巴西气候组织178项提案直送国会，中资基建与农业项目环评风险上升

Suely Araujo Gabriel Reis/Valor The Climate Observatory, Brazil’s leading civil-society network working on climate issues, has released a document containing 178 environmental proposals for presidential and congressional candidates. One objective is to reverse socioeconomic and environmental setbacks in Congress. Another is to bring the climate crisis into the election debate. Opinion: Brazil grows when it plans and cares Brazil’s burned area halves as Amazon fires plunge Six in 10 Brazilian children exposed to climate threats, UNICEF says Urban planner and lawyer Suely Araújo, the former head of Brazil’s environmental protection agency, Ibama, and one of the document’s authors, acknowledged the difficulty. “Bringing climate issues into the election debate is difficult.” She believes, however, that an external factor could push the subject onto the campaign trail. “Unfortunately, because El Niño appears likely to be strong, the phenomenon will help bring attention to the issue.” “Proposals for Brazilian Environmental Policy” is 96 pages long and incorporates suggestions from the network’s 172 organizations, including WWF, Greenpeace, Arapyaú, Alana, Idec, Imaflora, Instituto Socioambiental, and Oceana. Seven meetings have been held since March, each attended by 80 people. In June, the Climate Observatory’s Elections 2026 task force sent the document to 326 recipients considered strategically important in Congress, including 193 members of the Lower House and 54 senators whose seats are being contested. The national presidents of every political party also received the document. “The purpose was to insert the climate and environmental agenda into discussions of the 2026 election platforms and make the Climate Observatory available to explore the proposals in greater depth with the campaigns,” said Araújo, the organization’s public policy coordinator. This is not the first time environmentalists have compiled proposals intended to shape presidential candidates’ policy agendas. They also did so in 2022. There are two differences this time: some subjects have been broadened, and each chapter includes a table listing what should be blocked in Congress and what could be advanced. “Congress has adopted a strongly anti-environmental position. We tried to show lawmakers what is not working while supporting what we consider good bills,” Araújo said. The document presents a menu of proposals grouped into 14 themes. The first two—climate justice, environmental racism, and human rights; and the territorial protection of traditional communities—receive greater prominence than in the previous version. These are cross-cutting subjects that appear in other chapters, as does climate finance. “There are many bills in Congress on these subjects that attack conservation areas, Indigenous lands, and Quilombola territories, and the document highlights them,” she said. “Our domestic politics are marked by extreme polarization, in which battles over competing narratives gain ground while, with honorable exceptions, society’s demands for public policies receive less attention,” the introduction states. “Polarization relegates issues of collective interest to the background,” it continues. “This context, combined with the worsening climate crisis in Brazil and the increasing frequency of large-scale extreme events, demands even greater attention from Brazilian civil society.” The task force selected lawmakers who interact with the Climate Observatory network. “The team went to Congress and delivered the publication to each lawmaker or chief of staff,” Araújo said. More than 400 emails were also sent to lawmakers and congressional leaders. The effort will also seek to reach the public. “We want to convey a simple message: vote for lawmakers who care about climate change. It is important to direct attention to congressional races because that is where the greatest setbacks are occurring,” she said. “The Executive Branch has lacked the strength to block anything.” Another theme addresses the strengthening of climate and environmental governance through stable, continuous human and financial resources. “The attack on remote embargoes [of properties that engaged in illegal deforestation] destroys enforcement,” Araújo said by way of example. Climate change adaptation and disaster risk management are among the agenda’s strongest themes. Citing data from the Oswaldo Cruz Foundation (Fiocruz), the document notes that more than 336,000 people in Brazil were directly affected by extreme climate events in 2025. In 2024, flooding in Rio Grande do Sul killed more than 180 people, affected 2.4 million, and caused nearly R$90 billion in damage across the productive and social sectors, infrastructure, and the environment. Globally, 45% of deaths between 1970 and 2019 were related to climate disasters. Among the suggestions for candidates seeking executive office is the development of robust scenarios to assess climate risks to infrastructure—including power generation and transmission, urban mobility, sanitation, ports, airports, hospitals, and schools—as well as to agriculture, cities, towns, communities, and terrestrial, aquatic, coastal, and marine ecosystems. This knowledge should combine scientific evidence with traditional and local experience. Another proposal calls for ensuring the traceability of resources used for adaptation in public policies and increasing oversight, transparency, and accountability among banks that finance activities affecting social, environmental, and climate conditions. “Brazil does not adequately identify the resources allocated to climate policy and has considerable room for improvement in this area,” the document states. Another recommendation is to recalculate and adapt stormwater drainage systems in public and private projects. The need for measures to protect communities in high-risk areas is clear. The document says areas with lower levels of risk intensity, magnitude, frequency, and susceptibility should be identified—in other words, safer places for people to live. Brazil should prioritize multi-hazard early-warning systems and strengthen state and municipal civil protection and defense agencies, as well as community units. During disasters, essential services such as access to water, electricity, internet, and telephone service must be maintained. In its section on adaptation, the document identifies bills that would weaken environmental enforcement, directly affecting disaster prevention and response. On the positive side, it highlights proposals to phase out fossil fuels and establish national programs for sustainable infrastructure and resilient schools. “The current government has problems, particularly in energy, because of its decision to expand oil and other fossil-fuel production. But it has also made important gains, including reducing deforestation. Congress, however, has a host of bills moving in the opposite direction that would make deforestation control unworkable,” Araújo said. “That is the logic of the document—to offer proposals to candidates for executive office and alert congressional candidates to what is moving through the legislature.” In the section on a just energy transition—“the central element in confronting the climate crisis,” according to the document—the proposals range from establishing a timetable to end oil auctions in Brazil to redirecting Petrobras’s strategy toward the energy transition. Other recommendations include avoiding contracts for new fossil-fuel power plants, eliminating coal-fired electricity generation this decade, and supporting fossil-fuel industry workers through the energy transition. A special chapter is devoted to the sociobiodiversity economy, while another addresses reindustrialization and new low-carbon technologies. “The country’s reindustrialization has explicit support. That needs to be reconciled with the general environmental licensing law, which is loosening many procedures and threatening environmental oversight,” Araújo said. Translation: Todd Harkin