Brazil is abandoning deforestation-control policies and lending political support to agricultural practices that will make it “impossible” to meet global climate targets.
This is the main conclusion of a study published in Nature Climate Change this month (July 9), which looked at the costs of political backtracking in environment governance.
A team of Brazilian researchers write that the changes led by president Michel Temer in a struggle to retain power and avoid responding to corruption accusations, compromise the country’s greenhouse gas emission targets set out in the 2015 Paris Agreement.
Brazil's commitment to the agreement includes restoring 12 million hectares of forests and achieving zero illegal deforestation in the Amazon by 2030, as well as strengthening compliance with the Forest Code, a legislation that establishes rules on where and how native vegetation may be explored.
Read more at SciDev.Net
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