Brazil may be the first country in the world to zero net greenhouse gas emissions by 2040. The conclusion, made from data and analysis, is from a group of Brazilian researchers present at COP27, the United Nations Climate Conference, which is taking place in Sharm El-Sheikh, Egypt. According to experts, the fact that the country has most of its emissions linked to land use, read deforestation and burning, especially in the Amazon, makes it possible to neutralize the release of carbon equivalent, causing the climate crisis, with "relative speed".

"If we eliminate land use emissions, it reduces Brazilian emissions by 77% compared to 2005. If we consider the variation of carbon in the soil by pasture management, we can take another 230 million tons that are absorbed into agricultural soils. And if we add to this account that it is possible to reduce 200 million tons of methane, our emissions would practically be residual. Also remembering that when we reduce deforestation, this increases regeneration. We can change that picture relatively quickly. It is very possible that Brazil will become the first country with zero net emissions, sometime between 2030 and 2040," explained Tasso Azevedo, general coordinator of the MapBiomas project.

The conclusion was presented in the panel "Land use in Brazil: villain, victim or hero of the climate crisis?", which started the programming of the Brazil Climate Action Hub, a space of Brazilian civil society at the climate conference, on Monday (14). The discussion was moderated by Ana Toni, director of iCS (Instituto Clima e Sociedade), with participations also of Ane Alencar, Director of Science at IPAM (Environmental Research Institute of the Amazon) and coordinator of MapBiomas Fogo, and Michael Coe, director of the Amazon program at the Woodwell Climate Research Center.

Among the five largest polluters in the world, Brazil issued 2.42 billion gross tons of carbon equivalent in 2021. It was the largest increase in 19 years, of 12.2% compared to the previous year. The measure of carbon equivalent represents the sum of the effect of all types of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. Emissions from other major polluters, such as the United States, China and Russia, are more tied to burning fossil fuels. Gross emissions consider everything that is released into the atmosphere, while net emissions take into account gross emissions minus what is removed from the atmosphere or absorbed by vegetation, for example. If forests are preserved, if we reach zero deforestation, Brazil's CO² absorption capacity will grow enormously.

Caring for the "great village of the world"

The opening of the discussion at The Brazil Hub, which should receive president-elect Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (PT) on Tuesday (15), was made by Toya Manchineri, coordinator of Coiab (Coordination of Indigenous Organizations of the Brazilian Amazon). He stressed the negative impacts of deforestation on the original peoples, forests and the animals that inhabit it, and indicated that the moment calls for unity to protect life in the present and in the future.

"Deforestation brings the loss of our cultural identity; it brings hunger and seed, because we lose seeds, and thus the planting and the way of organizing indigenous peoples is modified; brings the loss of life of the forest ecosystem. The forest is everything to us and should also be for humanity. There is much source of life for both the present and the future. We hope that everyone on Planet Earth understands the importance of the forest, using its intelligence so that we can together preserve the biomes. It is a time for, as human beings, to look at forests not as geographical space, but as a space where there is life, culture and wisdom. If we continue with this greed, we will destroy everything we have. It is time to take care of this great village of the world," Manchineri said.

Planet air conditioning

Forests and other types of native vegetation such as savannas, tundras and flooded areas hold large carbon stocks both above and below ground. According to the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change), tropical forests such as the Amazon can stock about 243 tons of carbon per hectare. Each year, all the world's forests absorb around 15.6 billion tons of carbon – equivalent to three times the annual emissions of the United States – but approximately 8.1 billion tons are released back into the atmosphere due to deforestation, fire and degradation of these vegetations.

"About 25% of emissions are taken out of the atmosphere by tropical forests, so they cool the planet. They're like natural air conditioners. If we remove all tropical forest on the planet, this will increase the global average temperature by 1°C, due to the decrease in humidity and cooling effect, so they provide us with a great service. If we lose 10% of these forests, we've already increased by 0.1°C in the planet's average temperature and we can't accept that. What we have is a functioning climate solution and it is our duty to keep it as it is, to a minimum," warned Michael Coe, director of the Amazon program at the Woodwell Climate Research Center.

The release into the atmosphere of billions of tons of greenhouse gases, and in a short period, is what causes global warming. The graph below shows the variation in global temperature since the pre-industrial period: the lines in red become darker as the temperature increases, and the last ten years have been the hottest in history in sequence.

With the deforestation of native vegetation and the degradation of the area around fires associated with deforestation, all the carbon accumulated in the roots and structure of trees and plants returns to the atmosphere.

"This is the legacy that the Lula government will inherit. The deforestation that is taking place in the Bolsonaro government will enter into the account of the first rate of deforestation that the Lula government will drop, and look that it is already high and the year is not over. If it were to stop to account now, deforestation in the Amazon by October would already be almost equivalent to the entire 2016/2017 rate," commented Ane Alencar, Director of Science at IPAM and coordinator of MapBiomas Fogo.

The area deforested in 2021 in the Legal Amazon was 13,038 km², the largest since 2006, when deforestation was in a fall since the 27,772 km² deforested in 2004. As a result, emissions from deforestation increased by 20% in the country.

Land use and emissions in Brazil

According to the mapping of the MapBiomas initiative, Brazil has 66% of the territory covered by native vegetation. "That doesn't mean they're all conserved areas," Azevedo said. Of this total, 8.2% are areas of secondary vegetation, for example, that are recovering from having been deforested at least once in the last 36 years.

The advance of deforestation in recent history worries researchers: a third of all that has been deforested in 500 years has been overturned in the last three decades.

The occupation of the territory by soybean and pasture also draws attention. About 5% of the country is soybeans: this is more than added to urban, mining and planted forest areas. Grazing occupies 20% of the Brazilian territory. If degraded pastures are sources of carbon emissions, well-managed pastures play a role in the absorption of carbon from the atmosphere. In 2020, the MapBiomas network calculated that 47% of pastures in Brazil are well managed, a number that was 30% in the early 2000s.

"About 40% of everything that has been burned in Brazil in the last 36 years is in the Amazon, and most of this fire occurs in pasture areas, because people do the management using fire. So it is necessary to improve the management of pastures in this sense", said Ane Alencar, ipam.

Together, agriculture and land use changes in Brazil, which include deforestation and associated fire, account for 75% of the country's emissions.

In the Amazon, the increase in deforestation is directly related to the land grabbing and illegal occupation of public lands. More than half (51%) of the deforested area in the biome is within these lands. The area irregularly registered as private property within indigenous territories in the biome in Brazil increased 55% between 2016 and 2020 and the number of CAR (Rural Environmental Registry) increased 75% in the same period.

In 2022, Brazil had 80% more forest fires between January and October than the same period in 2021.

"We have two ways of solution: one of them is directed to strong and intelligent command and control, which involves identifying financial transactions, allocating public forests and taking forests out of the illegal land market. The other path is positive incentives to reduce deforestation, it needs resources to strengthen the states, so that they have a vigilance on compliance with the Forest Code", concluded Alencar.

Source: Projeto Colabora