President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva of Brazil signed Thursday (December 9, 2010) a decree detailing the National Policy on Climate Change. The act defines how Brazil quantifies its greenhouse gas emissions and how it will achieve the commitment the country made during the United Nations Conference on Climate Change in Copenhagen in 2009 to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by between 36.1% and 38.9% by 2020 from 1990 levels. The decree also establishes a legal requirement for the estimation of national emissions on an annual basis.  

Setting a Target Volume for Emissions Reductions

In order to honor commitments made to the Convention, Brazil undertook a national inventory of its greenhouse gas emissions this year to quantify emissions from 1990-2005.  The emissions of 2005 were calculated to be 2.2 GtCO2eq. 

The inventory served as basis to build the reference “business as usual” scenario for emissions by 2020 of 3.2 GtCO2eq.  The decree therefore defines a target to reduce emissions between 1.17 – 1.26 GtCO2eq by 2020, when compared to this reference scenario. 

Brazil plans to achieve this total emissions reduction target through actions in all sectors of the economy. To do so, 12 sectoral plans will be implemented by the end of 2011 including specific targets for emissions in each of those sectors.

Tangible Actions to Achieve Lower Greenhouse Gas Emissions

The actions detailed in the decree to reach these goals include:

• Reducing 80% of deforestation in the Amazon
• Reducing 40% of deforestation in the Cerrado biome
• Increasing the supply of renewable energies
• Recovering 15 million hectares of land degrade by cattle raising
• Improving the system of integrated farming, foresting and cattle raising by 4 million hectares
• Expanding direct seeding by 8 million hectares
• Expanding  biological nitrogen fixation by 5.5 million hectares
• Expanding foresting by 3 million hectares
• Using new technologies to produce an additional 4.4 million cubic meters of animal manure annually
• Increasing the use of charcoal in the steel industry