More investments, fewer stupid decisions are needed for environmental conservativism in Brazil

The UN Sustainable Development Goals and Climate Summits are Not Necessary: Why Brazil Needs a Global Rescue Plan, But We Need It Now

World leaders this week pledged todouble efforts on a plan to end poverty and protect the environment, which is woefully behind schedule.

The self-imposed deadline for meeting the 17SDGs will be missed. Governments and leaders are better at making promises than at keeping them, scientists have told Nature. However, there are signs that the SDG agenda is having an impact, they say.

“The SDGs need a global rescue plan,” UN secretary-general António Guterres declared at the opening of the summit. Guterres is proposing to increase funding for sustainable development by at least US$500 billion to help countries to achieve the goals, as well as other financial aid, including debt relief for the poorest nations so they can survive and thrive after economic shocks.

The world needs to take bolder and more transformational action now in order to fulfill theSDG agenda, says Paula Caballero, who was instrumental in creating the framework.

At the same time, she says that 2030 should not be seen as a final ‘take-it-or-leave-it’ deadline. There is no end in sight for the goal of the Nature Conservancy, says Caballero, who is now in charge of Latin American activities. It’s a big deal.

Sociologist Shirin Malekpour, one of the GSDR authors, agrees. A person at a university in Australia suggests that the targets and goals need to be replaced with what they are doing.

The aim of the summits is to find solutions to the complex nature of challenges facing humanity, and this is what the goals are about. But she says that the UN system is still making the mistake of treating sustainable development and climate as separate issues, including by holding separate SDG and climate summits in New York this week.

She states that the only way for you to address climate is through the UN, and also that you cannot fulfill the goals unless you deal with it.

You may wonder why there is a Brazilian agenda in New York. Second, because the UN climate summit is this week. Second, they want to show international investors the power of the country as a whole, not only economically but as well.

To understand why this is important to Brazil, we need to back in time and look at the context of what we are talking about. Under former President Jair Bolsonaro, climate change agendas were not only left aside — but almost scrapped. The government cut 93 percent of investments on studies and projects to mitigate and adapt to climate change in its first three years of management, compared to the previous three years, according to BBC News Brazil.

A survey carried out by researchers from INPE (National Institute for Space Research) showed that in the first two years of the former president’s term, the cutting and burning of the forest released 122 percent more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere than the average recorded between 2010 and 2018.

These are just two examples that demonstrate the size of the destruction to the environment between 2019 and 2022 in Brazil. But in 2023, Bolsonaro is out of power, and the mood has become more optimistic.

The Columbia Climate School: More Investment, Less Decisions: What is needed of the Brazilian Government? A Key Note from a Brazilian House of Representatives to the Brazilian Parliament

The Columbia Climate School, which was the university’s first new school in 30 years, is focused on studying climate change worldwide.

I emphasized the importance of programs like the climate school, especially in countries like the United States, and she confided that 40 percent of the students are international (including Brazilians). We had doubts about how Brazil would deal with climate issues after the new President da Silva took office.

The perspective of those who work with the government, like Natalie Unterstell, president of Instituto Talanoa, is that there is not much tension. One thing is for sure, there are differing law projects, but other than that, it is a unique and unique way of unifying fronts and benches. So, I think it will be good work for our Congress to, for the first time, adopt a market-based instrument for conduct policy,” she commented.

She ended her speech amidst a round of applause from the audience, summing up what she wants: “So [we need] more conservation jobs, more investment, and less stupid policy decisions.”

Catarina is in the midst of earning a master’s degree from Columbia, and she thinks that Brazil’s image has improved recently.

Source: Environmental conservation in Brazil: more investments, fewer ‘stupid decisions’

Umgrauemeio: a platform for rapid detection, monitoring, and mitigation of forest fires at Embrace Pantanal

Around 50 volunteers help bring the Brazil Climate Summit to New York. Meeting with them over lunch, they told me the turkey sandwiches and salmon were tastier than last year’s fare — although, as a vegetarian, I didn’t have many options. They experienced the usual hiccups with the summit’s online component: someone had a problem with Zoom, which alternated between one screen, several screens, no screens, and an eternal vortex of them opening atop each other without end.

The Startup Challenge, which honors projects relating to green energy, waste management and recycling, sustainable constructions and other climate-focused fields, wasn’t enough to take the shine off of the summit. The project, carried out for the first time, had three Brazilians in the top three places: DeepESG, a consultancy for the management of carbon emissions; Trashin, which deals with the topic of waste management; and Umgrauemeio, which provides forest fire monitoring solution that is also applicable in the Brazilian Pantanal.

At the end of the day, when talking to Osmar Bambini, co-founder and CIO of Umgrauemeio, the big winner, I had the feeling that technology can indeed change the world — even if I knew the reality was more complicated. The company carried out the Embrace Pantanal project, one of the largest projects in the world in environmental preservation, through the rapid identification of fires. The startup has a platform for this.

Prevention, detection, and response are pillars of the platform. This is the triad for any risk mitigation. There are modules that alert you daily on whether or not it is okay to start a tractor in an area with a high fire danger.