At last week’s meeting of the governing council of the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) in Nairobi, Kenya, Brazilian environment minister Carlos Minc presented a proposal for cooperation between developed and developing countries in formulating more ambitious targets for cutting greenhouse gas emissions.

The Brazilian proposal is aimed at achieving high-level international agreement at the Copenhagen Climate Conference in December this year, when the new parameters for the second phase of the Kyoto Protocol, from 2012 onwards, are due to be established.

Based on the principle of developed and developing countries’ common but differentiated responsibilities with regard to combating climate change, as established in the Kyoto Protocol, the proposal would entail the provision of financial resources and the transfer of clean technologies to developing countries.

One part of the proposal is that developed countries should set more ambitious emissions-reduction targets – Minc points out, for example, that European Union countries’ current targets fall significantly short of those established by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

Another part is that developed countries should commit resources to a fund aimed at enacting immediate measures in order to mitigate climate change and help the regions of the world most seriously affected to adapt to new climatic conditions.

These initiatives from the richest countries would then have to be accompanied by developing countries curbing the increases in their own emissions. For overall progress in combating climate change the developed and developing worlds would depend on each other fulfilling their respective commitments.

Brazil presented its own national plan for reducing greenhouse gas emissions at the UN climate meeting in Poznan, Poland, in December last year, where it received praise from Al Gore and UN secretary-general Ban Ki-Moon. One of its most ambitious aims is to reduce current levels of deforestation in the Amazon by 70% by 2017, which would have a major impact on Brazil’s carbon footprint given that deforestation accounts for around three-quarters of the country’s emissions.

Source: Ministry for the Environment and Embassy of Brazil in London