BRASILIA, Brazil — Forest fires have sent carbon dioxide emissions soaring in Brazil over the past two years, undermining efforts by the government of President Jair Bolsonaro to restore the country’s environmental credentials.
Emissions jumped 10% in 2019, Bolsonaro’s first year in office, following a decade of small declines or stagnation, according to a report published Friday by Observatorio do Clima, a network of Brazilian environmental organizations. Preliminary data show the new trend accelerating as much as 20% in 2020, even as the pandemic curbs the amount of CO2 being produced by transportation and industrial activity across the globe, the group has warned.
“That’s a considerable increase that has Brazil running against the global trend,” Tasso Azevedo, former chief of the Brazilian Forest Service and now responsible for a system that estimates greenhouse gases emissions for Observatorio do Clima, said in an interview. “That’s basically associated with deforestation; Brazil is getting further away from its Paris Agreement goal.”
The environment ministry didn’t immediately reply to a request for comment.
Brazil has faced global outrage in the past two years as a growing number of fires destroyed swaths of the Amazon rainforest and the Pantanal wetlands. In June, a group of prominent institutional investors managing about $3.7 trillion in assets sent a letter to the Brazilian government threatening to withdraw from the country unless environmental metrics improved.