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Brazil: 10 States Pledge to Respect the Climate Paris Agreement

  • People hold a marionette shaped like Brazil's President Jair Bolsonaro on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly in New York, U.S., Sep. 23, 2019.

    People hold a marionette shaped like Brazil's President Jair Bolsonaro on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly in New York, U.S., Sep. 23, 2019. | Photo: Reuters

Published 25 September 2019
Opinion

Ten Brazilian subnational governments will reduce greenhouse gas emissions regardless what the Bolsonaro administration does.

Brazil's North East Consortium (CN) spokesperson Paulo Camara on Tuesday announced that ten Brazilian states pledged in New York to respect and implement the Paris Agreement, independent of what President Jair Bolsonaro thinks or decides regarding global climate change.

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"In response to the recoil risks [in environmental protection] generated by the Federal government, the Brazilian states have decided to assume their role decisively," the Pernambuco governor said at the Climate Week, a complementary event of the United Nations 2019 Climate Summit.

In this scenario, Camera defended the need to work for a "more human" planet and recalled that dozens of Brazilian local governments also have strong commitments to the protection of nature.

The Paris Agreement is a multilateral instrument that seeks to protect the global environment by reducing the emission of greenhouse gases. It was adopted by 195 countries in 2015 and is currently in force because it has already been ratified by 147 nations.

During his presidential campaign in 2018, the former captain Jair Bolsonaro threatened to remove Brazil from the Paris Agreement. Once he assumed the presidency on January 2019, however, he recanted his statement. As a result, Brazil still participates in the agreement, so far.

The Northeast Consortium brings together 56 million Brazilians, which represents a quarter of the population of the South American country. With the support of the Brazil Clima Center (CBC) and other ecologist organizations, those states have been deploying interesting initiatives for environmental protection.

One of them is the greenhouse gas emission reduction program being implemented in Fernando de Noronha, an archipelago of 21 islands and islets in the Atlantic Ocean, which is 220 miles offshore from the Brazilian coast.

By 2030, this territory expects to completely replace combustion cars with electric cars, an ambitious goal that few subnational governments in the world have set.

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