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DEFINITION
Sustainable development is that which enables today's generation to meet its requirements without detriment to the capacity of future generations.
RIO 92
United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change.
During the 1980s, scientific evidence on the possibility of worldwide climate change aroused increasing interest by the public.
In the 1990s, a series of international conferences appealed to the urgency of a worldwide treaty to help solve such a problem. The United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) and the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) responded to these calls by creating an intergovernmental working group in charge of drawing up the negotiations of that treaty.
Since then, huge progress has been made partly due to the work undertaken by the specialists on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and meetings, such as the Second World Conference on Climate (1990).
In response to the proposal formulated by the working group, the United Nations General Meeting, at its 1990 period of sessions, established the Intergovernmental Negotiation Committee for the Framework Convention on Climate Change (INC/FCCC), to which it requested the draft of a Framework Convention and any related legal instrument that may be considered necessary.
The representatives from more than 150 countries met at five meetings between February 1991 and May 1992 and, finally, on May 9, 1992, the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change was adopted at the UN headquarters in New York.
Shortly afterwards, 155 countries signed the convention at the UN Conference on Environment and Development, known as the Earth Summit, which was held in Rio de Janeiro in June 1992. Since then, the Convention has been signed by other nations and ratified by an increasing number of countries.
The Convention was enforced on March 21, 1994, 90 days after the fiftieth ratification. The first meeting of the member countries conference was held in Berlin, from March 28 to April 7, 1995. The INC/FCCC was then dissolved and the members conference began the long process of implementing the convention.
Agenda 21
Global Agenda 21
The international community during Rio-92 agreed to approve a document containing commitments for change in the development pattern during the forthcoming century, calling it Agenda 21. The meaning of the word "Agenda" was thereby retrieved in its intentions, desire for changes in a model of civilization where environmental balance and social justice prevail among the nations.
Agenda 21 is much more than just a document. It is a shared planning process that analyzes the current status of a country, state, county and/or region, and plans the future on a sustainable basis. This planning process must involve all social players in the debate on major problems and formation of partnerships and commitments for their short, middle and long term solution.
The proposals for the future must be analyzed and distributed within an integrated systematic approach of the economic, social, environmental and politico-institutional spheres. In other words, the effort to plan the future, based on the Agenda 21 principles, produces concrete, feasible and measurable products derived from commitments agreed among all the players, to ensure the sustainability of the results.
Brazilian Agenda 21
The objective of the Brazilian Agenda 21 is to define a sustainable development strategy for the country, based on a process of cooperation and partnership between the government and society.
In this sense, the Brazilian Agenda 21 is being drafted by the Committee for Sustainable Development Policies and Agenda 21 (CSDP), based on guidelines and specific premises that favor a multi-sectored approach to the Brazilian reality and long term planning for the development of Brazil.
The working methodology of the Brazilian Agenda 21 has selected the thematic areas to reflect the country's socioenvironmental problem and has defined the need to propose new instruments of coordination and follow-up of public policies for sustainable development.
The six central themes of the Brazilian Agenda 21 chosen to include the complexity of the country, states, counties and regions within the concept of expanded sustainability, permitting planning of the ideal systems and models, are as follows:
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Sustainable Agriculture for the countryside;
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Sustainable Cities and Towns for urban environment;
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Key issues of Infrastructure and Regional Integration for the strategic sectors of transportation, energy and communications;
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Natural Resources Management for the protection and sustainable use of natural resources;
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Reducing Social Inequalities to diminish social disparities;
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Sustainable Development for science and technology.
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Six thematic documents have been produced on a shared basis, used as subsidies in drafting the document "Brazilian Agenda 21 - Grounds for Discussion" which will be widely announced so that it may be discussed at a regional level and that, by the end of 2000, the Agenda will have been completed in order to be sent to the Civil Office of the Cabinet of the President of the Republic (Ministry for the Environment - MMA).
Kyoto Protocol
When they adopted the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change in 1992, the governments acknowledged it as a possible driving force of more energetic actions in the future.
The Convention, on establishing a permanent process of revision, discussion and exchange of information, helps towards the adoption of further commitments in response to changes in scientific knowledge and political provisions.
The first revision of the adaptation of the developed countries' commitments was addressed, as expected, at the first session of the Conference of Parties (CP.1), held in Berlin in 1995. The Parties decided that the commitment of the developed countries to have their emissions go back to 1990 levels by the year 2000 was not sufficient to achieve the long term objective of the Convention, which consists of preventing a hazardous anthropogenic (human-induced) interference in the climate system.
The response of ministers of state and other authorities was to adopt the Berlin Mandate and to begin a new phase of discussions on strengthening the commitments of the developed countries.
The Ad Hoc Group of the Berlin Mandate (AGBM) was then formed to draft the outline of an agreement that, after eight sessions, was sent to the CP.3 for final negotiation.
Around 10,000 delegates, observers and journalists attended this summit meeting in Kyoto, Japan, in December 1997. The conference culminated in the decision by consensus (1/CP.3) to adopt a Protocol in which industrialized countries would reduce their combined greenhouse effect emissions by at least 5% in relation to the 1990 levels until the period between 2008 and 2012. This legally binding commitment promises to produce a reversal of the historic trend towards further emissions which had begun in those countries around 150 years ago.
The Kyoto Protocol was opened for signing on March 16, 1998. It only entered in force 90 days after at least 55 parties of the Convention deposited their ratification, including the developed countries that accounted for 55% of the total carbon dioxide emissions for 1990 of this group of industrialized countries. Meanwhile, the Parties of the Convention on Climate Change will continue to implement the commitments assumed under the Convention and be ready for future implementation of the Protocol (MCT).
Clean Development Mechanisms (CDM)
The Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) originated in the Brazilian proposal submitted in May 1997 to the Convention Secretariat in Bonn with the objective of establishing elements for defining the Protocol to the Convention. The Brazilian proposal consisted of creating a Clean Development Fund to be formed by contributions from the developed countries that did not meet their reduction goals. This fund would be used to develop projects in developing countries.
In Kyoto the idea of the fund was changed and the Clean Development Mechanism. started. The idea is based on a project that issues certified emission reductions. These projects shall involve reductions in emissions that are additional to any that would occur in the absence of the certified project activity, guaranteeing real long term and measurable benefits to mitigate the climate change.
Petrobras/CEBDS Agreement
Petrobras has set up an agreement with the Brazilian Business Committee for Sustainable Development, the objective of which is the "Formulation of a National Business Model for Climate Change".
The agreement shall, in its first stage, set up a database for decision making, consisting mainly of:
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A technical description of the problem, causes and consequences;
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A historical base of international and Brazilian negotiations;
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Institutional framework, organizations and liabilities;
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A proposed modus operandi to implement Clean Development Mechanisms (CDM).
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The second stage plans to develop a pilot project in Petrobras.
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