging to Colombia.

“If we don’t invest in exploring right now, we’re going to have to import gas and oil. For our economy that would be a disaster,” he said.

Fuel prices are already a sensitive political subject: In August, taxi drivers in Colombia’s capital city Bogota stopped traffic in a protest against high fuel prices.

Jobs are at risk too. A government analysis this year found that halving the production of coal and oil could risk 362,000 jobs if there are no measures in place to help.

To deal with this upheaval, the energy ministry is consulting on a just transition plan for workers. But Juan Carlos Solano, the environmental lead at Colombia’s coal workers’ union said that the process is “too slow”.

Renewables roll-out

Wind and solar still provide just over 2% of Colombia’s power. The government wants to multiply installed capacity by 20 by 2030.

Its having some success. Last month, the energy regulator announced a record number of renewables developers were requesting to be connected to the electric grid.

But some projects are stalling. French energy giant EDF cancelled a solar project south of Bogota in October.

In a statement, it primarily blamed local government for delays in environmental permits. But also criticised national government’s tax reforms which made the project less profitable.

Argentine rewilding debate descends into legal threats

The rising cost of borrowing and a volatile exchange rate also dampened their enthusiasm, the company said.

In May, Italian firm Enel indefinitely suspended a wind farm near the Venezuelan border because indigenous Wayuu communities regularly blockaded construction.

But a 200-mile electricity transmission cable through the same region has been agreed, along with an agreement on energy transition.

Romain Ioualalen is the policy manager of Oil Change International. He said “‘it was always going to be the case that a very ambitious, visionary policy was going to be difficult”.

“No one said the transition was going to be easy and perfection doesn’t exist in the policy world,” he added, “but the political capital and energy they’re putting in to make this work is impressive”.

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Argentine rewilding debate descends into legal threats https://www.climatechangenews.com/2023/11/06/argentine-rewilding-debate-descends-into-legal-threats/ Mon, 06 Nov 2023 12:44:53 +0000 https://www.climatechangenews.com/?p=49372 A nature conservation foundation has accused Argentine scientists of slander after criticism of their rewilding methods

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Argentine scientists have accused a nature conservation foundation of “intimidation” as an academic debate over rewilding descended into legal threats.

At issue is whether introducing certain large mammals to parts of Argentina will benefit ecosystems and cut emissions or harm local wildlife and threaten human health.

In April, a group of over 100 scientists published an article on the potential pitfalls of reintroducing the wrong kind of animals to the wrong kind of places.

The Rewilding Foundation Argentina (FRA) thought the article accused them of xenophobia and sent a legal letter to the authors, accusing them of slander, a criminal offence which could cost them their government jobs.

One of the scientists feeling threatened was Alejandro Valenzuela from the National University of Tierra del Fuego. He told Climate Home that “rewilding projects could have some minor climate benefits, as healthy ecosystems lock in more carbon.”

“But,” he said, “they have to be done right and scrutinised properly and freely”.

Although independent and based in Argentina, FRA has strong links to a conservation charity set up by American billionaires Douglas and Kris Tompkins, who made their money from the North Face brand of cold weather clothes.

Doug and Kris Tompkins, pictured in 2009 before Doug’s death in 2015 (Photo credit: Doug and Kris Tompkins)

FRA’s funders include companies like Rolex, Toyota and Patagonia, other charities like Turtle Conservancy and the Parrot Wildlife Foundation and several wealthy individuals.

Xenophobia accusations

The battle has played out mostly in the normally sedate pages of the an academic journal called Neo-Tropical Mastozoology.

Last year, an Argentine biologist called Mario Di Bitetti and two colleagues from Denmark’s Aarhus University published an article which was critical of the Latin American scientists.

“Until now, the Latin American scientific community has generally opposed the presence of perceived exotic mammals in natural settings, without even considering their effects are,” they said.

“A xenophobic and nationalist conception has dominated, which has produced a demonisation of exotics,” they added.

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In April 2023, over 100 Argentine scientists hit back in the same journal. They argued that reintroducing animals should not be a goal in itself but a way of restoring ecosystems.

They warned that big grass-eating animals can destroy grassland and that introducing animals in small numbers can leed to inbreeding, which produces weak and infertile offspring which are less likely to survive.

What most angered FRA though was a section which said that “some rewilding projects developed in Argentina propose a single interaction with local inhabitants, mainly through tourism projects, craft manufacturing and/or attention to visitors”.

It then asked: “Is it xenophobic to attempt to control introduced species… or is it xenophobic to ignore our multicultural reality, imposing the agenda of entrepreneurship on the native human populations of America?”

Lawyers get involved

FRA took this as a thinly-veiled criticism of them and reacted angrily. They sent a legal letter, seen by Climate Home, to one of the most high-profile of the article’s authors – the director of the Natural History Museum of Buenos Aires Pablo Teta.

The letter says that xenophobia is a criminal offence and they “will not tolerate” being accused of it.

They go on to accuse Teta and his fellow authors of the criminal offence of slander and demand a retraction “in the same medium in which the slander was poured out, under warning of initiating judicial actions”.

The letter finished by saying: “It is worth clarifying that the Penal Code provides for the accessory penalty of disqualification when the authors of the slander are public officials.” Like many of his fellow authors, Teta is a public official.

The editor of the journal Isabel E Gómez Villafañe declined their request for a public retraction. She said that FRA had not been directly named anywhere in the article and had been repeatedly invited to respond and not taken up the offer.

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Valenzuela told Climate Home that he had been disappointed that “what could have been a rich academic debate turned into a potential judicial dispute.”

He added: “In my own country, I was left feeling intimidated and threatened by censorship by this NGO which works with international funding”.

In a statement, FRA denied this letter was a form of intimidation a threat to freedom of speech. “On the contrary,” they said, “the letter helped to rectify a serious unfair accusation”.

The argument played out on social media too. As FRA posted on X about the “false accusations”, one user praised FRA’s “great work” while another said “what you can do if you don’t like Argentine science is leave our country”.

Project rejected

At around the same time, FRA was invited to a meeting with the National Parks Administration (APN) to discuss their project alongside scientists, technicians and the health ministry.

On the day of the meeting, FRA legal representatives sent APN a note saying they weren’t going to show up. The experts in the room discussed the project anyway and a few weeks later, the APN rejected the plan.

In a statement, they said it was a risk to public health. Swamp deer can spread a potentially life-threatening disease called human monocytic ehrlichosis and, the APN said, the project lacks a plan to tackle this risk.

They added that the deer would be threatened by donkeys, dogs, wild animals, hunting and fire. Marsh deer are already considered vulnerable by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN).

Ian Convery is the co-chair of the IUCN’s rewilding group. He told Climate Home that rewilding “has to be the right species, right place and right time”.

FRA pointed out that the APN had approved aspects of the project in 2019 and 2021.

They claim it only rejected it in 2023 because it had a new director of conservation called Pablo Berrozpe and he had consulted with scientists critical of FRA whose “ability to objectively evaluate the project was at least compromised”.

Berrozpe disputes this. He says “the project was rejected since it did not meet the minimum requirements” and that FRA are underestimating the Argentine national scientific system.

Lawful right not intimidation

In their statement, RFA said that “technical arguments revealing the limitations of any conservation strategy are always welcome as they help to improve the sorely needed restoration of the world’s ecosystems.”

“But,” they added, “actions must be taken when these criticisms turn into a collection of violent misleading arguments” and “in a
democracy, such actions include resorting to legal tools so the victims of false claims can defend themselves.”

“This defensive strategy is a lawful right, not an action of intimidation”, they said.

A spokesperson for Tompkins Conservation said they supported the statement of RFA, which is their “offspring organisation” although now independent.

This article was amended on 10 November to include a comment from Pablo Berrozpe

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Lula scraps Bolsonaro’s cuts to Brazilian climate target ambition https://www.climatechangenews.com/2023/09/18/lula-scraps-bolsonaros-cuts-to-brazilian-climate-target-ambition/ Mon, 18 Sep 2023 16:10:01 +0000 https://www.climatechangenews.com/?p=49226 Brazil will go back to the climate targets it drew up in 2015 while it works on new and improved ones

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The Brazilian government has agreed to cancel former president Jair Bolsonaro’s cuts to its climate ambition and to work on a new improved climate target.

The moves were agreed by a group of government ministers at the Interministerial Committee on Climate Change last week.

The government will change Brazil’s climate plan, resuming the level of ambition presented in 2015 “in terms of absolute values ​​of greenhouse gas emissions”, it said.

President Lula Da Silva is expected to officially announce this at the United Nations (UN) General Assembly in New York on Tuesday.

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Izabella Teixeira, Brazil’s former environment minister and Lula advisor, welcomed the decision saying “Brazil finally recognises the mistakes made by the previous government”.

“We have again a baseline pointing in the right direction from whom to discuss the future,” she told Climate Home News. “Brazil has the ambition to do more in the future. It can move from green-wishing to green-doing”.

Claudio Angelo from the Observatorio Do Clima says it is an important first step, but bolder commitments are needed.

“We are finally burying Bolsonaro’s toxic climate governance legacy,” he said. “But this is nowhere near the ambition we need to show in a country whose president says he wants to lead on climate”.

Bolsonaro’s cuts

In its first UN climate plan in 2015, the Brazilian government led by Lula ally Dilma Rousseff pledged to cut emissions by 37% between 2005 and 2025 and by 43% by 2030.

Under UN rules, governments are supposed to progressively increase their ambition but the Bolsonaro administration twice used accounting tricks to weaken its climate goals.

In 2020 it reiterated the same targets but tweaked the baseline emission data, allowing for more emission than the previous version in absolute terms.

Lula scraps Bolsonaro's cuts to Brazilian climate target ambition

The Brazilian climate target in 2015 was more ambitious than its 2020 or 2022 ones. Source: Observatório do Clima

Following pressure from civil society and the international community, the government made a new update in 2022, raising the 2050 target to 50%.

But the proposal still permitted the emission of 70 MtCO2e more than what was first proposed in 2015.

Ana Toni, national secretary for climate change at environment ministry, said the return to stricter targets is “very important symbolically because it helps to end the evil things that the Bolsonaro government did”.

More ambition needed

Toni added that the government will now get to work on a new climate plan, which “will logically be more ambitious than that”. But she did not announce a timeline for its development.

The government has set up two working groups on the new plan – one for emissions-cutting and one for adapting to climate change.

Subgroups will be cretaed to draw up eight emissions-cutting plans for different sectors and 14 adaptation plans.

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Observatorio Do Clima’s Angelo does not expect the new plan to be released before Cop30, which Brazil will host in the Amazonian city of Belém.

Halting deforestation

Brazil is the world’s seventh-largest carbon dioxide emitter, according to Climate Watch, much of it driven by the clearing of trees in the Amazon rainforest.

Deforestation reached record levels under the government of Bolsonaro, who slashed environmental protection programmes.

Before coming back into office, Lula promised to reverse that trend and combat deforestation.

His efforts are achieving some initial results: tree loss has fallen  by nearly a half between January and August, compared to the same period of 2022.

The article was amended on 18/9 after publication to add a comment from Izabella Teixeira and on 19/9 to say that Lula is expected to announce the policy on Tuesday, rather than Wednesday.

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Green debt swaps, explained https://www.climatechangenews.com/2023/09/04/debt-for-nature-debt-for-climate-swaps/ Mon, 04 Sep 2023 12:00:49 +0000 https://www.climatechangenews.com/?p=48598 Debt-for-nature and debt-for-climate swaps are becoming more common, with Ecuador's recent $1.6bn deal the biggest yet. How do they work?

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Government debts are rocketing to untenable levels while the need for huge investments in climate and nature becomes ever clearer.

Enter debt-for-climate and debt-for-nature swaps. Dating back to the 1980s, these measures are having a renaissance.

In the past, a common policy response to debt crisis was to boost exports by cutting down forests for timber or farmland. This was unsustainable.

In 1984, the World Wildlife Fund’s Thomas Lovejoy proposed debt-for-nature swaps as a solution and the US congress authorised the government to do them in 1990.

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Recent moves

In 2018, the Seychelles announced it had converted $22 million of its debt into an obligation to spend that money protecting its oceans off the coast of East Africa.

In 2021, the Central American nation of Belize dodged International Monetary Fund austerity measures by swapping roughly $550m of its debt for an obligation to spend money saving its oceans.

In January, Portugal swapped the $152m Cape Verde owes it for a promise to invest $12m initially in an environmental fund. This will go towards climate measures like renewable energy production in its former colony.

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Then in May came the biggest deal of them all. Ecuador changed $1.6 billion in debt into a commitment to spend at least $12 million a year on park rangers, drones and other measures to save the wildlife of the Galapagos islands.

Ecuadorean Foreign Minister Gustavo Manrique Miranda said biodiversity was now a valuable “currency”.

Andrew Johnstone is the CEO of an investment fund called Climate Fund Managers (CFM), which aims to protect the climate and nature and make a profit and was involved in the deal.

He said the swap was a “cutting-edge climate solution” that “sets a new precedent which we are actively looking to replicate across our focus markets of Africa, Asia and Latin America”.

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But how do these swaps really work? And are they as good as they sound? Let’s look at the example of Ecuador.

Who is letting Ecuador off their debts?

The institutions that Ecuador owed money to sold off $1.87 billion of that debt at a discount.

They didn’t do that out of charity. Debt is sold at a discount because it’s risky for lenders, who fear not getting paid back. This happens often and is not specific to Ecuador or to debt swaps.

Most of this debt, $1.63bn, was bought by pension funds, insurance companies and asset managers like Legal and General.

A smaller amount, $0.24bn was bought by CFM, through money that ultimately comes from mainly Northern European governments and from private companies like the BNG Bank and Aegon.

This $1.63bn debt was replaced with a new debt of just $0.66bn, called a “Blue Galapagos Bond”. With about $1bn of debt cancelled, Ecuador has a lot less to pay back every year.

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The government’s payments were further reduced when the US government’s International Development Finance Corporation (DFC) got involved.

It told CFM and the institutional investors lending the $0.66bn Blue Galapagos Bond to Ecuador that if the government doesn’t pay its debts, then it will pay them instead.

Lenders set their interest rate based on how they perceive the risk of lending.

With this guarantee, lending to Ecuador became less risky and, CFM say, lenders charged less interest than they had before – freeing up a load of money each year to spend on other things, like nature conservation.

Isn’t this a gamble for the DFC?

The DFC gets much of its initial money from the US government and ultimately taxpayers.

If Ecuador doesn’t pay its debts, it will  lose out and have less money to invest in other projects like investments in health, food security and infrastructure.

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Juan Paez is the Latin American head of Climate Fund Managers and was involved in the Ecuador deal.

He told Climate Home it was a gamble “but it’s a good gamble” because Ecuador is much less likely to default now the US has an interest in it not doing so.

“The political relationship between the US and Ecuador will allow the Americans with significant presence to influence, to help, to aid” to avoid a default, he said.

He said that when agencies like DFC provided political risk insurance, payouts “never really historically happened”.

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Paez was only aware of one exception in Latin America, when the World Bank’s insurance arm MIGA paid out for a claim in Argentina in 2004.

Why not just give Ecuador money for nature protection?

The US government has a limited aid budget and has to fight Congress for every penny.

With guarantees, they can get money to park rangers in the Galapagos without actually handing over a cent – unless Ecuador defaults on its debts.

“Its a much more effective use of capital,” said Paez, “based on basically a confidence in their balance sheet.”

Has there been any opposition to the deal?

Industrial fishing associations initially worried about the impact on their catch, but were assured the localised protections would boost fish populations in a wider area.

Civil society also has concerns. Latindadd, a coalition of Latin American debt and climate justice campaigns, criticised the deal over poor transparency and “high transaction costs” for a relatively small scale of debt reduction.

These deals are complicated, with significant sums of money going to consultants and intermediaries to establish and run them.

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Latindadd warned the deal undermined Ecuador’s sovereignty over the Galapagos. “Decisions on the use of resources will be made by a private entity created outside Ecuador under the decision-making power of private stakeholders,” it said.

While saving the Galapagos’s wildlife is in everyone’s interests, things could get tense if Ecuador’s efforts don’t satisfy its new creditors.

Julie Segal, climate finance manager at Environmental Defence Canada, told Climate Home “countries should be able to deliver solutions driven by local needs and keeping a debtor relationship risks getting in the way of that”.

Debt Justice campaigner Tess Woolfenden called these debt swaps a “distraction… from the solutions that are actually going to work” like large-scale debt cancellation.

Climate Action Network said in a statement debt swaps were “not an adequate solution” as they rarely cancel significant debt.

While they don’t take a moral stance, credit rating agencies can penalise nations for debt swaps. If they count the debt cancellation as a default, they put a black mark against that nation’s name, which makes it more expensive for their government to borrow money.

What happens if Ecuador doesn’t spend the money on nature protection?

Erik Wandrag is the CEO of CFM’s oceans arm and will manage the Galapagos project. He told Climate Home there were covenants in the agreement which mean Ecuador needs to do certain things.

“If they don’t do it, it actually becomes an event of default, which then could trigger a repayment of the full loan and put the whole structure to default,” he said.

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His organisation, CFM’s Ocean Finance Company, is responsible for overseeing the conservation efforts. It will use third party verification as well as direct engagement. If it’s not satisfied, “funding gets turned off,” said Wandrag.

In response to civil society concerns, Wandrag said that “there is no loss of sovereignty”. The government wants to protect the Galapagos and would fund these programmes itself, he said, “if it had the funding available in its budget, which it doesn’t”.

He added that the government, local communities, civil society and industry associations were “widely consulted”.

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Soy, beef and gold gangsters: Why Bolivia and Venezuela won’t protect the Amazon https://www.climatechangenews.com/2023/08/24/bolivia-venezuela-deforestation-soy-beef-illegal-gold-mining/ Thu, 24 Aug 2023 12:47:27 +0000 https://www.climatechangenews.com/?p=49087 Bolivia wants to chop down trees to grow soy, beef and palm oil while Venezuela is unwilling or unable to restrain illegal gold mining

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This month’s Amazon summit brought together leaders from eight countries to sketch out a plan to protect the rainforest, but ended without a pledge to end deforestation by 2030 in the final document.

That target was pushed by Brazil but met the opposition of the Bolivian government, according to Brazilian officials quoted in the Financial Times and the Guardian.

“We tried [to include some deforestation targets], but Bolivia explicitly asked for it to be deleted,” said one official, “Venezuela was perhaps [also] reluctant, but since Bolivia was so strongly [opposed], they did not need to speak against it”.

Bolivia and Venezuela were also the only two Amazon nations not to sign a pledge to protect forests at the Cop26 summit in Glasgow in 2021.

Between them, they hold roughly a seventh of the Amazon. But their governments are permissive when it comes to extractive activities in those areas—and in both countries deforestation is on the rise.

Agribusiness ambitions

Bolivia’s reported position at the Amazon summit is in line with its policies at home, which prioritise development and the export of agricultural commodities, among others.

Bolivia’s soy and beef exports are small compared to those of Brazil and Argentina, the regional agriculture giants. But they are growing, and the Bolivian government has set ambitious targets for the sector.

To meet them it has built infrastructure, kept taxes on agriculture low and subsidised fuel. It has also handed out forested public lands to internal migrants while authorising more forest clearing and decriminalising illegal deforestation.

Rapidly accelerating deforestation

According to Fundación Tierra, a Bolivian NGO, deforestation averaged roughly 300,000 hectares a year, an area the size of Hong Kong, between 2016 and 2021.

For three years running, Global Forest Watch has ranked Bolivia third in the world for loss of primary forest, ahead of Indonesia and behind only much bigger forest nations Brazil and the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Yet there’s no sign of the government reducing its support for agribusiness. Declining gas exports have made agricultural exports all the more important to maintain the country’s international reserves.

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“It’s a sector that, even if it doesn’t generate much in the way of taxes, is very important for foreign exchange,” said Enrique Ormachea, an investigator at CEDLA, a Bolivian NGO.

Bolivia’s lack of foreign exchange has damaged its international credit rating, pushing up the price it pays to borrow money.

Recent policies aim to produce palm oil, boost beef exports to China and build biodiesel refineries that would use Bolivian produce—all of which would further expand the agricultural frontier.

Venezuela’s gold rush

On the other side of the Amazon, Luis Betancourt is the head of Venezuelan NGO Grupo de Investigaciones sobre la Amazonía.

He told Climate Home: “In the Venezuelan Amazon we don’t really have deforestation for ranching or large-scale agriculture, what we have is illegal mining.”

According to the IMF, between 2013 and 2021 Venezuela’s economy shrank by more than four-fifths. Millions left the country in search of work. Many others went into small-scale gold mining.

Why Bolivia and Venezuela won't protect the Amazon

An illegal gold mine in the south of Venezuela, pictured in 2012 (Reuters/Jorge Silva)

The government looked to mining to replace the revenues lost with the collapse of the oil industry. In 2016, President Nicolás Maduro decreed the creation of the Orinoco Mining Arc, taking an area that holds roughly a tenth of the nation’s landmass and five national parks and opening it up for mining concessions.

RAISG, a network of NGOs, has detected almost 2,000 mining sites in the Venezuelan Amazon, where it is estimated some 189,000 people work.

Mines are controlled by armed groups, including guerrilla groups and mining gangs known as sindicatos. Investigations by Insight Crime indicate many are linked to organised crime and backed by elements of the Venezuelan state, who take a cut of the profits.

Lack of interest

One study put the loss of forest in the Venezuelan Amazon at 140,000 hectares between 2016 and 2020, accounting for 1.6% of the total loss across the Amazon in that period.

Asked why Venezuela might have resisted a pledge to eradicate deforestation by 2030, Professor María Eugenia Grillet, an ecologist at the Universidad Central de Venezuela, said it was perhaps because that would imply committing itself to something it cannot achieve in the short or even medium-term.

“Because ultimately the government doesn’t seem interested in the conservation of our Amazonian forests,” she said. “This illegal gold mining seems to be promoted by a certain part of the state, by corruption, by unregulated illicit activities—and by the political, economic and social crisis of the country.”

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One of 2023’s most extreme heatwaves is happening in the middle of winter https://www.climatechangenews.com/2023/08/14/latin-america-heatwave/ Mon, 14 Aug 2023 15:18:57 +0000 https://www.climatechangenews.com/?p=49048 Temperatures in parts of South America are 20C (68F) more than normal, one of the most extreme deviations ever seen

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Temperatures in parts of Chile and northern Argentina have soared to 10°C-20°C above average over the last few weeks. Towns in the Andes mountains have reached 38°C or more, while Argentina’s capital, Buenos Aires, saw temperatures above 30°C – breaking its previous August record by more than 5°C. Temperatures peaked at 39°C in the town of Rivadavia.

Bear in mind it’s mid-winter in this part of the world. And it’s far south enough that seasonal variations have a substantial impact on temperatures. Buenos Aires, for instance, is as far south as Japan, Tibet or Tennessee are north.

In terms of deviation from temperatures you might expect at a certain place and time of year, this heatwave is comparable to, if not greater than, the recent heatwaves in southern Europe, the US and China.

In Vicuña, one of the towns in the Chilean Andes that recently reached 38°C, a typical August day might be 18°C or so – just imagine it being a whole 20°C warmer than normal wherever you are now.

No wonder some climate scientists have already suggested this could be one of the most extreme heatwaves on record.

What’s causing the extreme heat?

Over the past six days, a persistent area of high pressure, or anticyclone, has lingered to the east of the Andes. Also known as a “blocking high”, this appears to be the key driver of the intense heat.

Annotated map of South America
The blocking anticyclone driving the Chile-Argentina heatwave.
GFS analysis data, Author provided

Blocking anticyclones can drive heatwaves in three main ways. Firstly, they pull warmer air from closer to the equator towards them. The system also compresses and traps the air, heating it up, as was the case for the 2021 heatwave in the Pacific Northwest, which shattered the Canadian temperature record by nearly 5°C. Finally, the high pressure means there is little ascending air and hence little cloud cover. This allows the sun to heat the land continuously during the day, building up heat.

However, scientists need to analyse the meteorology of this unprecedented event in more detail to gain a more complete understanding.

El Niño made this more likely

The Chile-Argentina heatwave may have been made more likely by the developing El Niño in the Pacific Ocean. El Niño events, which typically occur every four years or so, are characterised by warm sea surface temperatures in the central-to-eastern tropical Pacific. Temperatures in the central Pacific are currently about 1°C above average for the time of year.

These warmer ocean temperatures make air more buoyant over the central Pacific, causing the air to rise. This drives changes to atmospheric circulation patterns further afield. El Niño-induced changes to atmospheric circulation typically mean higher pressure and warmer winter temperatures for this part of South America.

Climate change made it worse

The blocking system driving the extreme heat would probably have led to warm temperatures even in the absence of anthropogenic climate change. However, the rapid warming of climate change allowed the heatwave to become truly unprecedented.

Climate scientists expect to see temperature records broken as our planet continues to heat up. This is because the distribution of possible temperatures is shifting higher and higher.

Annotated graph
An increase in averages means an increase in extremes.
Australia Climate Commission/IPCC, CC BY-SA

Chile has already experienced the effects of climate change recently through a severe heatwave in February – late summer – resulting in several deaths from wildfires, as well as a decade-long mega-drought. The country recently rejected a rewrite of the constitution which would have mandated its government to take action against the nature and climate crises.

The longer-term impact of a winter heatwave

The hottest temperatures now appear to have largely subsided in the Andes. However, temperatures are still well above average for northern Argentina, Bolivia and Paraguay, and will remain so for the next five days or so.

The impacts of winter heatwaves are less well understood than summer heatwaves. For Chile, the most likely impact is on snowpack in the mountains, which provides water for drinking, agriculture and power generation. Any melting of the snowpack will probably also affect the diverse flora and fauna found in the Andes.

Overall, this heatwave is a startling reminder of how humans are changing Earth’s climate. We will continue to see such unprecedented extremes until we stop burning fossil fuels and emitting greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.

Matthew Patterson is a postdoctoral research assistant in atmospheric physics at the University of Oxford in the UK.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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Dis-united States of the Amazon – Climate Weekly https://www.climatechangenews.com/2023/08/11/dis-united-states-of-the-amazon-climate-weekly/ Fri, 11 Aug 2023 16:25:54 +0000 https://www.climatechangenews.com/?p=49044 Sign up to get our weekly newsletter straight to your inbox, plus breaking news, investigations and extra bulletins from key events

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Climate politics watchers had pinned major hopes on the much-hyped Amazon Summit this week.

It is easy to see why. For the first time in 14 years, leaders from eight Amazonian nations came together in the Brazilian city of Bèlem to sketch out a plan to tackle deforestation.

The biggest success is that the meeting happened at all. It would have been an unfathomable proposition less than a year ago under the then-presidency of Jair Bolsonaro, who was overseeing a skyrocketing increase in tree-chopping in the Amazon rainforest.

When it comes to the summit’s outcome things get less rosy. The countries agreed to a long list of policies and areas of possible cooperation. But, as environmental groups put it, the Bèlem Declaration looks like “a compilation of good intentions with little in the way of measurable goals and timeframes”.

There are two notable absentees in the final document: a pledge to end deforestation by 2030 and any mention of halting fossil fuel expansion in the Amazon.

The former met the insurmountable opposition of the Bolivian government, according to Brazilian officials quoted in the FT and the Guardian. The latter, pushed by Colombia’s Gustavo Petro, always looked doomed given Brazil is still looking into plans to develop a huge offshore oil field near the mouth of the Amazon River.

The Amazon nations did, however, manage to unite around a thinly-veiled attack on new EU deforestation rules affecting imported commodities

European leaders see this as a key lever in the fight to save rainforests. But the eight countries – and many other forest nations worldwide – slam the environmental rules as “protectionist” trade barriers.

This fight will continue at the negotiations over the EU-Mercosur free trade deal.

This week’s news:

Climate-unfriendly economics

Mainstream economists have a dangerous habit of playing down climate change.

At least that’s according to two recent reports that reached the same conclusion: economic models ignore tipping points, floods, droughts and indoor work. Glaring omissions that end up hugely underplaying the economic damage of global warming.

This is not just an academic exercise. The models are relied upon by investors, politicians, central bank governors and influential bodies like the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

If economists get it wrong, decisions made on the basis of their work will prove costly.

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Amazon nations decry EU deforestation rules in thinly-veiled joint condemnation https://www.climatechangenews.com/2023/08/10/amazon-nations-decry-eu-deforestation-rules-in-thinly-veiled-joint-condemnation/ Thu, 10 Aug 2023 14:36:28 +0000 https://www.climatechangenews.com/?p=49034 The Belem Declaration echoes growing discontent with a new law prohibiting firms from importing goods linked to deforestation

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Amazon nations have attacked in a joint declaration the “proliferation” of environmental rules in trade, echoing a growing backlash against new EU deforestation requirements.

A law adopted by European governments in June requires companies to prove a series of products, including cattle, soya and palm oil, were not grown on land affected by tree loss.

The EU says the rules are a key building block in the fight against climate change and biodiversity loss. But some of the world’s biggest commodity producers have been voicing increasing discontent calling the measures “protectionist” and “discriminatory”.

The latest sign of opposition comes in the Belém Declaration signed on Tuesday by eight South American countries following a major rainforest summit in Brazil. The final document includes a rejection to trade measures such as the EU’s rules.

In the Brazilian city of Belém, Presidents and top officials from Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia and Peru attended the Amazon Summit, while Ecuador, Guyana, Suriname and Venezuela sent other top officials.

Amazon nations fail to agree on deforestation goal at summit

Environmental ‘trade barriers’

The countries failed to agree on a common goal for ending deforestation but issued unified policies and measures to bolster regional cooperation.

The final document does not single out the European law specifically, but it condemns “the proliferation of unilateral trade measures based on environmental requirements and norms which constitute trade barriers”.

The signatories go on to claim that such measures “primarily affect smallholder farmers in developing countries, the pursuit of sustainable development, the promotion of Amazon products and the efforts to eradicate poverty and fight hunger”.

Mainstream economists accused of playing down climate threat

Marcio Astrini from the Observatório do Clima called the inclusion of the paragraph in the joint declaration “a disgrace”. He told Climate Home News that if countries like Brazil and Colombia are serious about ending deforestation, they should have vetoed this statement.

“What’s wrong with a commercial partner saying they don’t want to buy products linked to deforestation?”, Astrini added. “Environmental and climate issues are already part of business and market standards around the world, this is a new reality, and it is better to adapt to it.”

Brazilian backlash

The attack on trade measures in the declaration follows a week of heated rhetoric by top government officials in the region.

Brazil’s agriculture minister Carlos Favaro slammed the European deforestation law, calling it “an affront” to global trade regulations. He added Brazil would boost trade relations with other partners if the EU continues not to recognize Brazil’s efforts to protect the environment.

Indonesia falls short on peatland restoration, risking destructive fire season

Deforestation accelerated sharply under the far-right then-president Jair Bolsonaro, but rates have been coming down since the new administration led by Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva took power at the start of the year.

Brazil is the single biggest exporter of agricultural products to the EU, shipping almost $12 billion worth of soya, corn and beef to the bloc in 2022. The commodities have been a historical driver of tree loss across the Amazon region, including in Brazil. The government says only 2% of Brazilian farmers commit environmental crimes.

Brazil's president Lula da Silva stands on a stage decorated with tress in the back at the Amazon Summit 2023. Amazon Nations Unite in Criticism of EU Deforestation Rules

Brazil’s President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva waits for the official family photo with leaders of countries attending the Amazon Summit at the Hangar Convention Centre in Belem, Para State, Brazil. (Photo: Reuters)

Astrini claims for the overwhelming majority of producers the new rules will not be a problem, making the criticism of the European regulations “meaningless” in Brazil.

Other major commodities-producing nations like Indonesia and Malaysia have previously criticised the regulations.

‘Critical step’

Companies have until December 2024 to adjust to the new legislation, which requires them to trace the products they are selling back to the plot of land where they were produced.

André Vasconcelos from the supply-chain transparency group Trase says the EU law is a “critical step” in making sure consumer markets play a role in driving down deforestation. But he added that for the new regulations to be “effective and equitable”, the EU needs to cooperate with producer countries.

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“Such collaboration needs to include the provision of financial support to boost enforcement of environmental regulations as well as the provision of incentives for farmers, particularly smallholder farmers, not to deforest”, he told Climate Home News.

The EU says it is stepping up its engagement with producing countries to ensure an inclusive transition to deforestation-free and legal supply chains.

Mercosur stumbling block

The issue is likely to come back to the fore at upcoming talks over a long-awaited free trade agreement between the EU and South America’s Mercosur bloc.

Paraguay’s President-elect Santiago Pena told Reuters this week that the EU’s current environmental demands in trade talks are “unacceptable”. He said that the European bloc’s proposals would hinder major soy exporter Paraguay’s economic development.

Brazil is also pushing the EU for better trading terms in return for offering environmental guarantees over the protection of the Amazon rainforest. Mercosur officials are working on a counter-proposal before meeting with EU negotiators. The two sides hope to reach an agreement before the end of the year.

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Amazon nations fail to agree on deforestation goal at summit https://www.climatechangenews.com/2023/08/09/amazon-nations-fail-to-agree-on-deforestation-goal-at-summit/ Wed, 09 Aug 2023 00:20:30 +0000 https://climatechangenews.com/?p=49029 Eight South American nations agreed on a list of joint actions to protect the Amazon rainforest, but failed to mention a long-awaited target to halt deforestation.

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Eight Amazon nations agreed to a list of unified policies and measures to bolster regional cooperation at a major rainforest summit in Brazil on Tuesday, but failed to agree on a common goal for ending deforestation.

Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, who has staked his international reputation on improving Brazil’s environmental standing, had been pushing for the region to unite behind a common policy of ending deforestation by 2030 – one he has already adopted.

Instead, the joint declaration issued on Tuesday in the Brazilian city of Belem created an alliance for combating forest destruction, with countries left to pursue their own individual deforestation goals.

The document also leaves out any mentions to halting fossil fuel contracts in the Amazon rainforest, a proposal that was championed by the Colombian President Gustavo Petro but ultimately failed to make it into the final text.

The Brazilian coalition of climate NGOs, Climate Observatory, said the declaration fell short of expectations, adding the agreement “fails the rainforest and the planet”.

Pressure grows on governments and banks to stop supporting Amazon oil and gas

Slow action

The failure of the eight Amazon countries to agree on a pact to protect their own forests points to the larger, global difficulties at forging an agreement to combat climate change. Many scientists say policymakers are acting too slowly to head off catastrophic global warming.

Lula and other national leaders left Tuesday’s meeting without commenting on the declaration. Presidents from Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia and Peru attended the summit, while Ecuador, Guyana, Suriname and Venezuela sent other top officials.

Brazil’s Foreign Minister Mauro Vieira said in a press briefing that the issue of deforestation “in no way whatsoever will divide the region” and cited “an understanding about deforestation” in the declaration, without elaborating.

As Guyana shows, carbon offsets will not save the Amazon rainforest

This week’s summit brought together the Amazon Cooperation Treaty Organization (ACTO) for the first time in 14 years, with plans to reach a broad agreement on issues from fighting deforestation to financing sustainable development.

Márcio Astrini, executive secretary of the Brazilian NGO coalition Climate Observatory, said the summit’s declaration is a “first step” but added it still lacks “concrete responses to the situation we’re dealing with”.

“The planet is melting, we are breaking temperature records every day. It is not possible that, in a scenario like this, eight Amazonian countries cannot put in a statement, in bold letters, that deforestation needs to be zero and that exploring for oil in the middle of the forest is not a good idea,” said Astrini.

Oil in the Amazon?

Tensions emerged in the lead up to the summit around diverging positions on deforestation and oil development.

Fellow Amazon countries also rebuffed Colombia’s leftist President Gustavo Petro’s ongoing campaign to end new oil development in the Amazon. In his speech on Tuesday, Petro likened the left’s desire to keep drilling for oil to the right-wing denial of climate science.

He said the idea of making a gradual “energy transition” away from fossil fuels was a way to delay the work needed to stop climate change.

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Civil society organisations accused the Brazilian government of opposing a mention to fossil fuels in the final text, adding the country wanted to “bury” any mentions of a fossil fuel phase out in the region.

Brazil is weighing whether to develop a potentially huge offshore oil find near the mouth of the Amazon River and the country’s northern coast, which is dominated by rainforest.

“What we are discussing in Brazil today is of an extensive and large area – in my vision perhaps the last frontier of oil and gas before … the energy transition,” Brazil’s Energy Minister Alexandre Silveira told reporters after Petro’s speech.

Silveira said they should conduct research into what oil is there in order to make a decision on the issue.

Illegal mining

Beyond deforestation, the summit also did not fix a deadline on ending illegal gold mining, although leaders agreed to cooperate on the issue and to better combat cross-border environmental crime.

The final joint statement, called the Belem Declaration, strongly asserted indigenous rights and protections, while also agreeing to cooperate on water management, health, common negotiating positions at climate summits, and sustainable development.

As Reuters previously reported, the declaration additionally established a science body to meet annually and produce authoritative reports on science related to the Amazon rainforest, akin to the United Nations’ International Panel on Climate Change.

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Amazon nations split on oil and deforestation, ahead of summit https://www.climatechangenews.com/2023/08/07/amazon-summit-deforestation-oil-colombia-brazil/ Mon, 07 Aug 2023 10:39:57 +0000 https://www.climatechangenews.com/?p=49008 Colombia wants to restrict oil production while the Brazilian government is divided on the issue

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Eight Amazon rainforest nations are expected to face divisions over proposals to block new oil drilling and end deforestation when they meet on Tuesday for their first summit in 14 years.

The meeting of the Amazon Cooperation Treaty Organization (ACTO) gathers heads of state from Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, Guyana, Peru, Suriname and Venezuela for two days in the northern Brazilian city of Belem.

They will aim to forge unified policies, goals and positions in international negotiations on some 130 issues ranging from financing for sustainable development to indigenous inclusion.

But at a pre-summit meeting last month, Colombian President Gustavo Petro pushed his Brazilian counterpart Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva to block all new oil development in the Amazon. Brazil is weighing whether to develop a potentially huge offshore oil find near the mouth of the Amazon River.

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“Are we going to let hydrocarbons be explored in the Amazon rainforest? To deliver them as exploration blocks? Is there wealth there or is there the death of humanity?” Petro asked in a speech alongside Lula.

Days later, Petro underscored the issue in an op-ed in the Miami Herald, writing: “As heads of state, we must assure the end of new oil and gas exploration in the Amazon.”

The debate over drilling for oil near the mouth of the Amazon has sparked fierce infighting in Lula’s seven-month-old government, pitting advocates for regional development against environmentalists.

Asked whether oil would factor into an accord at the summit, Brazilian diplomats told journalists last week that a joint statement was still being negotiated and economic development more broadly was under discussion.

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A Brazilian government official, who was not authorized to speak to the media, said that Colombia was in an easy position to propose no new drilling in the Amazon because it did not have significant oil reserves there, unlike Brazil or Peru.

For his part, Lula pushed at the pre-summit meeting in Leticia, Colombia, for all countries in the region to pledge an end to deforestation by 2030. Only Bolivia and Venezuela have not yet made such a commitment.

Bolivia could be a barrier to such a regional 2030 pact, the Brazilian government source said. Primary forest loss there rose 32% last year amid fires and rapid agricultural expansion, according to Global Forest Watch.

The Bolivian government did not respond to requests for comment.

Amazon governments set sights on narco-deforestation

Other differences that could surface at the summit are more subtle disagreements about priorities. Colombia hosted the pre-summit meeting where top on the agenda was cross-border collaboration to address the rising threat of drug traffickers perpetrating environmental crimes in the Amazon.

Brazil, by contrast, has emphasised opportunities for sustainable development, reflecting Lula’s campaign platform focused on poverty reduction and conservation.

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Amazon governments set sights on narco-deforestation https://www.climatechangenews.com/2023/08/03/narco-deforestation-amazon-trees-forests/ Thu, 03 Aug 2023 11:11:33 +0000 https://www.climatechangenews.com/?p=48997 When governments gather for the Amazon summit next week, they will talk about how to tackle drug traffickers who destroy forests

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When the presidents of Amazon nations including Brazil, Peru and Colombia meet at a regional summit next week, they will train their sights on a new breed of criminal just as comfortable chopping down the rainforest as shipping drugs overseas.

“Narco-deforestation,” as it was referred to in a United Nations report last month, represents a new target for law enforcement operating in the Amazon rainforest, where the lines between specialist criminal outfits are increasingly blurred.

The eight member countries of the Amazon Cooperation Treaty Organization (ACTO), who are due to meet in the northeastern Brazilian city of Belem for an Aug. 8-9 summit, are expected to reach an agreement to cooperate on combating such crimes, said Carlos Lazary, the organization’s executive director.

“We’re worried about the Amazon,” Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, who proposed the summit on the campaign trail, said in a speech last month. “It’s there that organized crime, drug trafficking and everything illegal is fomented.”

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Boosted by bumper Andean coca harvests and record-breaking cocaine demand in Europe, the Amazon has in recent years become a drug-trafficking thoroughfare. Illicit cargos easily pass through the vast, sparsely populated and thinly policed region on boats, planes or even submarines on their way to the Atlantic Ocean.

With booming profits, many of the drug gangs in the Amazon are now laundering the money through illegal land speculation, logging, mining and other means, the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime warned in its annual World Drug Report.

Charles Nascimento, a Brazilian Federal Police officer and veteran of the Amazon drugs beat, said criminal groups often use existing drug routes to get illegally harvested gold and wood to market.

“Many people who work in wildcat mines also work as traffickers and vice versa,” he said. “It’s like they feed off of each other.”

This increasing criminal cross-pollination has prompted police to expand a recurring Amazon anti-narcotics operation between Peru and Brazil, scheduled for later this year, to also target environmental crimes, Nascimento said.

Murders prompt pushback

The 2022 murders of indigenous expert Bruno Pereira and British journalist Dom Phillips, allegedly at the hands of a poaching ring with organized crime connections, prompted Lula to increase policing in remote areas, Nascimento said.

Lula – who has staked his international reputation on ending the rampant deforestation that surged under his far-right predecessor Jair Bolsonaro – has reeled off a flurry of measures to combat environmental crime since taking office on Jan. 1.

The most important has been the creation of a specialized Federal Police directorate focused on the Amazon and environmental crime.

His administration has also proposed a center for international police cooperation in the Amazon’s largest city of Manaus, which may factor into the final agreement at the summit, ACTO’s Lazary said.

Brazil seeks European trade advantages in return for Amazon protection

Neighboring countries – as well as agencies in developed countries importing illegal wood and gold – will be invited to send permanent representatives to the center to help coordinate investigations, said Valdecy Urquiza, head of the Federal Police’s international cooperation directorate.

At a meeting of international police in Belem a day before next week’s presidential summit, Brazil will also promote plans to share lab technology that can pinpoint whether wood and good is illegally sourced, Urquiza said.

Databases of gold and wood samples taken from around the Amazon – which use molecular analysis to identify the specific locations of the source – can help police determine if seized goods originated in an area where it is illegal to mine, such as in Indigenous reserves, Urquiza said.

Brazil – which will host the global COP30 climate change summit in Belem in 2025 – has begun to train police in Latin America and Europe on these methods.

As Guyana shows, carbon offsets will not save the Amazon rainforest

Past international meetings and agreements have largely failed to generate much cooperation between wary national police forces in the Amazon, said Robert Muggah, lead author of the U.N. report’s chapter on organized crime in the Amazon.

Amazon countries signed a strongly worded commitment to cooperate on environmental crimes in the 2019 Leticia Declaration. But Brazil’s Bolsonaro and former Colombia President Ivan Duque excluded leftist Venezuela, and the signatories failed to follow through with concrete actions, Muggah said. South America’s swing left under Lula and Colombia’s Gustavo Petro may help improve cooperation, he added.

“Crime is among the top, if not the top issue confronting the protection of a standing forest in the Amazon,” he said. “It should be concerning to our decision-makers.”

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Brazil seeks European trade advantages in return for Amazon protection https://www.climatechangenews.com/2023/08/01/brazil-mercosur-amazon-eu-trade/ Tue, 01 Aug 2023 14:21:38 +0000 https://www.climatechangenews.com/?p=48981 The EU wants environmental guarantees in case a future Brazilian government stops trying to protect the Amazon

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Brazil will push the European Union for better trading terms in return for offering environmental guarantees over the protection of the Amazon rainforest, according to a diplomat with knowledge of the EU-Mercosur trade deal negotiations.

Brazil felt targeted by a “side letter” added this year to the trade deal struck in 2019, adding environmental guarantees to the original accord, they said. The new Brazilian government of President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, who has made bold pledges of environmental stewardship in contrast to his predecessor, has taken its time to come up with a response.

But the South American trade bloc Mercosur will prepare its counterproposal this weekbefore meeting with EU negotiators in August in the hopes of closing the accord by the end of the year, two Brazilian diplomats told Reuters.

The sources said Brazil would also seek new exceptions to opening government purchases for foreign firms in the health industry, public-sector construction and green technology.

Brazil’s Foreign Ministry and the EU declined to comment.

As Guyana shows, carbon offsets will not save the Amazon rainforest

The Europeans drafted the side letter in response to Brazil’s far-right former President Jair Bolsonaro, who undercut environmental protections, allowing deforestation to soar. Since coming to power at the start of the year, Lula has improved Brazil’s environmental policy, but European diplomats say the EU still needs guarantees against a relapse.

Brazil fears the addendum could lead to trade sanctions. Its diplomats complain that the new rules go beyond the Paris climate agreement.

“There are new obligations that are unacceptable. If sanctions are applied, we want other concessions to compensate,” the diplomat said, requesting anonymity ahead of sensitive negotiations.

The EU recently passed a law banning six imported products if linked to deforestation, which Brazilian exporters and government officials saw as a protectionist move.

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One of the Brazilian diplomats said that new law had muddied the waters by failing to distinguish between legal and illegal deforestation in Brazil, making it more difficult to conclude the trade talks by year-end.

The EU has warned against trying to renegotiate parts of the trade agreement, given that it took two decades to reach an initial deal. Brazilian diplomats say they are seeking to tweak concessions and quotas, so as not to reopen chapters that could stall the whole deal.

A European diplomat in Brasilia said the EU hoped to resume talks in August with the Mercosur counterproposal on the table.

He said a “re-balancing” of concessions, however, would be difficult without reopening chapters of the trade deal.

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“The government procurement chapter is not very comprehensive and already includes a lot of exceptions, but okay, let’s look at this,” he added, noting that the defense industry was already excluded, along with Brazil’s state and municipal governments.

On the environmental guarantees irking Brazil’s new government, the European diplomat said the EU recognized what Brazil is now doing to protect the Amazon forest.

“But we still need guarantees going forward because we conclude agreements with the country and not with the government that is in office,” he said.

For Welber Barral, a former Brazilian foreign trade secretary, there is a window to finalize the accord, which has never had so much support from Brazil’s private sector. But ironing out remaining differences could take time.

“To be realistic, concluding it by the end of the year is a very optimistic goal,” he said.

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As Guyana shows, carbon offsets will not save the Amazon rainforest https://www.climatechangenews.com/2023/08/01/amazon-rainforest-carbon-offsets-credits-guyana/ Tue, 01 Aug 2023 10:37:30 +0000 https://www.climatechangenews.com/?p=48979 With all their flaws, carbon offsets are not the solution to deforestation of the Amazon rainforest - leaders should acknowledge that

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In theory, forest carbon offsets are a simple idea. Companies pay for a tonne of carbon reduced through forest protection and restoration to counter emissions they are continuing to emit, or have emitted in the past.

It sounds like a a win-win. A company gets a step closer to telling its investors and consumers it’s reached net zero, and critical forest protection gets an injection of cash.

These days, forests generate a lot of credits: they represent one in three carbon credits sold through Verra, the largest of the voluntary carbon market administrators. 

But this market is plagued with problems. It routinely inflates its climate impact, diverts money to middlemen who cream off profits, and exploits Indigenous communities. High-profile investigations have exposed widespread malpractice. 

G20 climate talks fail to deliver emission cuts despite leadership pleas

That scrutiny should not stop, because the most dangerous element of exploiting forests for carbon credits still exists: businesses buy credits as a shortcut to meet their net zero targets while continuing to pump out emissions.

Forest offsets, no matter how incredible trees’ role in tackling climate change is, are simply not equivalent to cutting emissions: storing carbon in trees isn’t always a long-term bet to keep carbon out of the atmosphere.

Deforestation, decay, or fire (as we have recently seen in Canada) can release it back into the atmosphere within hours. The only sure way to slow down climate change and meet net zero goals is to keep coal, oil and gas in the ground.   

To understand the risks of forest carbon credits being sold as offsets, take a look at Guyana: a story of zombie carbon credits, dubious accounting, and a cosy relationship between offset schemes and the oil industry. 

UN deep-sea mining talks deadlocked over agenda clash

Guyana’s story begins with a calculated overstatement of the risk of deforestation. A report written by McKinsey in 2009 claimed that the country’s forests could disappear at a rate of more than 4% per year, gone entirely within 25 years.

Independent assessments show that the true rate of deforestation was actually around 0.2%. But the inflated McKinsey estimate had already established an attention-grabbing baseline number that would set the project up to report an impressive – but false – impact.   

In a deal set up with the Norwegian government, Guyana received four payments totalling nearly $200 million for ‘avoided deforestation’. Recently, Guyana sold 33.5 million carbon credits for reducing forest loss during 2016 and 2020, this time under an ART-TREEs crediting scheme.   

But analysis of the methodology used shows that, as with previous payments to Guyana, the ‘emissions reductions’ may be largely fictitious. According to one analysis, some 84% of these credits were created by accounting manipulations allowed under the scheme.

Independent evidence also suggests deforestation actually rose during the crediting period. Data from the independent Global Forest Watch shows that forest loss in four of the five years was higher than in all the years the analysis looked at. 

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Meanwhile, the Amerindian Peoples Association, which defends the rights of Guyanese Indigenous Peoples, said that there hadn’t been proper consultation about the programme with people with ancestral rights to land. 

Astonishingly, this project – which allowed deforestation to rise, and more carbon to be released into the atmosphere – was used to greenwash oil drilling off Guyana’s coast. The Hess Corporation, which has a 30% stake in a deal exploiting oil from Guyana’s recently-opened Starbroek offshore oil block, announced its intention to buy $750 million of credits generated by Guyana forest projects to offset its emissions.

But in comparison to the 33 million tonnes of carbon supposedly captured by the scheme so far, the oilfield could, over its lifetime, release up to 5.5 billion tonnes of carbon. That’s 166 times as much. 

A race to the bottom of offset standards permitted the creation of millions of ‘zombie carbon credits’ used to justify oil drilling.  

UN climate fund suspends project in Nicaragua over human rights concerns

But can we blame forest nations for looking to exploit a promising source of finance? For decades emerging economies dense in essential biodiversity have faced promises of critical finance from the global north to protect and restore rainforests – the lungs of the earth and the only tried and tested method for removing carbon from the atmosphere.

A $711 billion a year funding gap currently exists for nature protection and restoration, with $200 billion of that needing to be new sources of finance outside of repurposing existing subsidies that could be channelled in better directions.  

In the run up to Cop28 we’re seeing countries and continents rich in carbon storing biodiversity come together – through the Amazon Summit, Africa Climate Summit and Three Basins Summit all before COP28 –  to renegotiate what those financing solutions should look like.  

Now is the time to turn away from the small piece of the funding pie failing carbon markets represent and focus energy on real solutions that really have forests, people and the climate at their heart.  

On its website, ART TREES says credits created under its HFLD methodology “constitute additional climate action” and “incentivises jurisdictions to protect intact forests since guarding the carbon sequesterd in these forests is essential to meeting the goals of the Paris Agreement”

Joe Eisen is the executive director of the Rainforest Foundation UK

This story was was edited on August 21, 2023, to correct the role of the Amerindian Peoples Association as a defender of indigenous rights in Guyana, but not a legal representative of them.

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Pressure grows on governments and banks to stop supporting Amazon oil and gas  https://www.climatechangenews.com/2023/07/25/amazon-rainforest-oil-gas-banks-jpmorgan-hsbc-citibank/ Tue, 25 Jul 2023 09:05:56 +0000 https://climatechangenews.com/?p=48919 An upcoming summit on protecting the Amazon has become the focus of a Indigenous and civil society-led campaign to set up an exclusion zone for fossil fuels

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South American nations and international financial institutions are coming under increasing pressure to stop exploiting oil and gas in the Amazon ahead of key political talks in Brazil.

Leaders will be meeting next month at the Amazon Summit in Belém, a city also due to host the Cop30 climate talks in 2025, to discuss the 45-year-old Amazon Cooperation Treaty for the first time in several years.

The final guest list is not yet clear, but nations across Latin America are expected to be represented as well as some from Europe.

Brazilian president Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva has rebooted the summit in the hope of using it to build support for his commitment to end illegal deforestation in the Amazon by 2030, but curbing fossil fuel extraction does not appear to be on the agenda.

G20 divisions over key climate goals pile pressure on Cop28 hosts

However, a grassroots campaign led by Indigenous groups and civil society argues such a move is essential to combat climate change, and to protect biodiversity and the Indigenous people that live there.

The campaign builds on an existing effort to get a global pact for the permanent protection of four-fifths of Amazonia by 2025. Focusing specifically on oil and gas, it calls for an Amazon exclusion zone where no fossil fuels can be exploited, in line with the International Energy Agency’s (IEA) warning that there can be no new fossil fuel projects if the world is to stay under a 1.5°C warming threshold.

Domestic exploitation

A number of South American countries in which the Amazon rainforest lies have been trying to boost domestic oil and gas exploration and extraction in recent years. 

Peru is proposing to place 31 oil blocks over 435 indigenous communities, while Bolivia recently finalised an ‘Upstream Reactivation Plan’.

Meanwhile, the result of a forthcoming Ecuadorian referendum about oil exploitation in the Yasuní rainforest will be hugely significant for that part of the Amazon but will also send a wider message about the region’s priorities.

In Brazil, a far-right Congress is proposing to gut the powers of both the ministries of the environment and Indigenous peoples, throwing Lula’s deforestation pledge into doubt. 

The Brazilian president’s own ambitions of positioning himself as climate leader have also been called into question over his stance on an oil drilling project at the mouth of the Amazon river. He recently said he found it “difficult” to believe that oil exploration in the Amazon basin would damage the region’s rainforest.

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Ahead of the Amazon Summit, Indigenous groups will be meeting in Brazil to share fossil fuel resistance strategies, with the support of campaign group 350.org. 

“From this we hope will come a very powerful document that will inform the discussions of the presidents in Belém,” said Ilan Zugman, 350.org’s Latin America managing director. “Hopefully it will have some very strong messages saying no new fossil fuel projects in the Amazon.”

Petro’s lead

Zugman said Colombian president Gustavo Petro had been a “very loud voice” in support of this idea. In January, Petro announced a halt in all new oil and gas exploration contracts, keeping 380 currently active contracts. 

In a recent opinion piece for the Miami Herald, Petro called on Amazon countries and their partners in the Global North to follow him on ending all new oil and gas exploration in the Amazon.

He said that, while ending deforestation was “fundamental”, it had to be accompanied by “an ambitious transnational policy to phase out fossil fuels”. Oil, gas and coal accounts for about half of all Colombian exports.

Dozens of oil & industry lobbyists attended secretive shipping emissions talks

Petro said some countries, like Colombia, could allocate a “substantial amount of resources” to protect the Amazon. 

But he stressed that curbing oil and gas exploitation would have a big economic impact on poorer South American nations and called on countries like the US to help with financial mechanisms such as debt-for-climate swaps, a multilateral fund that funds environmental protection services by inhabitants of these territories, or the kind of financial reforms being progressed by the Bridgetown initiative

At a recent meeting, the Colombian and Brazilian presidents pledged to cooperate to protect the Amazon but the latter did not appear to make any concessions on oil and gas.

“We need to convince other presidents like Lula.. to step up as well and really play this leadership role,” said Zugman, “to not allow fossil fuel exploration in one of the most important places of the world.” 

Banking spotlight

Campaigners are also stepping up pressure on financial institutions to stop financing oil and gas projects in the region.

A report, published today by NGO Stand.earth and the Coordinator of Indigenous Organizations of the Amazon Basin (COICA), shows that US$20 billion has been provided to explore and exploit reserves in Peru, Colombia, Brazil and Ecuador over the past 15 years.

More than half of this (US$11 billion) came from just eight banks: JPMorgan Chase, Citibank, Itaú Unibanco, HSBC, Santander, Bank of America, Banco Bradesco and Goldman Sachs.

Six of these banks are either headquartered in the US or act through their US subsidiary and operate in deals across the region, while the two Brazilian companies – Itaú Unibanco and Banco Bradesco – are highly connected to specific oil and gas projects in that country. 

The report is accompanied by a database of all the banks involved in Amazon oil and gas through directly traceable and indirect financing, for example by providing loans or underwriting bond deals for upstream and midstream development and transport of oil and gas in Amazonia. 

The EU-Mercosur trade deal will harm Brazil’s indigenous communities

JPMorgan Chase tops the list, having directly provided US$1.9 billion in direct financing to oil and gas in the region over the past decade and a half.

Together with HSBC, it was a major backer of Petroperú’s Talara refinery expansion project, which is driving the exploitation of oil on Indigenous land in the Peruvian Amazon.

JPMorgan Chase has ruled out support for the highly controversial East African Crude Oil Pipeline project, but made no such commitment on oil and gas activity in the Amazon or wider fossil fuel expansion. 

The Stand.earth report says an Amazon exclusion for financial institutions is an “essential strategy” to protect the region from oil, gas, and other extractive industries.

Although no banks have completely ruled out funding fossil fuels in Amazonia – the geographic region around the Amazon basin – the report does praise some companies for starting to recognise the risks involved. 

Exclusion policies

 In May 2022, BNP Paribas pledged to no longer finance or invest in companies producing from oil and gas reserves in the Amazon or developing related infrastructure, becoming the first major bank to adopt a geographical exclusion of oil and gas in this area.

And in December 2022, HSBC amended its policies to exclude all new finance and advisory services for any client for oil and gas project exploration, appraisal, development, and production in the Amazon Biome.

The EU-Mercosur trade deal will harm Brazil’s indigenous communities

Stand.earth says these two companies, along with some others, are “sending important signals” that banks should be willing to review their relationship to Amazon destruction and take steps to manage that risk.

These also go some way towards the Exit Amazon Oil and Gas principles devised by international advocacy groups including Stand.earth and Amazon Indigenous leaders.

Clear boundaries

Angeline Robertson, lead researcher of Stand Research Group, said efforts to restrict fossil fuels should cover the wider Amazonia area “to avoid confusion or allow banks to define the exclusion zone themselves.

This was an issue with Arctic exclusions, where banks used different boundaries in their policies.”  Standard Chartered’s and BNP Paribas’ exclusions, for example, cover the ‘Amazon’ or ‘Amazon Basin’, while Société Générale and Intesa Sanpaolo’s policies include only the Amazon regions of Ecuador and Peru.

Zugman said both governments and financial institutions had a big role to play in protecting the region. “Governments need to step up first. And banks… should be there by their side to support these bold decisions and to help accelerate the just energy transition.”

He added that banks could play an important role in the Amazon by supporting a just energy transition. “Energy access is still a big deal in the Amazon and banks could, in consultation with communities, be helping them have clean access to energy instead of investing in businesses that are going to destroy their lands.”

Zugman said the Belém summit was vital because it would inform about protection of the Amazon at Cop28 in December as well as the next G20 meeting which Brazil is due to host. “We’re really pushing together for this moment.” 

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EU and Argentina strike gas, hydrogen & renewables deal https://www.climatechangenews.com/2023/07/19/eu-argentina-gas-methane-hydrogen/ Wed, 19 Jul 2023 10:20:13 +0000 https://www.climatechangenews.com/?p=48913 Brussels and Buenos Aires agreed to work for a "stable delivery" of gas to Europe while cracking down on methane leaks and building renewables

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The European Commission has signed a non-binding agreement with Argentina to facilitate a supply of liquefied fossil gas (LNG) to Europe in exchange for cooperation on green energy and Buenos Aires reigning in gas leakage.

Europe’s economic relations with Argentina are strong. Despite the geographical distance, EU investment in the country accounts for half of foreign investment. Similarly, the bloc is Argentina’s third-largest trading partner, behind Brazil and China.

While the more comprehensive trade agreement between the EU and its Latin American counterpart, Mercosur, flounders, von der Leyen agreed on a bilateral agreement with Buenos Aires on Monday (17 July). It follows a similar agreement on materials agreed in June.

“Europe and Argentina are partnering for a more secure, sustainable and prosperous world,” she said.

Ahead of elections, Argentina’s leaders wrap fossil fuels in the flag

The non-binding agreement hinges on four key aspects: hydrogen and its derivatives, renewables, energy efficiency, and liquefied natural gas (LNG).

With Russian gas flows into Europe at an all-time low, the two partners committed to “enabling a stable delivery of liquefied natural gas (LNG) from the Argentine Republic to the European Union.”

Argentina’s export dreams

The 45 million-strong country, which heavily relies on natural gas for its own energy consumption, is a serious player in the gas industry – bolstered by the rich shale gas stemming from Vaca Muerta in the South-West.

To export its fracked riches, Buenos Aires is working on a law to boost its LNG industry – with an eye to begin exporting at scale as early as 2027.

The agreement insists that supplying LNG will be  “consistent with [the EU’s and Argentina’s]  respective long-term decarbonisation objectives and consistent with the goals of the Paris Agreement.”

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Likely as a concession to Brussels, the agreement also insists that Argentina tackles its leaky gas wells. In 2022, at least one new gas well was drilled in Vaca Muerta per month.

Meanwhile, the formerly Argentina-based NGO Center for Human Rights and Environment warned in 2018 that at least 5% of produced gas was entering the atmosphere, often due to operators venting surpluses to maintain operational security.

“The Participants endeavour to reduce methane leakages in the fossil gas supply chain to the maximum technically feasible level,” the EU-Argentina agreement stresses, adding that new technologies should help tackle “venting and flaring.”

Both venting and flaring are commonplace methods of ensuring production equipment does not get damaged by too much fossil gas. Given methane’s extreme climate impact, it is 28 times worse than CO2 on a 100-year basis, uncontrolled venting is among the most climate-damaging by-products of producing fossil gas.

The agreement also points to integrating “recovered methane into the supply chain.” Methane that would otherwise leak into the atmosphere can be captured and used regularly. One key source may be landfills, like Norte III in Buenos Aires, which account for about half of the city’s methane emissions.

With corporate climate cheats on the chopping block, net zero is growing up

Renewable potential

In large parts of your beautiful country, in the large plateau of the South, you can only hear one sound: this is the sound of the wind, running undisturbed,” explained von der Leyen in June when speaking to business executives.

Argentina has all it takes to become a “renewable energy powerhouse,” she said, adding that “the extraordinary Patagonian winds are a blessing of nature.”

In practice, the EU-Argentina agreement is sparse on the details – aside from a commitment to “facilitate investments necessary to increase energy trade between the Participants.”

European investments are largely expected to come through the European Gateway Initiative, which has a “Team Europe” approach, meaning that EU countries invest under the banner of the bloc.

For example, France and the EU have supported upgrading and bringing the country’s electricity grid up to speed. Other projects include waste and water management support and aid in exploiting the country’s rich mineral resources.

Whether similar initiatives will help fund the country’s nascent LNG infrastructure is unclear.

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The EU-Mercosur trade deal will harm Brazil’s indigenous communities https://www.climatechangenews.com/2023/07/17/eu-mercosur-brazil-indigenous-apib/ Mon, 17 Jul 2023 09:45:52 +0000 https://www.climatechangenews.com/?p=48899 Far-right president Jair Bolsonaro is gone but agribusiness and congress are still a threat to Brazil's indigenous communities

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The world watched in despair at the environmental damage President Jair Bolsonaro’s government wrought during his four years as presdident of Brazil.

Its crimes attracted global attention: from dismantling policies to protect the natural world, to the spiralling number of attacks on Indigenous People and incursions on their land, to deforestation reaching its highest levels for years.

For the European Union (EU), Brazil’s second largest trading partner and a large importer of the soy and beef driving deforestation in the country, alarm over these issues led to the suspension of a mammoth trade agreement, which had been 20 years in the making.

The free trade deal between the EU and Brazil and other Mercosur nations was approved in 2019 but was never ratified because of fears that it might intensify environmental and human rights abuses in Brazil.

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Now, with Bolsonaro ejected from office by the electorate, and his successor, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, making efforts to end deforestation and protect land rights, finalising the EU Mercosur agreement is a priority once again. It will be high on the agenda in the summit taking place this week in Brussels between EU and Latin American heads of state.

Ongoing threats

Yet despite the change of government in Brazil, the assault on Indigenous People’s land rights continues.

The reason is simple: Bolsonaro was defeated at the polls, but Bolsonarism survives as a political force.

Brazil remains deeply polarised, with the mighty agribusiness sector (responsible for a quarter of Brazil’s GDP in 2022) on one side of the divide, helping orchestrate the relentless attacks against Indigenous Peoples’ rights.

UAE’s Cop28 president plans “brutally honest” climate summit

While Lula has shown a serious intent to protect land rights and forests, he is being thwarted by his political opponents in Brazil’s National Congress, where he lacks a majority.

Agribusiness is helping drive proposals for laws which would enable mining to take place on protected Indigenous lands, and for Brazil to withdraw from the International Labour Organisation’s convention recognising Indigenous People’s right to free, prior and informed consent. Meanwhile the powers of the Minister for Indigenous Affairs powers have been eroded by Congress.

Last month, Brazil’s lower house voted overwhelmingly in favour of a bill that among other setbacks proposes the legal establishment of the Marco Temporal thesis, which only recognises Indigenous People’s right to territory they were occupying on October 5, 1988 – when the current Brazilian constitution came into force.

Marco Temporal poses a huge threat to Indigenous territories. The indigenous organisation APIB has estimated that almost 1,400 Indigenous lands are endangered by this proposal, which will open the door to farming and mining interests, and the inevitable environmental and social chaos that will follow in their wake – all in the name of commerce.

Fuel to the flames

A knock-on effect of these multiple legislative efforts to weaken Indigenous land rights is that it creates legal uncertainty in international trade, specifically putting companies at risk of importing goods produced on land whose ownership is disputed.

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In this context, proceeding with the EU-Mercosur free trade agreement would add fuel to the flames: increasing the trade of agricultural commodities will only magnify the pressure on Indigenous lands.

As it stands, the EU-Mercosur agreement contains no measures to protect Indigenous Peoples. Before moving ahead with the deal, this must be rectified.

The agreement must explicitly provide Indigenous Peoples with the right to free, prior and informed consent about any trade or investment that may affect them. It should also champion traceability, so that all companies would have to know the origin of the goods they import. Finally, it should include sanctions for companies sourcing from Indigenous lands and committing environmental crimes.

In the aftermath of Lula’s election, news of the enduring threat to the Amazon and Brazil’s other biomes has largely slipped beneath the radar in the EU.

But it could be disastrous if EU lawmakers ignore it, as they push to revive the EU-Mercosur trade agreement without the right measures in place.

Dinamam Tuxá is executive coordinator of Articulação dos Povos Indígenas do Brasil (APIB), Brazil’s largest Indigenous Peoples’ representative body, representing more than 300 Brazilian Indigenous ethnic groups.

Pierre-Jean Sol Brasier is EU-Mercosur Trade Agreement Campaigner at forests and rights NGO, Fern.

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Latin America leads resistance to global shipping emission tax https://www.climatechangenews.com/2023/06/29/shipping-imo-brazil-tax-levy-emissions-shipping/ Thu, 29 Jun 2023 17:06:11 +0000 https://www.climatechangenews.com/?p=48799 Brazil, Argentina and others have opposed a levy on global shipping emissions at behind-closed-door talks in London

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At crunch talks in London, Latin American nations led by Brazil have fought against a tax on the emissions of the global shipping sector.

The media is not allowed to watch the talks, hosted by the United Nation’s shipping arm in London, but six sources in the room said Latin American countries were most vocal against the measure.

A Brazilian foreign ministry spokesperson told Climate Home they opposed the levy, claiming it would distort trade, could push up the price of food and harm developing countries.

Germany-sized emissions

Global shipping produces about 3% of the world’s emissions, a similar amount to Germany, and the emissions from burning its fuel are currently only untaxed.

Pacific nations like the Marshall Islands and Solomon Islands, which are extremely vulnerable to climate change, have led the push for nations to agree to a tax, also known as a levy, on emissions.

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They want that price to start at $100 per tonne of greenhouse gas produced from burning ships’ fuel, which they say would raise $60-80bn a year. This amount would decline as shipping cleans up.

With journalists banned from the venue, the Marshall Islands lead shipping talks negotiator Albon Ishoda, spoke to Climate Home in the lobby of the International Maritime Organisation.

He said that shipping has a “dirty past” and has “a responsibility, as the servant of global trade to transition and to ensure a 1.5C future”.

Governments now have until July 7 to decide whether to tax emissions from the shipping sector, which are not included in the UN climate change talks.

Discomfort

Ishoda from the Marshall Islands said that a levy causes “discomfort” among many states. There has been a lot of “misinformation guided by disinformation” and developing countries think a levy will hurt them disproportionately more, he said.

“Fair enough, we’re not saying a levy will be great all round”, he said, but the $60-80 billion a year their proposal will raise could be used to decarbonise shipping and to address any negative economic effects.

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As the talks are secret, Ishoda would not disclose who opposed the tax.

But six sources present told Climate Home that Brazil had led the resistance, joined by Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, Guatemala, Ecuador, China and South Africa

At a summit in Paris last week, none of these countries signed a statement in support of the levy. 

On the other side, sources said, several European nations and Vietnam spoke in support of a levy while the US, UK, India and others neither supported nor opposed it.

“Unpredictable consequences”

A spokesperson for Brazil’s foreign ministry told Climate Home by email that they oppose a levy as it “would pose greater risks than other measures, especially for developing countries”.

They said a University of Sao Paulo study had shown that developing countries that export low value-added products to far away places are “likely to be negatively affected” by the measure.

Brazil’s main exports are iron ore, soybeans, crude petroleum and sugar. The countries which take the most of its exports are China and the USA.

The study suggests that a levy would decrease exports across the world, boost some economies mainly in developed countries and harm others mainly in developing countries, particularly in Africa.

Impacts on GDP in % – red is a hit of more than 1% while blue is a gain (Photo credit: Pereda et al)

The Brazilian foreign ministry spokesperson continued to say that the levy “could have unpredictable consequences” like changes to contracts and the substitution of agricultural crops and could increase food prices “with harmful effects for the poorest populations”.

Supporters of the $100 a tonne levy point out that the price of shipping fuel swings drastically over time. Over the last few years, it has varied from $200 a tonne to $600 a tonne, largely depending on the price of oil.

While Ishoda said the levy’s revenues could compensate for any negative effects, the Brazilian foreign ministry spokesperson said that this money was a problem too.

They said that governments could come to rely on these revenues and then have to find substitute sources of income as the shipping sector decarbonises and the money stops coming in.

Not a climate finance fix

Over the last year, the idea of a tax on shipping emissions has shot from obscurity onto the agenda of some of the world’s most powerful people.

Hosting a summit in Paris of nearly 40 heads of state last week, French president Emmanuel Macron said he was “in favor of an international taxation” to finance climate action and later mentioned a tax on maritime transport as an option. US treasury sectretary Janet Yellen said at the summit that it was “something the United States will look at”.

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Ishoda said he was at the Paris summit too. But “my message was simply to inform them – this money is not to fill in the gap where you failed”, he said.

The Brazilian foreign ministry spokesperson said they were also concerned  that the levy “may have the effect of partly releasing developed countries of their [climate finance] commitments”.

The levy “introduces a debate on climate financing that should not be undertook at the IMO”, the spokesperson added.

Rich nations have failed to provide the developing world with the level of climate finance they promised, a failure large developing countries often hold up as a reason they can’t cut emissions faster.

Over this week and next, governments will decide whether to include a levy on shipping emissions in their list of potential measures to reduce shipping’s emissions.

The level of the levy and what the money will be user for will be decided at future meetings.

This article was updated on 30 June 2023 to include the Brazilian foreign ministry’s comments, to add China to the list of countries opposing the tax and to correct the proposal from $100 a tonne of fuel to $100 a tonne of greenhouse gas (carbon dioxide equivalent) produced by burning the fuel. 

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Ahead of elections, Argentina’s leaders wrap fossil fuels in the flag https://www.climatechangenews.com/2023/06/20/argentina-gas-pipeline-nestor-kirchner-oil-equinor/ Tue, 20 Jun 2023 16:46:50 +0000 https://www.climatechangenews.com/?p=48737 Argentina's political class is promoting fossil fuels as a patriotic national endeavour and demonising any environmentalists who oppose them

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Argentina’s national oil company has begun to fill up a key gas pipeline on the country’s national flag day today, rushing to get the project completed on time to present it as a patriotic endeavour.

As the country gears up for election season, all the leading candidates and even some young environmentalists support the building of the Néstor Kirchner pipeline — a key piece of infrastructure that would allow for record gas exports from the Vaca Muerta “carbon bomb”.

Fossil fuels’ opponents have been villified with state-owned oil company YPF hiring a consultancy who advised them to ridicule environmentalists who opposed offshore oil drilling, as well as attaching the project to “nationalistic” views.

Pipeline for a “carbon bomb”

Ten years ago, gas was discovered in the Vaca Muerta shale fields of Argentina’s far west.

Despite this bounty of energy though, Argentina is still shipping in expensive foreign gas, as moving Vaca Muerta’s gas to eastern population centres by truck is prohibitively expensive.

To overcome this, successive governments have tried to build a pipeline from the gas fields to the country’s capital Buenos Aires, to provide energy to its 15 million consumers and to export gas abroad, earning the country much-needed foreign currency.

The project was held back by economic crisis then pandemic but today a section of it was finally inaugurated.

Argentina secures funding boost to kickstart gas exports from ‘carbon bomb’

Wearing a hard hat near gas workers waving the Argentine flag, energy minister Flavia Royon called the pipeline “the most important engineering work of the last 50 years and a transcendental milestone”

The pipeline is named after former president Néstor Kirchner, deceased husband of the current vice-president Cristina Fernández de Kirchner.

Election campaign

With presidential elections scheduled for October, all the leading candidates support the pipeline.

With unpopular president Alberto Fernández not running for re-election, the most likely candidate from the current ruling faction is economy minister Sergio Massa. He has called the pipeline a “turning point” and was at today’s ceremony.

Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner (left) and Sergio Massa (right). (Photo: Victor Brugge/Wikimedia Commons)

The right-wing opposition’s leading candidates –  Horacio Rodríguez Larreta, Patricia Bullrich and Javier Milei – all support the pipeline too.

Support goes further than the political class. Even the Argentinan branch of Greta Thunberg’s Fridays for Future movement is supportive.

Recently, Bruno Rodriguez, a leading figure from Youth for Climate Argentina said that Argentina “must develop” and producing gas “is a step in that direction”.

Asked about this, Thunberg said: “I don’t know these parts of the movement so I can’t speak on behalf of them but our general message – at least in the part of the climate movement I’m in – is that we need to move away from all fossil fuels and all false solutions”.

Martín Álvarez is a researcher at Observatorio Petrolero Sur, based in the city of General Roca, not far from the gas fields.

He told Climate Home that the Buenos Aires-based Youth for Climate has been able to “be interlocutors with real power due to the lack of federalism that exists in the country”.

He said that the strength of the environmental movements lies in different provinces of Argentina “not in the youth of the urban middle class, who never understood what is happening [outside of the big cities]”.

Leaked document

Environmentalists that oppose oil drilling off Argentina’s eastern coast, which the government approved in 2021, face a state campaign to discredit them.

Last June, Extinction Rebellion Argentina leaked a document which proved that YPF hired a consultancy called Eonia to train supporters of the pipeline in government and the oil industry to influence public opinion and build a “social license” for the project.

In a slide labelled “rejection of ridicule”, the manual says that many people join a cause because it is fashionable, a sense of belonging or a desire to be part of something bigger and positive.

“We must turn this fashion into a deep fear of being ridiculous,” the slide says, “tying it with the most insane claims and with the most uncomfortable forms”.

Alongside the text are pictures of Extinction Rebellioin protesters throwing soup and paint over artworks, like a Van Gogh painting in London. The painting was unharmed.

One of its slides is titled “nationalist acceptance” and says the oil drilling should be framed as a way for Argentina to go from energy importer to exporter and “make the dollars that Argenina lacks”.

The first offshore driling is expected to start before the end of the year, with Norwegian firm Equinor given the contract.

Protesters in Mar Del Plata march against offshore oil drilling last January (Photo credit: Diego Izquierdo/Greenpeace)

Álvarez said he had “great concern” because it is the state that is carrying out these policies, as the government has a majority stake in YPF.

Environmentalists face harassment and threats on social media too. With twitter users calling them “traitors to the homeland” and declaring “with the bones of the environmentalists, we will build the foundations of the refineries”.

In Argentina’s 40th year of democracy, Alvarez said, environmentalists should not be marginalised and stigmatised or there will be no progress towards a fairer society.

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Colombia accuses Drummond coal mining exec of funding paramilitary group https://www.climatechangenews.com/2023/06/05/colombia-paramilitary-funding-drummond-coal-mining-auc/ Mon, 05 Jun 2023 10:47:44 +0000 https://www.climatechangenews.com/?p=48661 The current Colombia head of an American coal miner will face trial, accused of giving money to right-wing paramilitaries in the late nineties

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The current Colombia head of coal miner Drummond Co Inc and his predecessor will be tried for allegedly funding right-wing paramilitaries, the country’s attorney general’s office said on Wednesday, as the U.S.-based company denied any wrongdoing by the executives.

There is “abundant proof” current head Jose Miguel Linares, who took up his post in 2013 after serving as vice-president of legal, and Augusto Jimenez, who headed the company’s Colombia operations between 1990 and 2012, conspired to finance a paramilitary group, the prosecutor said in a statement.

“Linares Martinez and Jimenez Mejia, between 1996 and 2001, increased the value of a food provision contract with a provider company to obtain additional resources and use them to cover previously-agreed illegal obligations with…the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC),” the statement said.

The effort was a bid to protect assets and ensure the free operation of Drummond’s mine in Cesar province, the statement added.

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Drummond rejected the accusations, saying in its own statement that they are the product of “a cartel of false witnesses.”

“These accusations are not backed up with credible proof and are based, principally, on false declarations by convicted criminals, who receive payments for testimony,” the company said, without providing further details.

The company is confident evidence will demonstrate Linares’ and Jimenez’s innocence, it added.

The case is a “moral triumph,” said Joris van de Sandt of Dutch non-governmental organization PAX, which has campaigned to raise awareness over alleged wrongdoings by Drummond, which the company has always denied.

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Drummond – Colombia’s largest producer of thermal coal – has three mining contracts in the country and also holds a port concession on the Caribbean coast.

It expects to export around 30 million tons of coal this year, Linares said this week.

Paramilitary groups emerged in the 1980s, funded by landowners, merchants and drug traffickers to defend themselves from attacks by leftist guerrillas.

Paramilitary groups – accused of murders, rapes, torture and other crimes – demobilised under a peace deal in the 2000s, though many members later formed crime gangs.

Colombia is one of the most dangerous countries in the world for environmental activists, with at least 33 dying in 2021, according to Global Witness’s research.

Last year, Colombian anti-fracking activist Yuvelis Natalia Morales told Climate Home that unidentifiable armed men had held a gun to her head, resulting in her fleeing abroad.

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Amazon gateway city Belém will host Cop30 climate talks https://www.climatechangenews.com/2023/05/30/amazon-gateway-city-belem-will-host-cop30-climate-talks/ Tue, 30 May 2023 10:15:35 +0000 https://www.climatechangenews.com/?p=48634 Brazil's president Lula said Belém will host Cop30 so that delegates from around the world can learn about the nearby Amazon rainforest.

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The Brazilian city of Belém will host the Cop30 climate talks in November 2025, according to the Brazilian government.

In a statement, the Brazilian presidency said the United Nations (UN had confirmed that the northern city, commonly described as the gateway to the Amazon river and rainforest, would host the talks.

A spokesperson for the UN’s climate change body (UNFCCC) told Climate Home that the Latin America and Caribbean region had informed them that the group is endorsing Belém’s bid. The choice now just needs to be rubber-stamped at the Cop28 talks.

Brazil’s president Lula da Silva, who will be in the final few months of his term during Cop30, said that the Amazon rainforest had been the main topic of conversation at climate talks in Copenhagen, Paris and Sharm el-Sheikh.

“If everyone’s talking about the Amazon, then why not hold the Cop in an Amazon state so that they can find out more about the region? About its rivers, its forests, its fauna?”, he said.

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Lula has been promising to tackle deforestation in the Amazon rainforest, which hit a 15-year-high under former president Jair Bolsonaro.

He has named Marina Silva, who oversaw a significant drop in deforestation during his first stint as president in the 2000s, as his environment minister.

Amazon Cop

Belém is the capital of the Amazonian state of Pará and is the second most populous city (1.5 million people) in the Amazon region after Manaus (2.2 million).

Former Brazilian environment minister Izabella Teixeira told Climate Home in January that the Brazilian government had chosen Belém over Manaus because its state governor Helder Barbalho is “the essential political player in Amazon”.

While Belem is at the mouth of the Amazon river near the Atlantic coast, Manaus is deep in Brazil’s interior. Lonely Planet calls Belém the Eastern gateway to the Amazon region.

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Teixeira has said having a Cop in the Amazon would be “amazing”. Climate campaigner Cintya Feitosa said that having the talks in the Amazon region “can send a signal to the global community of the relevance of the Amazon to the climate negotiations and include its population in the main rooms”.

But, while this is an important symbolic signal, “the environment does not live only on nice gestures”, said Marcio Astrini, executive secretary of the Climate Observatory, a Brazilian NGO.

“Brazil is today the country that deforests the most in the world and Pará is the state that deforests the most in the Amazon. It is essential to get to Cop30 with this situation reversed”, said Astrini in January.

Logistical challenges

Teixeira also previously said she was “concerned because of infrastructure, costs, digital infrastructure, hotels – everything that you need when you have a Cop with 30,000 people”.

She said flying to the Amazon region was particularly expensive. Return flights from Sao Paulo to Belém are currently around $250 three months in advance. Demand from Cop30 travellers is likely to push these prices up.

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One Brazilian campaigner, who did not want to be named, told Climate Home Belém is “a lovely colonial city, but between ‘lovely’ and ‘able to host a COP’ there’s a huge distance”.

The city does host large events. Every October, the city hosts more than one million pilgrims who participate in a procession of the image of the Virgin of Nazaré.

Regional rotation

The host of UN climate talks rotates each year among the UN’s regional groupings.

In 2021, Cop26 was in the British city of Glasgow. The UK is part of the Western Europe and others group which includes Canada, Australia and New Zealand with the USA as an observer.

Last year’s climate talks were in the beach resort of Sharm el-Sheikh in Egypt, which is in the African group.

This year’s will be in the United Arab Emirates, which is in the Asia-Pacific. South Korea had indicated an interest but backed down.

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Next year’s event will be in Eastern Europe and the president of Bulgaria has said his country wants to host it.

Before the Bulgarian announcement, the new Australian government had said they wanted to co-host it with a Pacific nation but that would mean persuading the Eastern Europe group to let them swap turns.

Then it is the turn of Latin America and the Caribbean. No country other than Brazil publicly indicated a willingness to host the talks.

Previous Latin American Cops have been held in Argentina’s Buenos Aires, Mexico’s Cancún and Peru’s Lima.

Chile’s attempt to host talks in 2019 was abandoned after mass protests and the talks were held in Madrid instead.

This article was updated on 3oth May to include the UNFCCC’s statement

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Lula set to improve Brazil’s climate target https://www.climatechangenews.com/2023/05/23/lula-set-to-improve-brazils-climate-target/ Tue, 23 May 2023 09:40:58 +0000 https://www.climatechangenews.com/?p=48582 Brazil's new president Lula is set to improve on the climate target set by his far-right predecessor Jair Bolsonaro, Reuters sources say

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President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva plans to commit Brazil to a more ambitious climate change goal this year, addressing criticisms of the previous target set by his far-right predecessor Jair Bolsonaro, two sources told Reuters.

In 2021, amid growing global outrage over Bolsonaro turning a blind eye to the destruction of the Amazon rainforest, his government pledged to cut greenhouse emissions by 50% by 2030, up from a previous commitment of 43%.

But Bolsonaro’s government used a higher, 2005 baseline – a move that made it easier for Brazil to reach its target compared with the previous pledge and that was widely criticized by environmentalists.

Brazilian lobby group Climate Observatory calculated that the Bolsonaro target would allow an additional 400 million tonnes of greenhouse gas to be emitted, compared to the prior target.

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To address those issues, Lula’s leftist government intends to maintain the 50% reduction but fix the issue with the baseline, two sources with direct knowledge of the matter told Reuters. Both spoke anonymously as the move is not yet public.

The goal is to issue the revised target, known as a nationally determined contribution under the 2015 Paris Agreement on climate change, later this year. After the change, the target will be “more ambitious,” one of the sources said.

The government is exploring ways to simplify the target, including issuing the exact number of gigatonnes of greenhouse gas that the country will seek to reduce, the source added.

Rich nations “understanding” of South African delay to coal plant closures

Neither Brazil’s Environment Ministry nor a representative for Bolsonaro responded to requests for comment.

Lula took office on Jan. 1 with a pledge to restore Brazil as a global leader on climate change. Bolsonaro had appointed climate skeptics to key positions and presided over soaring levels of Amazon deforestation, the largest source of Brazil’s greenhouse gas emissions.

Before he was elected, his environmental adviser Izabella Teixera told Climate Home that he would update Brazil’s climate target if elected. Campaigners called for him to do so in his first 100 days, a deadline Teixera did not commit to and which Lula has now missed.

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Regulator blocks Brazilian oil drilling, sparking conflict within government https://www.climatechangenews.com/2023/05/19/regulator-blocks-brazilian-oil-drilling-sparking-conflict-within-government/ Fri, 19 May 2023 13:33:17 +0000 https://www.climatechangenews.com/?p=48571 While President Lula's environment minister Marina Silva supported the decision, Lula ally Randolfe Rodrigues vowed to oppose it

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A decision by Brazil’s environmental regulator to block state-owned oil company Petrobras’ Amazon oil project has exposed tensions in President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva’s coalition between those wanting to protect Brazil’s environment and those prioritising economic development at any cost.

Brazil’s environmental regulator Ibama, late on Wednesday, said it would block a request by state-run oil giant Petrobras to drill at the mouth of the Amazon river near Amapá, in a much-awaited decision that followed a technical recommendation by Ibama experts to reject the project.

In a filing, Petrobras said it planned to file an appeal for Ibama to reconsider its ruling, saying it “strictly complied with all the requirements of the licensing process.”

The decision by Ibama, which is overseen by Lula’s environment minister, the globally recognized environmentalist Marina Silva, has riled some within the governing coalition.

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Lula, who hails from the poor northeast, has staked his international reputation on reversing environmental back-sliding under his far-right predecessor former President Jair Bolsonaro. But he is also under pressure to deliver much-needed growth to poor, under-developed regions in the north and northeast, and wants state-owned Petrobras to be an engine of that growth.

Lula ally resigns

Senator Randolfe Rodrigues, who represents the state of Amapa, said Ibama had taken a decision with major economic impact for the state without taking into account the views of the people of Amapa or its state government. Rodrigues is a senior Lula ally who ran his presidential campaign last year.

“We’ll fight against this decision,” Rodrigues wrote on Twitter, adding that “the people of Amapa want to have the right to be heard”. He later announced he was departing his party, the center-left Sustainability Network, in light of the decision.

The Sustainability Network was founded in the early 2010s by Silva, the environment minister, who appointed Ibama head Rodrigo Agostinho.

Agostinho told GloboNews TV on Thursday that Petrobras would be allowed to file a new request to drill in the region, but noted that studies presented by the firm to date were not enough for the move to be cleared.

Petrobras said in its filing that it was not giving up hope on its plans to develop an oil-rich region with potential reserves of up to 14 billion barrels of oil.

“The company remains committed to the development of the Brazilian Equatorial Margin,” it said, adding it would “ensure the country’s energy security.”

Final decision

Despite Petrobras’ stated intentions, the ruling effectively ends all future development of the unexplored oil prospects at the mouth of the Amazon river, former Ibama boss Suely Araujo told Reuters.

Araujo said that even if Petrobras undertakes the deeper studies requested by Ibama, the final say would still rest with the regulator. “The decision is final,” she said, adding she expected Lula to support Ibama’s ruling.

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Exploration rights in the area were auctioned in 2013, but oil majors BP and TotalEnergies pulled out due to the cost of the off-shore studies and difficulties in obtaining licenses for drilling, while Petrobras kept going.

Neither Lula’s office, nor the environment ministry responded to requests for comment.

Environmental groups celebrated Ibama’s decision.

In a statement, Greenpeace said Ibama had emphasized the need for “a fair energy transition, instead of insisting on yet another oil exploration frontier in the context of the climate crisis.”

Ibama has “postponed the end of the world,” environmental group Observatorio do Clima proclaimed.

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Exxon scrambles to save investments before Colombia bans fracking https://www.climatechangenews.com/2023/04/27/exxon-scrambles-to-save-its-investments-before-colombia-bans-fracking/ Thu, 27 Apr 2023 14:36:59 +0000 https://www.climatechangenews.com/?p=48454 The company is looking at how to get some money back despite Gustavo Petro's government looking to ban it from fracking in Colombia

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Exxon Mobil is in talks with Colombia’s government in hopes of recovering its investment in a fracking pilot project as the U.S. oil major prepares to stop producing fossil fuels in the country where the government is pushing through a fracking ban, two sources close to the discussions told Reuters.

Exxon has held eight exploration and production contracts in Colombia, including the fracking pilot. All either have been or are being ended, suspended or liquidated, Colombia’s National Hydrocarbon Agency (ANH) told Reuters.

The company had planned to develop the Platero pilot project for hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, eyeing an investment of $53 million, under a contract awarded two years ago.

Colombia’s congress has been preparing to pass a fracking ban backed by leftist President Gustavo Petro, who took office nearly nine months ago.

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The proposed bill would ban development of non-conventional energy projects including fracking. It has already passed the Senate and is expected to get final congressional approval in the coming months.

The law would leave companies with few options to recoup investments, according to the text of the proposal, including options such as the chance to transfer their investments elsewhere or be awarded rights over other conventional blocks.

Exxon is “reviewing the mechanisms to reach a solution regarding the investments for exploring unconventional” energy resources it has in the country, an Exxon source in Colombia told Reuters.

“We will continue to have constructive dialogue with the Colombian government on a comprehensive assessment of our unconventional investments,” Exxon spokesperson Michelle Gray told Reuters.

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The term “compensation” does not exist in technical or legal terminology used by the ANH in its processes, the agency said, but Exxon is advancing an “accreditation” process regarding the Platero pilot project.

“The procedure is currently being studied,” the ANH said. It did not respond to follow-up questions about what an accreditation process could include.

After winning separate approvals to develop fracking pilot projects in Santander province, Exxon and Colombia’s majority state-owned oil company Ecopetrol said they would team up, with Ecopetrol as operator for both pilots.

The fracking projects in Santander inspired mass protests. The leaders of those protests were threatened with violence. Yuvelis Natalia Morales told Climate Home last March that armed men put a gun to her head and she fled the country as a result.

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Also last year, the state-run company asked the ANH to temporarily suspend both licenses, citing uncertainty over their future. The two companies mutually agreed to end their alliance in November, an Ecopetrol spokesperson said this week.

Ecopetrol’s new CEO Ricardo Roa said this week he would analyze that company’s fracking contracts “with a magnifying glass.”

Exxon most recently decided to withdraw from its 70% participation in the VMM-37 block it shared with a subsidiary of Sintana Energy in Colombia’s Medio Magdalena region, it confirmed to Reuters this week.

Exxon said it continuously evaluates and prioritize investments, including those in Colombia.

The company will continue in the country through its petrochemicals and marketing businesses, the people said.

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Nations fight to be called climate vulnerable in IPCC report https://www.climatechangenews.com/2023/03/22/nations-fight-to-be-called-climate-vulnerable-in-ipcc-report/ Wed, 22 Mar 2023 16:15:27 +0000 https://climatechangenews.com/?p=48249 Being recognised as partiuclarly vulnerable can help countries access climate finance and plan adaptation strategies

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Government negotiators fought bitterly last week over which groups and regions are defined as particularly vulnerable to climate change in the latest report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

Representatives of countries from an array of different regions, including Africa, Asia, Latin America and small island states, pushed to be singled out as particularly vulnerable.

Tanzania and Timor-Leste asked that the world’s poorest countries, known as least developed countries (LDCs), be added to a list of impacted communities, according to a report of the meeting by think-tank IISD.

Africa and small island developing states (Sids) were nearly cut out of one section on vulnerabilities, the IISD report says, and replaced by a reference to “developing and least developed countries”.

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But there was a strong push from many delegates to retain them, particularly as most of those regions’ representatives had already left the talks to approve the report, as they had to catch flights home from Switzerland.

Mexico and Chile wanted to add Latin America to the list of regions that are particularly vulnerable while India wanted Asia included, according to IISD’s report.

The final document lists Africa, Sids, LDCs, Central and South America, Asia and the Arctic as particularly vulnerable.

The benefits of vulnerability

What makes some communities more vulnerable than others is not just physical factors like sea level rise but also social factors like poverty, governance, building standards and infrastructure.

This makes naming specific parts of the world as vulnerable a politically sensitive topic.

The inclusion of the Arctic as one of the most climate vulnerable places in the world, for example, was significant because it came just days after the US approved the hugely controversial Willow oil drilling project on Alaska’s north slope.

There are various reasons for wanting to be named as vulnerable, including global recognition and better access to climate finance.

Last year’s Cop27 climate talks agreed that a new fund for climate victims should be targeted at countries who are “particularly vulnerable” to climate change.

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Samoan ambassador Fatumanava-o-Upolu III Dr. Pa’olelei Luteru, who chairs the alliance of small island states (Aosis), said making specific note of the risks to these islands was “imperative in the context of climate justice”.

“The fact is that we are already facing devastating losses and damages of great magnitude, and funds we should be investing into sustainable development initiatives must be diverted to help us cope with climate change impacts,” he said.

IPCC highlights rich nations’ failure to help developing world adapt to climate change

But recognising growing impacts also gives states the responsibility of acting on them.

Jörn Birkmann researches climate vulnerability at the University of Stuttgart in Germany and was coordinating lead author of one of the underlying IPCC reports.

He told Climate Home: “It seems like governments fear that if their country is not mentioned, they could receive less support (e.g. global adaptation funds),”

He added: “Or vice versa; if they are mentioned it might lead to a stigmatisation or might raise questions about the role of governance.”

Measuring vulnerability

Birkmann said studies on human vulnerability all point to the same global hotspots, particularly Africa.

But even though many governments acknowledge this, there are significant tensions when measuring and mapping human vulnerability.

“It is still difficult in [a summary for policymakers report] to name specific global regions that are more vulnerable than others,” he said.

“The synthesis report is mentioning some regions, but it seems to be much easier for governments to agree on general sentences, rather than pointing to areas or countries where such deficits are evident.”

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Although it misses a lot of nuance about who is vulnerable, Birkmann welcomes the fact that the report recognises global hotspots, “since the success of adaptation and resilience building also depends on the starting point communities and countries have”.

He believes adaptation strategies should not just focus on physical phenomena and climatic hazards such as storms, but also on structures and interventions that reduce human vulnerability, such as poverty reduction, education or fighting corruption – the latter being “a very controversial topic in the political arena”.

Furthermore, when new financial mechanisms for loss and damage agreed at Cop27 are being put into practice, he said it would be helpful to define adaptation goals, not just those on emission reduction.

“These goals should also take into account the very different starting points of regions/countries/communities to build resilience,” he said.” The level of human vulnerability might be such a benchmark of the different starting points.”

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Argentina secures funding boost to kickstart gas exports from ‘carbon bomb’ https://www.climatechangenews.com/2023/03/16/argentina-secures-funding-boost-to-kickstart-carbon-bomb-exports-gas-oil/ Thu, 16 Mar 2023 10:13:10 +0000 https://climatechangenews.com/?p=48217 President Alberto Fernández is seeking funding for an export pipeline that would channel Vaca Muerta's gas to neighbouring countries

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Argentina has secured $540 million from the Latin America Development Bank to finance a new pipeline that would allow for “record” gas exports.

The bank announced a deal last week to finance the Néstor Kirchner pipeline, a project that would allow the country to export gas from the Argentinian Patagonia’s Vaca Muerta field, which campaigners have described as a ‘carbon bomb’ due to huge emissions potential.

Vaca Muerta currently holds the world’s second-largest shale gas deposit and could lead to “record oil and gas production,” according to Argentina’s president Alberto Fernández.

Sergio Massa, minister of economy, said in the past that Argentina did not have the finance to carry the project forward, but now they have an “opportunity for Chile, Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil and Uruguay to access the world’s largest reserves of gas, which we have at our disposal”.

The move could contribute to pushing global temperature rise beyond 1.5C – a threshold above which climate impacts will be significantly worse for people and ecosystems. The International Energy Agency stated in a 2021 report that new oil and gas projects are incompatible with international climate goals.

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Carbon bomb

Activists are critical of the initiative due to its impact on carbon emissions. However, the national government points to Vaca Muerta as an economic hope.

According to 350.org in Latin America, the project is a “carbon bomb” that threatens to use up more than 11% of the world’s remaining carbon budget to reach 1.5C.

Talks to expand gas exports from Vaca Muerta date back to the early 2000s, but were abandoned after Argentina focused its gas production for domestic use. But a 2010 discovery found large gas reserves and led to initiatives to boost exports.

Currently, 31 oil and gas companies have contracts to operate in Vaca Muerta, among them Shell, ExxonMobil and Argentinian company YPF.

To transport shale oil and gas from Vaca Muerta, the Néstor Kirchner pipeline will run more than 570 kilometers from Tratayén, in the shale fields, to northern Argentina’s Santa Fé province.

A map of the Vaca Muerta field in the Argentinian Patagonia. (Photo: Ministry of Economy of Argentina)

Ilan Zugman, 350.org Latin America managing director, said the fracking technique used in the oil and gas extraction is dangerous to the environment. Chemicals used in the process are polluting rivers.

According to 350.org estimates, costs from healthcare, stranded assets and oil spills from Vaca Muerta’s operations could reach between $2.2 and $5.6 billion, compared to the estimated project profits of $2.1 billion if all the oil and gas is exploited.

The first stretch of the pipeline is set to be inaugurated by the middle of this year. At the same time, Argentina is experiencing its hottest recorded summer. The combination of heatwaves and drought is affecting agricultural yields, causing economic losses and negative health impacts.

The high temperatures and drought sparked fires that affected critical energy infrastructure. For several days, about half of Argentina faced blackouts.

Help from abroad

Zugman said Argentina does not have sufficient resources to bring to market all of Vaca Muerta’s oil and gas by itself. As a result, the government is seeking deals overseas to finance critical export infrastructure.

President Fernández discussed the issue with a number of European leaders. Meanwhile, state-owned oil and gas company YPF has landed a deal with Malaysia’s Petronas to develop an LNG terminal at the port of Bahia Blanca, in Buenos Aires.

In January, during a meeting between Fernández and Brazilian president Lula da Silva, the latter  considered financial support for the project. “We’re going to create the conditions to finance within our possibilities and help the pipeline,” Lula said.

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Earlier this year, the Argentinian government sent a delegation to Brazil to secure gas sales from Vaca Muerta.

President Lula has promised to gradually reduce fossil fuel use, but he said he will support oil and gas production in Brazil.

Zugman said Brazil’s support for the pipeline would contradict Lula’s environmental policies.

While Lula’s government claims to prioritise the protection of indigenous people, supporting Vaca Muerta represents a threat to the Mapuche people in Patagonia, he said.

The Brazilian National Bank for Economic and Social Development (BNDES) told Climate Home that it currently has no plan to finance oil and gas projects outside Brazil.

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Biden promises to “work with Congress” to fund Amazon protection https://www.climatechangenews.com/2023/02/13/biden-promises-work-with-congress-fund-amazon-protection-brazil-us/ Mon, 13 Feb 2023 16:35:47 +0000 https://www.climatechangenews.com/?p=48039 With Jair Bolsonaro out of power, one obstacle to US funding for Amazon rainforest protection has gone - but Republicans in Congress could still block funding.

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US President Joe Biden has promised to “work with Congress” to fund the protection of the Amazon rainforest, after meeting with Brazil’s new president Lula da Silva.

On Friday, Lula visited Washington DC to meet with Biden at the White House. The US government’s summary of the meeting says “the United States announced its intent to work with [the US] Congress to provide funds for programs to protect and conserve the Brazilian Amazon, including initial support for the Amazon Fund, and to leverage investments in this critical region”.

The Amazon Fund is a pot of money administered by the Brazilian Development Bank which is spent on forest protection projects like small-scale farming and management of forests by indigenous people.

The $1.2 billion fund was suspended under Bolsonaro but revived on Lula’s first day in office. It is funded by Norway and Germany and the UK is considering a donation too. The US has never financially backed it before.

“Significant change”

When running to become president in 2020, Biden promised that if elected he would mobilise “the hemisphere and the world” to provide $20bn in public and private money to protect the world’s biggest rainforest.

When he came to power, his administration tried unsuccesfully to negotiate with far-right Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro, who oversaw a spike in rainforest destruction and was hostile to what he claimed was foreign interference in Brazil’s affairs.

In January 2023, left-wing president Lula took power on a promise to end deforestation by giving more power to the environmental protection agencies gutted by Bolsonaro.

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Natalie Unterstell, president of Brazilian think-tank Talanoa Institute, told Climate Home that a US donation to the Amazon Fund would be “a significant change in the way the US deals with climate finance for Brazil as it shifts the resources to Brazilian governance instead of acting through a cooperation agency.”

“It’s quite positive. This is an important gesture and a first step from the perspective of rebuilding the bilateral relationship between the countries. But we will need a billion-dollar strategy, not a million-dollar one, to achieve zero deforestation in this decade,” she added.

Limited budget

But the US has a poor record of delivering public climate finance, consistently giving less than much smaller European economies. The president has to negotiate with Congress over how to spend their budget, gaining the support of 60 of the 100 US Senators and a majority in the House of Representatives.

For the September 2022 to October 2023 fiscal year, Biden asked Congress for $11.4 billion for international climate finance but received only $1bn.

Biden was criticised for not fighting hard enough against Republicans in Congress for that finance. Diana Movius, forest lead at Climate Advisers, told a press briefing last week: “In those last minute budget negotiations with high level folks from both parties and from the administration that finance was likely not prioritised”.

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Since then, Biden’s Democrats have lost control of one part of Congress – the House of Representatives – while having just a slim majority in the Senate.

Joe Thwaites, an international climate finance advocate at the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), said this will make it harder for Biden to get more climate finance when he makes his next budget request in the coming months.

In the October 2022 to September 2023 fiscal year, the Biden administration could give money to the Amazon Fund by drawing upon money earmarked for international development but, Meyer said, there was a lot of competition for this “fairly limited pool of funds”.

Renewed talks

E3G analyst Alden Meyer said that environmentalists would need to “work to block likely efforts to cut international climate funding”.

But both Meyer and Thwaites said that Republicans have tended to support tree-planting and tropical forest conservation more than other climate measures.

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Biden and Lula agreed to re-instate a joint working group on climate change which was set up in 2015 before being disbanded at the end of the year.

The working group will discuss cooperation on topics which include fighting deforestation, supporting clean energy deployment, adapting to climate change, making farming more climate-friendly and enhancing the bioeconomy.

Izabella Teixera was involved in the working group as Brazil’s environment minister between 2010 and 2016. She told Climate Home it had worked well, as then presidents Barack Obama and Dilma Rousseff were involved and influenced the talks at the highest level.

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Colombia gets $70m from new global renewable integration fund https://www.climatechangenews.com/2023/02/03/colombia-gets-70m-from-new-global-renewable-integration-fund/ Fri, 03 Feb 2023 03:00:18 +0000 https://www.climatechangenews.com/?p=48003 Colombia will get the first pay-out of a $300m Climate Investment Funds pot for transmission lines, batteries, EV chargers and green hydrogen

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Colombia is set to be the first country to benefit from a new fund to help the roll-out of renewable energy across the world.

The Climate Investment Funds (CIF) will lend Colombia $70m at a low interest rate so that it can invest in its transition from dirty to clean energy.

The funds are aimed at infrastructure which helps get renewable electricity to communities and businesses including batteries to store renewable electricity, transmission lines to move it around and facilities to make green hydrogen with it.

The money comes from a $300m pot made up of one-off donations from the governments of the United Kingdom, Netherlands and Switzerland. 

Other countries set to benefit with up to $70m each are Kenya, Mali, Fiji and Ukraine.

If rich nations give more, the next developing countries on the priority list are Brazil, India, Indonesia, Turkiye and Costa Rica.

An official told Climate Home “there is an active fundraising campaign underway to draw in more resources from donors and support additional countries”.

The Colombian government expects the $70m will mobilise $280m more from multilateral development banks and carbon finance markets.

It predicts the spending will save a total of 1.6 million tons of carbon dioxide from entering the atmosphere. That’s about 1% of the greenhouse gas Colombia produces every year.

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Colombia gets about three-quarters of its electricity from hydropower dams, a zero-carbon source. The rest is mostly from fossil fuels.

The Colombian government plans to use the money for loans and guarantees to green projects.

Red tape challenge

The government says that delays to environmental permits could threaten some projects’ success, especially after the government approved the Escazu agreement which protects environmental defenders.

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Colombian environmentalist Martin Ramirez told Climate Home that the social and environmental licenses to build transmission lines are “almost impossible to get fast”.

He added: “There is a lot of bureaucracy and red tape in Colombia, it’s getting harder and harder” and that officials can demand bribes to approve projects.

Green hydrogen facilities are often easier than transmission lines, he said, because they only cover a small area and so only one community has to be consulted.

Another risk, the government’s plan acknowledges, is political instability. Colombian presidents get only one four-year term so left-wing environmentalist president Gustavo Petro will leave office in 2026.

The Climate Investment Funds was set up in 2008 and has received $11 billion from 14 countries. It works from the same building as the World Bank in Washington DC. It recently dedicated $500m to Indonesia’s energy transition.

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Brazil launches first raids against Amazon tree-cutters under Lula’s new government https://www.climatechangenews.com/2023/01/20/brazil-launches-first-raids-against-amazon-tree-cutters-under-lulas-new-government/ Fri, 20 Jan 2023 11:53:35 +0000 https://www.climatechangenews.com/?p=47929 Brazil's new government is already having an impact on deforestation in the Amazon rainforest, an environmental enforcement agent claimed

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Brazilian environmental agents cut through the rainforest with machetes on Thursday in search of criminals in the first antideforestation raids under President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, who has pledged to end surging destruction inherited from his predecessor, Jair Bolsonaro.

Reuters exclusively accompanied raids led by environmental agency Ibama in the rainforest state of Para to stop loggers and ranchers illegally clearing the forest.

The agency also launched raids this week in the states of Roraima and Acre, Ibama environmental enforcement coordinator Tatiane Leite said.

About ten Ibama agents set out in pickup trucks on Thursday from their base in the municipality of Uruara, Pará, along with a dozen federal police, heading toward a cluster of points where satellite images showed loggers and ranchers recently at work clearing the forest illegally.

In twelve hours driving on dirt roads illegally crisscrossing an indigenous reserve, the convoy reached five areas that were deforested and burned around the time of last October’s election that pitted Lula against Bolsonaro.

An Ibama agent gets ready before going to an operation to combat of deforestation, in Uruara (Reuters/Ueslei Marcelino)

The areas all lay within the Cachoeira Seca indigenous reserve, where deforestation is strictly prohibited.

Four of the tracts appeared to be subsequently abandoned, with no signs people were living nearby or in the process of turning them into ranches. Agents said it could be a sign that illegal ranchers gave up on investing time and money in turning illegal land into productive pasture, knowing that Lula campaigned on a pledge to crack down on deforestation.

“People know that in this government enforcement will tighten and won’t let them use an area they deforested illegally,” said Givanildo dos Santos Lima, the agent leading Ibama’s Uruara mission.

“If the other government had won, you would have found people here, well-maintained pastures and cattle.”

Amazon deforestation has risen since Bolsonaro came to power in 2018.

The government under Bolsonaro had gutted staff and funding for environmental enforcement by Ibama in his four years in office, while the former president criticized Ibama for issuing fines to farmers and miners.

Bolsonaro gave the military and later the Justice Ministry authority over operations to fight deforestation, sidelining Ibama despite the agency’s extensive experience and success in fighting the destruction of the Amazon.

An area larger than Denmark was deforested under Bolsonaro, a 60% increase from the prior four years.

In another area of the reserve, agents found a newly built house with several chainsaws and stocked with weeks of food, indicating the occupants had likely fled just before Ibama’s arrival.

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Flanked by police with semiautomatic weapons, Ibama agents hacked a path through the adjacent jungle to reach an area the size of 57 football fields strewn with downed trees and charged trunks.

Some messily planted corn sprouted up to knee-level in what appeared to be an attempt to lay claim to the area to eventually turn it into cattle pasture, the agents said.

“We’ll come back with a helicopter and catch them by surprise,” Lima said.

He was optimistic that Ibama would be able to conduct more raids under Lula, aimed at fining deforesters and spooking criminals from attempting to clear more areas.

Lula on the campaign trail last year pledged to put Ibama back in charge of combating deforestation with beefed-up funding and personnel. He took office on January 1, so additional money and staff have yet to reach the front-line enforcers.

Bolsonaro’s government denied several requests by Reuters to accompany Ibama missions during his 2019-2022 administration. His government instituted a gag order forbidding Ibama agents from speaking to the press, which agents say has already been reversed.

Lula took office for the first time in 2003 when Amazon deforestation was near all-time highs, and through strict enforcement of environmental laws reduced it by 72% to a near record low when he left office in 2010.

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Brazil bids to bring Cop30 climate talks to Amazon’s Belem https://www.climatechangenews.com/2023/01/11/brazil-bids-bring-cop30-climate-talks-amazon-belem/ Wed, 11 Jan 2023 17:49:34 +0000 https://www.climatechangenews.com/?p=47888 The city is at the mouth of the Amazon river and is the second-biggest city in the Amazon region after Manaus

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Brazil has officially launched a bid for the north-eastern city of Belem to host the Cop30 international climate summit in 2025.

The country’s new president Lula da Silva said in a video on Twitter that Brazil’s foreign relations ministry had formalised Belem, located in the state of Pará, as a candidate to host Cop30.

“In Egypt I made the pledge that Brazil could host Cop30, and I am happy to know that our [foreign] minister Mauro Vieira has formalized Belem’s bid,” Lula said in the video alongside Pará Governor Helder Barbalho.

“I hope we are going to make a beautiful Cop,” he said, shaking the hand of a smiling Barbalho.

Barbalho said that Cop was “the biggest climate event on the planet” and that Cop30 would discuss the Amazon and the global climate and find solutions.

Former Brazilian environment minister Izabella Teixera told Climate Home that having a Cop in the Amazon would be “amazing”. 

But, she added, “I’m concerned because of infrastructure, costs, digital infrastructure, hotels – everything that you need when you have a Cop with 30,000 people”. She said flying to the Amazon region was particularly expensive.

Brazilian climate campaigner Cintya Feitosa told Climate Home that having the talks in the Amazon region “can send a signal to the global community of the relevance of the Amazon to the climate negotiations and include its population in the main rooms”.

While the bid is an important symbolic gesture, “the environment does not live only on nice gestures”, said Marcio Astrini, executive secretary of the Climate Observatory, a Brazilian NGO.

“Brazil is today the country that deforests the most in the world and Pará is the state that deforests the most in the Amazon. It is essential to get to Cop30 with this situation reversed”, said Astrini.

Amazon COP

Belem is the capital of the Amazonian state of Pará and is the second most populous city (1.5 million people) in the Amazon region after Manaus (2.2 million).

Teixera said that Belem was chosen over Manaus because its state governor Helder Barbalho is the “the essential political player in Amazon”.

While Belem is at the mouth of the Amazon river near the Atlantic coast, Manaus is deep in Brazil’s interior. Lonely Planet calls Belem the Eastern gateway to the Amazon region.

Lula revives $1 billion Amazon Fund and environmental protections

Every October, the city hosts more than one million pilgrims  who participate in a procession of the image of the Virgin of Nazaré.

Lula has been promising to tackle deforestation in the Amazon rainforest, which hit a 15-year-high under former President Jair Bolsonaro.

He recently named Marina Silva, who oversaw a significant drop in deforestation during his first stint as president in the 2000s, as his environment minister.

Regional rotation

The host of UN climate talks rotates each year among the UN’s regional groupings.

In 2021, Cop26 was in the British city of Glasgow. The UK is part of the Western Europe and others group which includes Canada, Australia and New Zealand with the USA as an observer.

Last year’s climate talks were in the beach resort of Sharm el-Sheikh in Egypt, which is in the African group.

This year’s will be in the United Arab Emirates, which is in the Asia-Pacific. South Korea had indicated an interest but backed down.

Next year’s will be in Eastern Europe and the president of Bulgaria has said his country wants to host it.

Before this announcement, the new Australian government had said they wanted to co-host it with a Pacific nation but that would mean persuading the Eastern Europe group to let them swap turns.

Then it is the turn of Latin America and the Caribbean . So far, no country other than Brazil has said they want to host the talks.

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Lula revives $1 billion Amazon Fund and environmental protections https://www.climatechangenews.com/2023/01/04/first-day-office-lula-revives-1-billion-fund-amazon/ Wed, 04 Jan 2023 09:20:44 +0000 https://climatechangenews.com/?p=47849 On his first day in office as Brazil's president, Lula da Silva signed a package of seven executive orders to protect the environment

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In his first day in office, Brazil’s new president, Lula da Silva, signed a package of seven executive orders aimed at controlling deforestation in the Amazon and re-building the country’s environmental institutions.

As part of the package, Brazil’s new leader reinstated the Amazon Fund, a $1.2 billion fund to protect of the world’s largest rainforest, after a three-year period of inactivity.  

Donors Germany and Norway suspended transfers to the fund in 2019, under the previous government of Jair Bolsonaro, after the former president unilaterally suspended the board of directors and the technical committee of the fund.

On Monday, Lula reinstated the fund’s governing body, which Norwegian environment minister Espen Barth Eide said “allows for an immediate reactivation of the fund”.  The UK’s environment minister Therese Coffey said the UK was “seriously looking at” joining the fund.

Destruction of Brazil’s Cerrado savanna soars for third year in a row

The fund, which was established during Lula’s second term in 2008, supports 102 conservation projects in the Amazon, among them forests managed by indigenous people and small-scale farms. 

Among the first executive mandates, Brazil’s new president also moved the Rural Environmental Registry —which tracks all rural land-ownership— from the agriculture to the environment ministry, extinguished the possibility of conciliating environmental fines and reactivated a plan to prevent and control deforestation in the Amazon. 

“There is still a long way to go, but what we’ve seen at the beginning of this mandate is a right start and demonstrates the importance that the issue has gained on Lula’s agenda,” said Marcio Astrini, executive secretary of the Brazilian NGO Climate Observatory. 


Green promises 

Lula was sworn into office for a third term on Sunday, after defeating rightwing incumbent Bolsonaro by a thin margin in October’s general election. Bolsonaro’s policies led to a 60% increase in deforestation in the Amazon.

Brazil’s new president promised to achieve zero deforestation in the Amazon and 100% renewable electricity during his inaugural speech, adding “Brazil does not need to cut down forests to keep and expand its strategic agricultural frontier”.

“The world expects Brazil to once again become a leader in tackling the climate crisis and an example of a socially and environmentally responsible country, capable of promoting economic growth with income distribution,” he said.

Lula will update Brazil’s ‘insufficient’ climate plans if elected: advisor

Lula appointed former environment minister and activist Marina Silva to once again lead the country’s green efforts. He also created the Ministry of Indigenous Peoples, to be led by the influential Amazonian leader Sônia Guajajara.

The new government’s environment team is promising, said Astrini, but he also warned that Lula will have to negotiate without a majority in Congress, which is dominated by legislators linked to Bolsonaro’s party and to the “ruralist” movement defending agribusiness in the Amazon.

A package of three Bolsonaro-era bills being discussed in Congress could trump Lula’s efforts to control deforestation in the Amazon. These projects would respectively allow for the relaxed use of pesticides, land-grabbing in public forests and weaker regulations for environmental permits.

“Our current Congress is extremely hostile to indigenous and environmental affairs. We have grown used to that. We need a government that defends the environment and that can face that Congress,” said Astrini.

This article was updated on 4 January to add that the UK is considering joining the fund

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Destruction of Brazil’s Cerrado savanna soars for third year in a row https://www.climatechangenews.com/2022/12/15/destruction-of-brazils-cerrado-savanna-soars-for-third-year-in-a-row/ Thu, 15 Dec 2022 11:00:31 +0000 https://www.climatechangenews.com/?p=47803 Brazil's outgoing president Jair Bolsonaro has presided over four years of destruction of the Amazon rainforest and the Cerrado grasslands

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Deforestation in Brazil’s Cerrado savanna rose for the third year in a row, government data showed on Wednesday, destroying a vital habitat for threatened species and releasing huge amounts of greenhouse gases that drive climate change.

Destruction of native vegetation rose by a quarter to 10,689 square kilometers (4,127 square miles) – an area larger than Lebanon. The data from space research agency Inpe is for the 12 months through to July 2022, compared with the same period the previous year.

The Cerrado, the world’s most species-rich savanna, has given way to Brazil’s expanding agricultural frontier for decades. Roughly half of the savanna’s vegetation has already been destroyed, with much of it converted to farms and ranches.

When far-right president Jair Bolsonaro came to power in 2019, deforestation in the Cerrado was at its lowest point for decades. It increased in every year of his time in office. Deforestation in the Amazon rainforest rose too.

Deforestation in the Cerrado has risen in Bolsonaro’s time in power, although it remains lower than previous decades. (Photo: INPE)

Bolsonaro will be replaced by left-winger Lula Ignacio da Silva in January, who has promised to combat deforestation and reduce it to zero in the Amazon rainforest.

Trade levers

The European Union recently agreed on a law to prohibit companies from selling agricultural products linked to deforestation, which would apply to the Amazon rainforest but excluded much of the Cerrado.

Asked about rising Cerrado destruction, EU Environment Commissioner Virginijus Sinkevicius said protections could be expanded.

“We have a review clause in just one year, we will have a look at it,” he said in an interview at the UN’s Cop15 nature summit in Montreal. “If we see patterns shifting to other ecosystems, we will be able to react relatively quickly.”

Governments split on ditching nature-harming subsidies in Montreal

Countries at Cop15 aim to strike a deal to protect areas rich in biodiversity like the Cerrado. But with the summit set to end on 19 December, negotiators still disagree on some 200 points, according to conference documents.

“What we eat and how we produce our food are the main drivers of this large-scale obliteration,” said Jean-Francois Timmers, a policy expert for environmental advocates WWF.

“We need Cop15 negotiators to prioritise ending deforestation and conversion in areas where the yearly rate of ecosystem losses prove alarming, like the Cerrado.”

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