The Brazilian Proposal and its Scientific and Methodological Aspects

By Luiz Pinguelli Rosa, Maria Silvia Muylaert and Christiano Pires de Campos, International Virtual Institute on Global Change - IVIG/COPPE/UFRJ

During the negotiations of the Kyoto Protocol in 1997, the delegation of Brazil made a proposal for distributing the burden of emission reductions among Parties included in Annex I to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). The proposal suggested that reductions towards an overall emission ceiling for all Annex I Parties were to be shared among individual Annex I Parties proportional to their relative share of responsibility for climate change. The proposal suggested the use of an agreed simple climate model for estimating the temperature increase resulting from emissions of different countries. The scientific and methodological aspects of the proposal were questioned, and the Kyoto Protocol was designed using 1990 emissions to share the responsibility among the Annex I Parties to the Convention.

However, the Brazilian Proposal is the unique option for international burden sharing being carried out by the UNFCCC officially. At the moment, the international community is starting to discuss the next commitment period of the Kyoto Protocol and the proposal by Brazil can help the discussions on share of responsibilities.

The Brazilian Proposal (BP) presents a different option to share responsibilities among countries related to the climate change issue due to anthropogenic activities, shifting the focus of the debate from the emissions to the temperature increase. The main aspects of the Brazilian Proposal (2000) are:

I) to consider the existent process between the emission of a greenhouse gas and the effects on climate change, such as the temperature increase in the earth's atmosphere. For that, it is necessary to account for the emissions, taking into consideration that greenhouse gases have different lifetimes. Another important point foreseen by the BP is that different moments of emissions present different climate responses. The responsibility related to a temperature elevation in the present needs to be associated to the respective emissions in the past, for each gas evaluated.

II) to force the countries that do not accomplish their commitments to pay a tax for a Clean Development Fund. It was foreseen that the use of the fund for projects in developing countries would promote greenhouse gases emissions reductions programs.

In this paper we highlight the newest methodological and scientific aspects of the proposal by Brazil.

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