Brazil seeking UN help in World Cup preparations

Yahoo Sports/Associated Press, 03/21/2013

World Cup organizers in Brazil say they have signed a $17 million deal with the United Nations to help host the tournament.

Claudio Monteiro, the head of World Cup preparations in Brasilia, says the capital’s organizing committee signed the deal with the U.N. Development Program this week.

The U.N. will provide temporary structures outside the stadium to house support services and provide some security services.

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Carbon credits row could derail UN climate talks, says Brazil

Fiona Harvey – The Guardian, 12/02/2012

The climate change talks are taking place in Doha, Qatar. Photograph: Osama Faisal/AP

Brazil has said a row over carbon credits could derail the United Nations climate change negotiations taking place in Qatar this week.

The row concerns whether countries entering the second round of the Kyoto protocol should be allowed to carry over emissions credits from the first phase. Some countries, including Poland, Ukraine and Russia, have large surpluses of credits, generated because their carbon output collapsed alongside their industrial base after the fall of communism.

These credits are derided as “hot air” by critics because they represent greenhouse gases already reduced many years ago, rather than new efforts. André Corrêa do Lago, head of the Brazilian delegation, told the Guardian: “The second phase has to have environmental integrity, and you will not have that if countries are allowed to carry over [the credits]. The second period will be completely compromised. This is not a way to have effective reductions.”

Brazil occupies an important position at the talks: it is one of the rapidly developing Basic countries (Brazil, South Africa, India and China), but has acted as a moderating force between this group and the developed nations, which often have major differences.

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O’Neill Says Brazil Criticism of QE3 No Fix for Economic Woes

Eric Martin and Matthew Malinowski – Bloomberg, 10/21/2012

Jim O’Neill, the economist who bound Brazil to Russia, India and China to form the BRIC investing strategy, has some advice for Latin America’s biggest economy: Stop criticizing Federal Reserve efforts to revive the U.S. and do more to fix your own problems.

Blaming the Fed is “frequently an excuse to distract attention from the contradictions of monetary and fiscal policy in Brazil,” O’Neill, chairman of Goldman Sachs Asset Management, said in a telephone interview from London. The U.S. is the world’s biggest economy, and “if the Fed does something which is going to reduce the scale of the recession or boost the economy, that is really important for every other country, end of story.”

The Fed’s latest stimulus package dominated this month’s International Monetary Fund meetings in Tokyo, with policy makers from the Philippines to China warning that yield-seeking investors will flood emerging markets with capital. Chairman Ben S. Bernanke used the talks to rebut those arguments after Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff at the United Nations last month slammed rich nations for “fraudulent” protectionism.

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Brazil, South Africa, India and China discuss climate change

Associated Press – Washington Post, 9/20/2012

Representatives of Brazil, South Africa, India and China are meeting to define a common position ahead of November’s United Nations’ climate change conference in Doha.

The four countries form the bloc known as BASIC that acts jointly in international climate change meetings.

Brazilian negotiator Luiz Alberto Figueiredo says one of the main topics being discussed in the meeting that ends on Friday is the future of the 1997 emission- limiting Kyoto Protocol that requires industrialized countries to slash emissions.

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Rio+20: Prince Charles sends warning to Earth summit

The Guardian, 6/18/2012

In a prerecorded speech to the Rio+20 UN sustainable development conference today, the Prince of Wales warned of the potentially “catastrophic” consequences of inaction on issues such as climate change and global food security.

In the video address, Charles said: “I have watched in despair at how slow progress has sometimes been and how the outright, sceptical reluctance by some to engage with the critical issues of our day have often slowed that progress to a standstill.

“As I speak, the world’s rainforests continue to be destroyed, wiping out so much of the world’s vital biodiversity and removing our chances of storing carbon naturally.

“And we continue to ignore the painful lessons of the so-called green revolution in India by intensifying our food production methods in such blinkered, chemically and technologically-based ways, that the land and the oceans are now both beginning to fail.”

He added: “Already levels of CO2 have exceeded 400 parts per million. 450 parts per million is the tipping point we have to avoid so every day of delay threatens to make the change more dramatic.”

He added that scientific evidence shows the potential consequences and warned we can no longer ignore the risk.

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Rio+20: Sustainable development needs women’s empowerment, UN official says

United Nations – 6/18/2012

Sustainable development will not be achieved without empowering women, the head of the United Nations agency tasked with advancing gender equality said today, adding that the importance of their participation must be reflected in all aspects of the outcome document of the UN Conference on Sustainable Development (Rio+20).“We cannot afford to leave women marginalized,” the Executive Director of the UN Entity for Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women (UN Women), Michelle Bachelet, told reporters today in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. “This is not sustainable. This social exclusion of women is not only hurting women, it is hurting all of us.”

On Friday, the responsibility for the negotiations on the outcome document was handed over to the Brazilian Government, which holds the Presidency of Rio+20. The South American nation has since presented a shorter consolidated text for countries to work on, and indicated that the consultation process on the document is expected to conclude on 18 June. It will then be put forward for adoption by Member States, when they meet from 20 to 22 June.

In her comments, Ms. Bachelet said that the outcome document must highlight women’s roles throughout the entire text, as their participation permeates all aspects of sustainable development, including agriculture, education, environmental management and decision-making, among others.

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Politicians can’t save the environment

Peter Bjerregaard – Huffington Post, 6/19/2012

The Rio+20 summit will accentuate the management crisis that characterizes international environmental corporation. Politicians probably won’t agree on anything substantial. Instead, new networks — spearheaded by companies, NGOs and cities — will set the agenda for the future.

“This is no way to run a planet,” wrote Todd Stern, American chief negotiator on climate change in a letter to former President Georg W. Bush in 2007, and stressed that just like you can’t run a company through large plenary sessions with shareholders, you can’t solve global challenges by inviting roughly 200 countries to conferences with extensive agendas. But that’s exactly what’s happening in Rio at the moment.

The Rio+20 conference marks the 20th anniversary of the first Earth Summit on Sustainable Development held in Rio in 1992. The summit attracted momentous media attention and resulted in a number of international conventions on sustainability, biodiversity and climate. But what has happened with these objectives? According to the newly published U.N. report, Global Environment Outlook, there has been progress in only a handful of nearly 90 indicators. Access to clean water has improved, investments in renewable energy have increased and the ozone layer getting better — but then the stream of good news stops. On almost all other areas the picture look bleak. CO2 has risen by 40 percent, biodiversity in the tropics has decreased by 30 percent, etc.

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Brazil pitches for UN summit deal

AAP/World News Australia, 06/18/2012

Brazil is pushing a deal for a looming global summit on poverty and the environment, but its draft has run into objections from Europe and criticism from activists.

The blueprint for Earth’s future is to be issued in Rio de Janeiro on Friday after a three-day summit to climax the UN’s Conference on Sustainable Development.

Hosting the nine-day mega-event, Brazil on Saturday assumed control of troubled negotiations to agree on the communique.

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Brazil president opens Rio+20 summit with call to act

AFP, 06/13/2012

RIO DE JANEIRO — The UN Conference on Sustainable Development opened Wednesday, launching a new round of debate on the future of the planet, its resources and people, 20 years after the first Earth Summit.

Opening the so-called Rio+20 Summit, Dilma Rousseff, president of host nation Brazil, called on “all countries of the world to commit” to reaching an accord that addresses serious environmental and social woes.

The UN conference, which marks the 20th anniversary of the Earth Summit that declared the environment a priority, is the largest ever organized, with 50,000 delegates, the United Nations said.

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Brazil President Rousseff ‘proud’ of forest protection

BBC News, 6/12/11

Brazil enjoys the “privilege” of having the world’s biggest rainforest and can be proud of its conservation efforts, President Dilma Rousseff has said.

Ms Rousseff was speaking just days before the UN sustainable development conference begins in Rio de Janeiro.

Speaking on her regular Monday radio broadcast, Ms Rousseff highlighted data showing deforestation at a record low.

She recently vetoed parts of a forest law but critics say the bill still relaxes environmental rules too much.

Ms Rousseff said she was proud that Brazil had managed to curb deforestation of the Amazon region.

She said it was “the result of the government’s strong action” in policing environmental crimes and promoting less aggressive development policies.

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