MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

Brazil: Lula announces creation of National Climate Authority

The Climate Authority initiative had been discussed after Lula won the 2022 and environmental crises in Rio Grande do Sul and Amazonas have resurfaced it.

Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva announced Tuesday that he intended to create a National Climate Authority, Agencia Brasil reported. The new agency's mission would be to deal with extreme natural phenomena. Lula made these remarks in Manaus before dozens of environmental experts, as 61 of the 62 municipalities in the State of Amazonas face an emergency due to the drought.

“Our goal is to establish the conditions for expanding and accelerating public policies, starting with the National Plan for Tackling Extreme Climate Risks. Our goal should be to adapt and prepare to face these phenomena. To this end, we will establish a Climate Authority and a Technical-Scientific Committee to support and coordinate the implementation of this plan by the federal government,” Lula explained before dozens of mayors as well as Governor Wilson Lima.

The Climate Authority, which would function as a federal agency, with its own resources and staff, is a project that has been mentioned since Lula's election, back in 2022, and which began to be debated during the government transition. Subsequent environmental disasters in Rio Grande del Sur and now in Amazonas have unearthed the initiative.

“At the moment, we are experiencing a perverse combination of a number of factors which, combined, are creating this situation. The first of these is the problem of climate change, which is changing the rainfall regime, which is changing the period of drought and dryness, as you are observing. Some hours more and others less. Alongside this, we have the problem of deforestation, of fires, which ends up aggravating the situation even more,” Environment and Climate Change Minister Marina Silva pointed out.

Fires have already affected 1.1 million hectares of primary forest, proving that the rainforest is no longer immune to fire. “This is proof that the vegetation is losing moisture, and this is a phenomenon that we still don't know how to deal with,” she added.

Silva also spoke about the creation of a Global Fund for the protection of tropical forests, which should make US$ 300 million available for environmental preservation. According to her, it should be operational from next year, when Brazil will host the United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP30) in Belém.

Also Tuesday, Lula and a group of cabinet members toured the communities of São Sebastião do Curumitá and Campo Novo, in the municipality of Tefé, and Manaquiri, in Manaus, to talk to residents and announce measures to combat drought in the region hitting around 310 million people.

Lula also pledged to speed up negotiations and discussions around the reconstruction of the BR-319 federal highway, which links Manaus, in Amazonas, to Porto Velho, in Rondônia. The paving of the highway has been the subject of controversy for decades, as it crosses an environmentally sensitive region of the Amazon rainforest.

Also at the meeting with mayors, the president signed a decree setting up the Integrated Multi-Agency Federal Operational Coordination Center, linked to the National Integrated Fire Management Committee, which has to monitor actions to control and combat forest fires. The federal government, in coordination with the governments of the states of the Legal Amazon, will set up containment barriers in the regions recording the highest number of fires and forest fires in the biome at this time.

The number of fires in the Legal Amazon this year alone has exceeded 63,000 cases up to the beginning of this month, in the first year of the historical series measured by the National Institute for Space Research (INPE).