The Brazilian government plans to invest 200 million reais, some $113 million, next year to combat climate change and mitigate the effects of global warming, the Environment Ministry has announced.
The ministry’s secretary for climate change and environmental quality, Branca Americano, said the recently created National Fund on Climate Change would be partly financed by a new tax on oil production.
The fund was created at the end of 2009 to mitigate the environmental impact of oil production and to allocate a portion of the state’s revenue from oil to efforts to combat climate change.
Up to 1 billion reais, $567 million, of the fund’s resources could be invested annually to rehabilitate the country’s most vulnerable zones, such as semi-arid and coastal areas of Brazil. There is concern that climate change could particularly affect the impoverished northeast region of the country and its large number of small rural farmer and producers are facing increased flooding and droughts.
The fund also will promote sustainable activities such as the REDD (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation) system, which encourages business leaders to compensate for their carbon emissions by reforesting degraded areas.
In collaboration with Empresa Brasileira de Pesquisa Agropecuaria, a state-owned company that is dedicated to agricultural research, the fund will develop programmes to promote environmentally friendly agricultural practices that reduce emissions and conserve land.
Several developing nations, including Indonesia and Bangladesh, have established domestic climate funds, but Brazil’s is the first to be financed with oil money. ‘It’s something novel because it sends a price signal by taxing the emitting fuel,’ said Clifford Polycarp, a policy expert at the World Resources Institute in Washington, DC.
The money will be available to researchers studying the impact of climate change, as Brazil tries to map where effects will be greatest. The fund will also pay to educate farmers about potential changes in rainfall and weather, in addition to efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
