Brazil keeps climate targets despite failed summit

subscribe

Brazil will make its ambitious 2020 greenhouse gas emissions targets legally binding even though global climate talks failed this month, the country's environment minister said.

"We will fully comply with the targets. It doesn't matter that Copenhagen didn't go as well as we had hoped," Environment Minister Carlos Minc told reporters after meeting with President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva.

Lula will veto three items from a climate bill approved by Congress in November but would maintain the emissions targets, Minc said.

"The targets were maintained, which is the most important. Brazil will have a strong climate change policy," he said.

Brazil aims to reduce its projected 2020 greenhouse gas emissions by as much 39 percent. That amounts roughly to a 20 percent reduction from 2005 levels.

According to the bill that has become law, those targets will be quantifiable and verifiable.

Latin America's largest country had tried to prod other developing and industrialized countries into adopting bold targets at the UN climate summit in Copenhagen earlier this month. But the meeting failed to produce a new framework agreement on climate to follow the Kyoto Protocol which expires in 2012.

Brazil is one of the largest carbon emitters, largely due to the destruction of the Amazon rain forest. Deforestation, which has fallen sharply in recent years, releases carbon as trees burn or decompose.

Among the items Lula will veto were proposals to limit the construction of small hydroelectric plants and reduce the use of fossil fuels.

Related News

washington-ag-leads-legal-challenge-against-trumps-energy-emergency

Washington AG Leads Legal Challenge Against Trump’s Energy Emergency

SEATTLE - In a significant legal move, Washington State Attorney General Nick Brown has spearheaded a coalition of 15 states in filing a lawsuit against President Donald Trump's executive order declaring a national energy emergency. The lawsuit, filed in federal court in Seattle on May 9, 2025, challenges the legality of the emergency declaration, which aims to expedite permitting processes for fossil fuel projects by bypassing key environmental reviews.

Background of the Energy Emergency Declaration

President Trump's executive order, issued on January 20, 2025, asserts that the United States faces an inadequate and unreliable energy grid, particularly affecting the Northeast…

READ MORE
hydro one building

Hydro One shares jump 5.7 per cent after U.S. regulators reject $6.7B takeover

READ MORE

californias-solar-power-cost-shift

California’s Solar Power Cost Shift: A Misguided Policy Threatening Energy Equity

READ MORE

nuclear

'Net Zero' Emissions Targets Not Possible Without Multiple New Nuclear Power Stations, Say Industry Leaders

READ MORE

Salmon and electricity at center of Columbia River treaty negotiations

READ MORE