ABSTRACT
Brazil’s environmental and climate policies have been characterized by alternating strides forward and setbacks (Machado 2014; Machado and Vilani 2015). In the phase since the Conference of the Parties (COP-21) held in December 2015 in Paris, what real contribution is Brazil making to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and strengthen actions that lead to a global climate agreement? For COP-21 held in September 2015, Brazil dened its Intended Nationally Determined Contribution (INDC), or environmental goals. They can be considered ambitious (more than those dened by the United States) and unachievable, taking into account on one hand the illegal deforestation scenario in Brazil (Rajão and Soares-Filho 2015) and on the other hand, the climate contradictions discussed below in this chapter. As its main contribution, the Federal government set a 37 percent reduction of greenhouse gas emissions by 2025, plus 43 percent as an indicative reference value by 2030 – based on 2005 emission levels (Brazil 2015a). On December 12, 2015, at the COP-21, the new global climate agreement was signed, following two weeks of negotiations and discussions on the new standards to guide eorts towards a possible future. The main uncertainty on global climate governance lies precisely in knowing what eorts will actually be made by the signatory countries, which will require a permanent revision of the goals. In the coming years, due to the intense negative eects on human societies and ecosystems, will we see adequate treatment of climate risks? The answers to these questions belong to the future, but in the Brazilian case we can identify the main challenges at present for anticipating abstract risks like those related to the climate. Modern risks and abstract risks are treated here as synonymous, meaning “new risks [with] a global dimension (both in spatial and in temporal or multidimensional terms), […] invisible (that can only be accessed by expert scientists), irreversible […], and irrevocable […]” (Brunet, Delvenne and Joris 2011, 181).
