STATE OF THE WORLD FORUM

An Amazonian Climate Summit
Rio Branco, Acre
May, 2010

There was a remarkable development at Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Global Climate Summit II in Los Angeles September 30 – October 3, 2009, which drew governors from around the world and focused on sub national initiatives on climate change in the run up to Copenhagen. 

There were six governors present from Brazil, including five from the Amazon: 

• Governor Arnobio Marques de Almeida of the state of Acre, with more than 80% forest cover in the headwaters of several Amazonian rivers;
• Governor Carlos Eduardo de Souze Braga of the state of Amazonas, the largest of the Amazonian states and home of the largest biodiversity on the planet;
• Governor Ana Julia de Vasconcelos Carepa of the state of Para, the second largest of the Amazonian states;
• Governor Antonio Waldez Goes da Silva of the state of Amapa, with rainforest over 90% of its territory, 70% of which is still essentially unexplored;
• Governor Blairo Maggi of the state of Mato Grosso, which is the most afflicted of the Amazonian states with the pressures of agribusiness. 
• Governor Aecio Neves of the state of Minas Gerais, not an Amazonian state, but which has the best environmental record of any Brazilian state.

During their presentations, the Amazonian governors committed to reducing deforestation by 80% by 2020 and appealed to the international community to assist them in attaining this goal. President Lula made a similar commitment at the 2009 UN General Assembly the week before.

This is a remarkable commitment because saving the world’s rainforests is the most effective short term way to reduce global warming.  As the “lungs of the planet,” the Amazon is by far the largest rainforest, containing fully 25% of the earth’s biodiversity, over 20% of all the fresh water, and constituting the largest carbon sink in the world. Essentially eliminating deforestation in that region would both address the most crucial challenge in the fight against climate change and would provide a compelling model for other regions to follow.

This commitment positions Brazil far in the lead in terms of national commitments around reductions of carbon emissions by 2020, a key threshold in the global fight against global warming. Since deforestation amounts to roughly 70% of Brazil’s carbon emissions, a reduction of 80% of Brazil’s deforestation means that Brazil would be reducing carbon emissions by about 60% by 2020, substantially ahead of any other nation in the world.

In discussions with the Amazonian governors, State of the World Forum suggested that they capitalize on this commitment by convening an Amazonian Climate Summit, to carry forward not only the initiatives begun by Governor Schwarzenegger in his two Climate Summits in 2008 and 2009, but also to focus on the rainforests, particularly the Amazon, as a key area of challenge.

Governor Ana Julia Carepa of Para state offered to serve as the host of such a Climate Summit and to invite representatives of all nine nations that together encompass the Amazonian rainforest:  Bolivia, Brazil, Columbia, Ecuador, French Guiana, Guyana, Peru, Surinam, and Venezuela, as well as the governors and other dignitaries who have attended the two Schwarzenegger Summits.

Such a Summit would provide the opportunity for rainforest related NGOs and companies to come together with the assembled governors and other dignitaries in an unprecedented way to exchange information, align around common strategies, and implement initiatives to enable the actual reduction of deforestation by 80% by 2020.

State of the World Forum’s 2020 Climate Leadership Campaign has been working in Brazil to generate support for exactly what the Amazonian governors have committed themselves to – reducing carbon emissions by 80% by 2020. With Lester Brown and a growing consensus of scientists and policy analysts worldwide, we believe that only this level of commitment will avert the worst consequences of climate change because only reducing our carbon emissions 80% by 2020 will suffice to keeping global temperatures from rising over 1C and carbon concentrations from rising over 450 ppm. A rise of 1.2C causes Greenland to go into irreversible ice melt, for example, which would raise ocean levels by at least 5 meters, so the 80% by 2020 goal is not an idealistic nor academic commitment. It is necessary to save human civilization as we know it.

The 2020 Climate Leadership Campaign is supported by Globo, which controls 80% of the Brazilian media market. Globo is the first major media company in the world to take global warming seriously enough to broadcast national ads educating the public about global warming and calling for decisive action on a crisis that is escalating with each passing day. They would bring an extraordinary amount of publicity to an Amazon Summit.

At the heart of the 2020 Climate Leadership Campaign is the deployment of Rapid Response Teams. These Teams work with local leaders to develop carbon footprint assessments, design strategies to reduce carbon emissions while promoting savings, jobs and opportunities; participate in implementation plans to ensure that the goals are achieved; and synergize their efforts with counterparts nationally and internationally.  These Teams would be focused on assisting the local leadership in the Amazonian states in their efforts to reduce deforestation by 80% by 2020.

IF YOU WANT TO PARTICIPATE IN A RAPID RESPONSE TEAM, PLEASE CLICK HERE:

We believe that there is a unique and extraordinary opportunity here to support Schwarzenegger’s powerful Global Climate Summits by focusing on Brazil, which is demonstrating the level of climate leadership the whole world needs to emulate; emphasizing the Amazon as the front line of this kind of commitment; mobilizing resources to support Rapid Response Teams to enable these commitments to take shape; and doing so in a way that is replicable and scalable worldwide.

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