Brazil's complex climate conundrum

The role of Brazil in global climate change is as full of contradictions as the much-misunderstood country itself.

On the one hand, it will be among the small group of developing countries to enter December's UN climate talks in Copenhagen with a quantified target for cutting emissions. Although, as foreign minister Celso Amorim put it in an interview I reported on a couple of weeks ago, for "theological" reasons it will probably not be called a target.

On the other hand, as reported in the last post of this blog, Brazil's fossil fuel emissions are rising fast. Having been almost totally dependent on (extremely controversial) large hydro-electric dams for electricity, the energy ministry is backing a plan to build dozens of new coal and fuel-oil power stations, desperate to avoid a repeat of the energy rationing imposed a few years back to prevent blackouts.

Even more significant in the rising trend of energy emissions is the ever-greater volume of traffic choking Brazil's roads and highways. Inter-city passenger rail services are non-existent (although a much-overdue fast rail link between Rio and São Paulo is now in the pipeline), so increased mobility is entirely picked up by road and air transport. Even the exceptionally high use of biofuels cannot prevent this adding significantly to greenhouse gas emissions.

Ironically, as Brazil is lauded in international circles for its "leadership position" amongst developing countries on tackling climate change through exploitation of renewable energy, at home the big discussion now is over who will get the royalties for massive oil extraction from the so-called "pre-salt" layer off the country's Atlantic coast.

The reason Brazil is able to walk into the Copenhagen talks with an ambitious climate policy is that it seems finally to have got a handle on Amazon deforestation, until recently judged to be responsible for the bulk of its carbon dioxide emissions. The emissions-reduction "number" it brings to the table is likely to be a refinement of the target it already declared last year in its National Climate Change Plan, to reduce annual deforestation 70% by 2018, compared with the 10-year average from 1997-2006. The Brazilian government calculated that this ambition, if achieved, would prevent carbon emissions equivalent to an entire year's emissions from the European Union.

The most recent figures suggest that Brazil is well on the way to meeting that target, although here too there are contradictions. Certainly, the annual rate of destruction in the Amazon has come down considerably since a peak in 2003-4, when more than 27,000 square kilometres of rainforest were clear-cut. Three successive years of sharp decline were followed by a blip last year, probably linked to high food prices, which saw a 12% rise over the previous year. Even so, the 2007-8 figure of 12,900 square kilometres still represented a drop of one-third over the ten-year average.

Even more significantly for the government's position at Copenhagen, it is likely that just about the time the conference takes place, Brazil will be announcing its lowest Amazon deforestation figure for 20 years. Despite a sharp monthly increase for July, all the indications are that the period August 2008 to August 2009 (the official satellite data use this dry-season period to judge annual change to take advantage of maximum visibility) will reveal deforestation well below 10,000 square kilometres. A large part of this is likely to be due to the economic downturn, as deforestation is closely linked to demand for commodities such as soya and beef; but the government will also be able to claim credit for the impact of policies such as crackdowns on illegal sawmills, confiscation of cattle grazing in protected areas, and cutting off credit to rural landowners breaking environmental rules.

Clearly the real test will come once the global economy bounces back, and only then will it be clear whether deforestation is being effectively reduced. There are other reasons, too, why a simple correlation between annual deforestation and Brazil's carbon emissions may not be valid.

One has been emphasized by the government's own National Space Research Institute (INPE), responsible for compiling and interpreting the satellite data that are the world's window on what is happening in the Amazon. Recently it has started to analyse the images to estimate the area of degraded forest, as well as the clear-cut areas given in the main annual statistics. The first year for which data were available, 2007-8, showed an alarming 60% increase in the area of forest degradation over the previous year, suggesting that the official figures on which the Brazil's record is judged tell only a partial story. Large-scale degradation of rainforest implies a loss of biomass and therefore carbon - apart from the fact that a degraded forest now is more likely to go up in smoke and become cattle pasture next year.

The other question mark over a simple CO2-deforestation link was emphasized in a paper published last week by a team of scientists from Stanford University, in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.. It suggests that because the pattern of deforestation has been for clearances to move progressively deeper into the forest from the agricultural frontiers to the East and South, the amount of biomass destroyed by clearance of a single hectare has increased over time. The paper's estimate is that between 2001 and 2007, the amount of above-ground organic matter lost from the clearance of each hectare increased on average from 183 to 201 tonnes of carbon. Since the remaining areas of the Amazon are denser still, even a constant rate of deforestation would lead to a 25% increase in emissions, the study reckoned.

In fact, this conclusion is double-edged as far as climate politics (and economics) is concerned. Even though it may imply the emission reductions in recent years have been over-stated, it also suggests the remaining areas of rainforest are even more valuable to the world in preventing runaway climate change. That could be an important factor in raising the stakes for the world to pay up for reducing deforestation through the so-called REDD mechanisms (reducing emissions through deforestation and degradatation) featuring prominently on the Copenhagen agenda.