Meeting of the Environmentalist Parliamentary Front and CBC discuss updates on the Brazilian NDC

The Environmentalist Parliamentary Front, in partnership with Centro Brasil no Clima and support from the Climate and Society Institute and the Institute for Sustainable Development, held today, April 15, an online meeting on the climate agenda. The purpose of the meeting was to discuss proposals for compliance with the Brazilian Nationally Determined Contribution (NDC), as well as a possible update on it. More than 100 people attended, including congressmen and senators from the national congress, advisors, leaders of the parliamentary fronts of the subnational states, and representatives of various environmental institutions. The coordinator of the Front and former president of the Commission on the Environment and Sustainable Development (CMADS), Congressman Rodrigo Agostinho (PSB-SP), opened the discussion by highlighting the importance of including the climate agenda even in times of pandemic, making it clear that at the end of the crisis there will be discussions on international cooperation focused on various issues, including sustainability. The president of the Parliamentary Front of Indigenous Peoples, Deputy Joênia Wapichana, spoke about the need to join forces at a time when Brazil is going through health, economic and social crises. Joenia said that the climate issue was left in the background because of the current situation, but that the agenda should be discussed because there is an intense increase of deforestation in the Amazon and the continuous invasion of miners to indigenous lands.

Citing the Chinese ideogram 'crisis and opportunity', the executive director of the Centro Brasil no Clima (CBC), Alfredo Sirkis, presented the document "Proposals for the Implementation of the Brazilian NDC", which aims to reformulate the targets agreed in 2015 in the Paris Agreement. Sirkis points out that Brazil has always played an important role in the climate agenda, and one option for meeting the targets would be to include the issue at the sub-national level, not just at the federal level. According to the environmentalist, "we need to give a legislative consequence to this work that has been done, to prevent this from being lost. It is necessary that technical legislative advisors look at the document and understand what is the best way to include it in legislation that is in progress in the National Congress. Preferably, in the law that updates the Brazilian Climate Change Program".

Commenting on the speech by CBC's executive director, economist Cadu Young, stressed the need to use other climate guidelines besides the Paris Agreement, such as Agenda 2030 and the ODSs. According to the UFRJ professor, "it impresses the absence of the Sustainable Development Objectives in the Brazilian debate and the use of their numerous goals as an instrument for policy planning. This is important because all the resources of international organizations today are structured from this (...), including to be part of the OECD, objective of the current federal executive".

Closing the debate of the Parliamentary Environmentalist Front, Alfredo Sirkis reinforced that there is an opportunity to stimulate Brazilian emission reductions through a tax reform that covers the cost of carbon intensity in economic activities, thus encouraging the decarbonization of production processes.