Jamil Chad Amazon Fund: Lula’s team negotiating new countries and resources to join 22.11.2022 04h00

The team of president-elect Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (PT) is negotiating to expand the Amazon Fund to include new donor countries, at least for the first year of his term, which begins in 2023. Climate Change to strengthen international cooperation with Europeans and Americans using the already existing mechanism.

Brazil and Norway created the largest international cooperation fund with more than US$ 1 billion during the initial Lula administration and is managed by the BNDES and institutions in Oslo. Shortly after, the German government decided to join the initiative. But in 2019, the government of Jair Bolsonaro made new demands that led Norway and Germany to end the transfer of funds.

With Lula’s victory, both Oslo and Berlin indicated they would return to raise funds. However, the report found that Marina Silva spoke to the Joe Biden government envoy, John Kerry, about the possibility of joining the US Amazon Fund, albeit a relatively modest amount.

The idea is that Biden’s initiative will act as a kind of seal for the White House’s money for other governments to bet on the Fund as a viable alternative to contribute to the fight against deforestation in Brazil.

Marina Silva made the same suggestion to the UK government and Canadian authorities. In these cases, the suggestion is that these governments actually form part of the mechanism.

Another area of ​​action would be philanthropy. The elected government has received offers and tangible displays of interest from mega-entrepreneurs and private foundations in recent weeks. The elected government for 2023 wants to organize a mission for these businessmen to recognize the reality of Amazon. In particular, the government’s focus is the Bezos Fund, owned by American billionaire Jeff Bezos, which promises US$10 billion to tackle climate change worldwide.

The new government’s proposal is for some of the resources to be allocated to certain institutions whose budgets have been wasted and wasted in the past four years. One of them would be the Chico Mendes Institute.

International money may be needed to offset the decline in resources devoted to combating deforestation in recent years and to offset an even larger cut planned for the 2023 budget, according to the transition team’s assessment.

According to a survey by Greenpeace, a 6.4% reduction is projected for the Ministry of the Environment (down from R$3.17 billion to R$2.96 billion); 12% (down from R$1.9 billion to R$1.7 billion) for Ibama and 2% (down from R$726 million to R$711 million) for ICMBio.

According to the agency, for the second year in a row, no projected resources were anticipated for the Monitoring of Land Cover and Combustion and Forest Fire Risk conducted by INPE. in recent years”.

In his speech at the UN Climate Change Conference, Lula emphasized that Brazil wants and needs help to tackle deforestation. This is a position radically different from the tone used by President Jair Bolsonaro (PL), who insisted on excluding any foreign involvement and liquidated cooperation mechanisms.

However, Lula makes it clear that any foreign initiative cannot pose any threat to sovereignty and that the piloting of the mechanism will be left to Brazil.