Kyoto: Brazil jumps the gun

First country in the world to set up Interministerial Commission on Global Climate Change

Brazilia has jumped the gun ahead of the rest of the international community by setting up its Interministerial Commission on Global Climate Change,  announced this week by the Minister of Science and Technology, Eduardo Campos.

The Commission will measure the level of Greenhouse Effect Gas emissions in Brazil and will implement the emission levels stipulated under the Protocol of Kyoto. Two projects have been approved already by the Commission.

The Vega Project will measure GEG emission levels in the city of Salvador in the State of Baia and the Novagerar Project will do the same in Nova Iguacu, Rio de Janeiro.
Both of these projects are being installed near sanitary landfills and aim to reduce the emission of CO2 by 30 million tonnes in ten years, representing a carbon credit for Brazil in the region of 150 million USD. There are a further eleven proposals being studied by the Commission.

The Brazilian government intends to attract the attention of the international community and thereby attracting investment for its ecological programmes, by observing rigid controls on pollution emission levels. Projects presented to the Commission are assessed, depending on their
contribution towards a distribution of wealth, improvement of the environmental conditions technological development and regional integration.

The ruling Partido dos Trabalhadores, of President Luiz Inбcio Lula da Silva (Lula), considers global warming to be an issue of fundamental importance nowadays, given that international panels of experts have proved that over the last hundred years, the average temperature of our planet has risen by one degree Celsius. This has been caused by GEG emissions, such as CO2,
methane and Nitrous Oxide, which is wholly avoidable with the adequate levels of control.

The Earth Summit in Rio de Laneiro in 1992 was a first attempt to address the question of the Earth's environmental ills. Hundreds of thousands of people in many countries around the world worked hard to make this Summit possible, convincing their leaders to attend the event which called for the need to stop the destruction of our natural resources and to control our effects on the environment.

The Summit made the claim that to address environmental problems, we must also address the question of endemic poverty, for how are people to survive if they cannot make enough money to eat, unless they destroy the forests which support them? The developed nations have the obligation to help the developing nations put alternative projects into practice, for they too will face the consequences once the environment has been damaged beyond repair.

Almost 200 countries have ratified the UN-sponsored document, drawn up in 1994, which gave rise to the Declaration of the Protocol of Kyoto in Japan in 1997, fixing targets for reduction in GEG emission levels for 42 nations between 2008 and 2012, relative to 1990 emission levels.

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