Brasília – A report released this Thursday (5th) at the United Nations (UN) meeting on climate change highlights Brazil as an example of successful reduction in deforestation and greenhouse gas emission. Produced by the United States-based Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS), the document is titled Deforestation Success Stories. Tropical nations where forest protection and reforestation policies have worked, and includes a chapter dedicated to Brazil, which is described as the country that has reduced deforestation and emissions the most in the world.
Sixteen countries in Africa, Latin America and Asia are also listed as success stories in forest protection. The report notes that the Brazilian government has reduced deforestation in the Amazon, the world’s largest tropical rainforest, by establishing environmental protection areas beginning in the second half of the 1990s, with a sharp increase in the current century, and via moratoriums agreed upon with private companies on purchases of soy and beef from deforested areas. “The changes in the Brazilian Amazon in the past decade and the contribution they have made to slow global warming are unprecedented,” according to the document.
According to the main author of the piece, Doug Boucher, the Brazilian case goes to show that economic development is not hampered by lower deforestation. “For instance, the Brazilian beef and soy industries have thrived, despite the moratoriums to prevent deforestation.” The report states that the cutting down of the forest, “seen in the twentieth century as necessary to development and a reflection of Brazil’s right to control its territory, came to be viewed as the wasteful and exploitative destruction of resources that were the patrimony of all Brazilians.”
*Translated by Gabriel Pomerancblum
