Brazil increased its greenhouse gas emissions in 2020

This is stated in the new estimate from the SEEG (Greenhouse Gas Emissions Estimation System) of the Climate Observatory, the main Brazilian civil society network on the climate agenda.

The South American giant’s greenhouse gas emissions grew by 9.5% in 2020, “possibly becoming the only major emitter on the planet to register an increase in the year the COVID-19 pandemic brought the world economy to a halt,” he says. the report, which can be read in full here . The reasons for this increase would be in the high deforestation of last year, especially in the Amazon.

The report especially insists on pointing out that with this increase “the country went against the rest of the world”, which in 2020 (and due to the pandemic) registered a reduction of almost 7% of global emissions. In Brazil, total gross CO2 emissions reached 2.16 billion tons, compared to 1.97 billion tons in 2019. Not only did it grow compared to that year, the 2020 record becomes the highest since 2006.

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“With the increase in emissions and the fall of 4.1% of GDP, Brazil became poorer and polluted more”, conclude the researchers. When explaining the increase, the deforestation of the Amazon is pointed out. “Greenhouse gases released into the atmosphere due to changes in land use increased by 23.6%, which more than offset the significant drop in the energy sector, whose emissions, as a result of the pandemic, returned at 2011 levels.

Of the five sectors of the economy that account for Brazil’s emissions, three rose, one fell, and one remained stable. The energy sector fell 4.6%, registering 394 million tons of CO2. Emissions from agriculture grew 2.5%, the largest increase since 2010, but it is the increase related to the Amazon that most worries researchers.

“Only in the Amazon, emissions from changes in land use last year (2020) reached 782 million tons of CO2,” says the report, which exemplifies: if the Brazilian forest were a country, it would be the ninth emitter largest in the world, ahead of Germany.

“Land use change stands out once again as the main source of emissions in Brazil. 2020 was the year in which we had the highest emissions in the sector in 11 years, a clear reflection of the continuous dismantling of environmental policy, which has favored the resumption of high rates of deforestation,” said Ane Alencar, director of Science at Ipam (Amazon Environmental Research Institute), the body in charge of calculating the sector’s emissions in SEEG.

According to data from the Climate Observatory, deforestation in the Amazon suffered a significant increase in 2020, reaching 10,851 km2. This news comes days before the start of the COP26 climate summit and the publication of a report by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO), a UN agency, which indicates that a part of the Amazon is no longer a sink (which absorbs more carbon than it expels) and has become a source of carbon emissions.

“The regions of the eastern Amazon have a strong increase in the dry season, decrease in rainfall and a large historical deforestation during the last 40 years,” the report denounces.

“It is alarming and linked to deforestation in the region,” WMO Secretary-General Petteri Taalas told a news conference on Monday.

Source: The Spectator