Paulo Moutinho

The emerging REDD+ regime of Brazil

Brazil has exercised a leadership in the International scene about climate change mitigation and adaptation. Internally, it has been demonstrating institutional, legal and technical capacity to monitor and reduce deforestation in the Amazon, capacities also required to the development of a national Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD) system. In this article, we present the progress on the REDD+ debate under the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change and the Brazilian government trajectory towards a positive REDD+ agenda. We also discuss the relevant Brazilian legislation that can support a REDD+ regime: the National Policy for Climate Change, the Amazon state plans for deforestation reduction and the current debate and proposal of a REDD+ regime in Brazil, discussing their contexts, threats and opportunities. Funding opportunities are also discussed, with emphasis on the role of the Amazon Fund on fostering the REDD+ activities in Brazil. At the end, we propose a mechanism of REDD+ benefits sharing, based on a stock-target and flow approach.

Policy Update: Amazon deforestation and Brazil’s forest code: a crossroads for climate change

Considerably more is at stake in the ongoing battle in Brazil’s Congress and government over the country’s core forest protection legislation, the Forest Code, than President Dilma Rousseff ’s political fortunes or Brazil’s international reputation. The Amazon, and Brazil, will likely have more effect on global climate change than is often realized – for better or worse. Decisive action now to consolidate Brazil’s gains in reducing Amazon deforestation is critical to keeping open the option of containing global warming within manageable limits. Recent field studies as well as comprehensive modeling suggest that the combined effects of climate change in tandem with deforestation and the resulting fires may be pushing the Amazon ever closer to large-scale forest dieback. If such dieback occurs it will not only accelerate GHG emissions, but limit the options for forest preservation in the future. Modeling suggests that changing rainfall patterns and more frequent, widespread fires may be pushing the Amazon forest vegetation in the eastern and southern Amazon from moist evergreen forest to seasonal forest and savanna. When such a change occurs it results in emissions of large amounts of GHGs to the atmosphere. Field studies over the last decade that address the relationships among deforestation, forest degradation, climate change and fires suggest that forest ecosystems historically too moist to burn, even during prolonged dry seasons, are becoming increasingly drought-stressed and susceptible to fires and, consequently, to degradation [1–5]. Forests once affected by fire are now more likely to burn a second time, such that the process may become self-reinforcing, leading to increasing degradation and loss of carbon stocks. Experimental data shows that a forests’ ability to function as a carbon sink is measurably reduced even after just two consecutive drought years [6]. In 2005 and 2010 [7] the Amazon experienced two 100-year droughts, requiring water supplies to be flown in to river-dependent communities and causing massive mortality in fish populations, while this year’s record-setting floods in the states of Acre and Amazonas inundated cities, leaving tens of thousands homeless. Predictions of the effects of climate change on the Amazonian region include increased precipitation and more drying. A meta-ana lysis of coupled global circulation models using 19 global climate models found increased drought stress in the eastern Amazon in the 21st century and climatic conditions more favorable to seasonal forests than moist tropical forests [8]. More recently, leading international climate and vegetation modeling groups under the coordination of the World Bank, using the Japan Meteorological Agency Earth Simulator, results from 24 general circulation models, the Lund-Potsdam-Jena Land Dynamic Global Vegetation and Water Balance Model, and Brazil’s Center for Weather Forecasting and Climate Studies (CPTEC) vegetation model, assessed probabilities of Amazon dieback under various IPCC global GHG emissions trajectories [9]. This is the first comprehensive effort to analyze the combined effects of climate “ Decisive action now to consolidate Brazil’s gains in reducing Amazon deforestation is critical to keeping open the option of