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While the work of waste pickers advances urban sustainability, there has been little focus on how climate change impacts affect them. This paper reports on a pilot study with 61 waste pickers in Minas Gerais, Brazil to understand their perspectives on climate change impacts and actions. It explores how waste pickers experience climate change impacts at home and at work, their adaptive strategies and the specific actions and actors needed to address these impacts. Waste pickers have practical knowledge and experience of climate events. But due to precarious employment and lack of access to services, infrastructure and social support, their responses are improvised and inefficient. They require better institutional support and their proposals must be incorporated into a negotiated approach to urban resilience. Proposals such as the climate bonus – similar to the existing recycling bonus – may help address the structural drivers of vulnerability for waste pickers in Minas Gerais. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper interrogates the extent to which imaginaries of climate and ecological breakdown attend to the memories, knowledges, and experiences of communities already impacted by histories of racism, colonialism, and poverty. Drawing on insights from Black studies and decolonial thinking, the article reflects on how the causes and effects of anthropogenic climate change can be mapped onto geographies of racialised violence and social dispossession. Specific emphasis is given to Rio de Janeiro, notably its port area, a geographical space where future-oriented narratives remain oblivious to the city's history of anti-Black violence and Indigenous genocide. In parallel, the paper looks at the recently built Museum of Tomorrow and its public representations of the Anthropocene. Overall, the article contends that pluralising accounts of the Anthropocene might offer alternative epistemic entry points for understanding and interrupting the mounting ecological catastrophe. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Urban flooding refers to the excessive accumulation of water in urban areas due to heavy rainfall or inadequate drainage systems. It occurs when the natural water absorption capacity of the soil is reduced due to urbanization, resulting in increased surface runoff. Urban flooding can include inadequate storm-water drainage systems, improper land use planning, deforestation, and climate change. Impacts of urban flooding can be severe, including property damage, disruption of transportation networks, health hazards from contaminated water, and economic losses. This paper will investigate the issue in more affected areas in Brazil and presents some strategies to dealing with the urban habitation pressure and flooding risks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Devastating forest fires in Brazil's Amazon rainforest, one of the most important biomes for Earth's climate balance, have captured the world's attention in 2019 and 2020. Foreign governments, non-governmental organizations and institutional investors pressured Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro to act and control the situation. Within this context, institutional investors threatened to divest from companies potentially linked to the wildfires and to sell government bonds, creating a divestment movement. Against this background, this article shows that Bolsonaro's responses varied for each of the groups criticizing the handling of the environmental situation. It is argued that the Brazilian government adopted a more conciliatory tone and took more concrete actions when responding to institutional investors' demands, compared to the responses for foreign governments and non-governmental organizations (NGOs). Based on fifteen in-depth interviews conducted in 2021 with professionals involved in this divestment case, the paper concludes that institutional investors played a key role in Bolsonaro's winning coalition and electoral aspirations. Moreover, the shortage of financial capital due to the COVID-19 pandemic created further incentives for Bolsonaro to avoid conflicts with institutional investors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

By 2050, people in urbanized areas will account for 68% of the world's population, 80% of which will be concentrated in Asia and Africa. The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) introduced in 2011 the National Adaptation Plan (NAP) under the Cancun Adaptation Framework (CAF). Countries of the non-Annex I, described by the UNGeneral Assembly as especially vulnerable to the impacts of climate change, are invited to develop NAPs to identify adaptation challenges and devise appropriate climate adaptation responses. Recognizing the increasing vulnerability of urban systems to the effects of climate change, in 2019, UN-Habitat defined the supplement of the NAP process's technical guidelines for addressing urban and human settlement issues in NAPs. This paper aims to propose a methodology to assess the urban content of the NAPs after ten years from that the CAF comes into force. The evaluation is based, adapting and expanding, on the methodology used to assess the urban content of Nationally Determined Contributions (NDC) published by UN-Habitat in 2017. The methodology aims to analyse both key adaptation challenges and responses explicitly or implicitly related to urban systems. Moreover, it aims at understanding the interlinkage of urban content in NAP in relation to other key policies, such as NDCs and National Urban Policies (NUPs). In this perspective, 172 indicators were selected and clustered into nine groups: (i) Geographic Indicators; (ii) General Indicators; (iii) NAPs General Indicators; (iv) NAPs Urban Indicators; (v) NDCs Indicators; (vi) NUPs Indicators; (vii) Urban content in National Policies Indicators; (viii) International policy linkages (including SDGs, Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction, Paris Agreement and New Urban agenda); (ix) National plans/policy/strategies/repor ts linkages. The methodology was tested on Brazil's NAP, trying to find general considerations to apply to the countries that officially submitted their NAPs between 2014 to 2020. The test showed that: there is a stronger focus on defining climate adaptation challenges more than responses; climate adaptation challenges and responses are predominantly identified at the national scale, with a focus on policies and strategies at the national level; among the Brazilian NAP, there is "cities strategy", and it means that the NAP has a high urban content. In conclusion, the paper will highlight critical issues and improvements for each of the nine indices analysed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper assesses the role of the BASIC countries — Brazil, South Africa, India, and China — in UN climate change negotiations. The paper explores the formation and evolution of the group, and focuses on how the four major developing countries of China, India, Brazil, and South Africa have coordinated their positions and acted jointly to achieve an agreed outcome with other players in the recent UN Climate Change Conferences in Copenhagen and Cancun, based on an analysis of their country profiles and negotiation positions on a wide range of climate issues. The paper argues that the emergence of the BASIC Group is a reflection of the ongoing power shift from EU–US agreement to BASIC–US compromise in UN climate negotiations since the early 1990s. The rise of BASIC also has its roots in recent global market dynamics and further reflects the power transformation in the economic dimension of the international system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyses the impact of COVID-19 on the rights of indigenous peoples, particularly in Brazil. It deals with the current situation of the Brazilian indigenous peoples, the impacts of the pandemic, the rights created on the adoption of protective sanitary measures for indigenous people and land rights in Brazil. Does the Brazilian government comply with international law, with constitutional rights of indigenous peoples in the current COVID-19 crisis, particularly with the Brazilian Supreme Court decision on the adoption of protective sanitary measures for indigenous people? With a focus on the 2020 Report of the Special Rapporteur on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, this paper will identify and examine the gaps in protection of the indigenous peoples rights by reason of the impact of the COVID-19 crisis. This paper argues that the crisis is misused as an occasion for land invasions, deforestation, forest fires and the denial of basic indigenous rights. Especially in Brazil, a transformative change, an emergency support for indigenous peoples, and a still stand agreement on logging and extractive industries operating next to indigenous communities are needed. Brazilian NGO statements give guidelines as to how to manage the threats of the present pandemic on indigenous peoples of Brazil. The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, the United Nations and the International Labour Organisation all offer further relevant suggestions as to how to address the serious impacts in the response to and the aftermath of this crisis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The following paper aims to reconstruct the evolution of this dynamic by tracing the interpretations and reinterpretations of the norm done by Brazilian state actors through the process of localization of the norm in the domestic discourse on climate change in Brazil from 2005 to 2010. The theoretical perspective is based on the literature about norms internalization that attempts to specify the conditions under which international norms find salience in particular domestic contexts. Two main interpretations coexist within the Brazilian political arena in the period within the entry into force of the Kyoto Protocol until the signature of the Paris agreement that influenced the climate politics in Brazil in that period. The first stand around the norm was a traditional interpretation of the principle defending a position of historical responsibilities that implies that Brazil did not have to take greenhouse gas reduction measures. The second position is a more progressive interpretation of the norm that argues that Brazil, as an emergent country, can and must adopt emissions reductions. The tie between both positions allows us to understand the alleged ups and downs in climate policy in the time frame studied. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper estimates the economic impacts of climate change over the Brazilian regions until the end of the century. We estimate the direct and indirect impact of the projected changes in climate on the yield of the country's main crops. The results point to a broad spatial heterogeneity of impacts across the country. Using the extreme scenarios created by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) (RCP 2.6 and 8.5), our predictions indicate that the average annual losses due to climate change range from 0.4% to 1.8% of Brazilian gross domestic product until the end of the century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Climate change is predicted to exert further stress on already exploited ecologies and healthcare systems, added to this, the coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 (COVID-19) has signified a stimulus to revolutionize existing models of sustainable development in broad, and sustainable supply chains in the healthcare sector in particular. The Kruger to Canyons biosphere region in South Africa and the Amazonas state in Brazil serve as geographic case studies for this paper. The impact of economic globalization, natural catastrophes such as droughts, economic and geopolitical stresses, deforestation, economic and healthcare access inequalities in these two biomes converge with issues of climate change, and undercut coping mechanisms that are customarily used to oversee extreme events such as pandemics. The COVID-19 pandemic has deepened many of the economic and social difficulties which South Africa and Brazil are already facing. In comparison to Brazil, South Africa’s overall response to the pandemic can be regarded as a standout. By borrowing from best practices from prior public health responses to heath emergencies in South Africa, such as the tuberculosis and the HIV/AIDS crisis, South Africa has demonstrated its comparatively successful means of dealing with COVID-19. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyses an ongoing paradigm shift in how engineers have responded to the persistent problem of flooding in São Paulo, Brazil. Until recently, civil engineers largely attempted to expel water from the landscape as fast as possible. Over the past three decades, however, engineers have begun to articulate new mechanisms for responding to flooding that store stormwater in the urban landscape. In this paper, I analyse the construction of what are commonly referred to as piscinões, large-scale detention ponds that pool stormwater in the event of heavy rain events. Drawing from literature in urban political ecology, I argue that piscinões attempt to correct for a complex and unequal landscape, but that they do so in a way that mainly prioritises large-scale engineering solutions to the problem of flooding. As such, in spite of being hailed as indicative of a paradigm shift in flood management, piscinões are instead a continuation of the city's broader hydraulic and urban paradigms. In response, I consider alternative approaches to the development of multifunctional piscinões that could serve both social and ecological aims. Ultimately, however, I draw from urban political ecology to argue that flooding is fundamentally a political problem that requires a political solution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Contexto Internacional is the property of Pontificia Universidade Catolica do Rio de Janeiro, Instituto de Relacoes Internacionais and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Contexto Internacional is the property of Pontificia Universidade Catolica do Rio de Janeiro, Instituto de Relacoes Internacionais and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Effective mitigation of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions in the buildings sector requires a full understanding of the factors influencing emissions over the life-cycle of buildings, particularly in places where large additions to the building stock are expected. Currently, little is known about what affects the GHG emissions of buildings located in warmer climates, a typical situation for many emerging economies. This paper presents a study of emissions from Brazilian office buildings using building archetypes. A sensitivity analysis explores possible parameter ranges, various contributions to life-cycle impacts and their key drivers. For each of the 1000 building variations in the sample, the emissions were calculated using a life-cycle assessment. Multivariate regression analysis enabled the study of the results' sensitivity to 10 parameters, influencing building operation, design and others. The emissions ranged from 20 to 106 kg CO2-eq/m² gross floor area and year. Electricity mix, climate and cooling efficiency were the most impactful parameters, but building component service time was also significant. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Revista Catalana de Dret Ambiental is the property of Universitat Rovira I Virgili and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Studies of the anticipated consequences of climate change suggest that among all economic sectors, agriculture would be the most affected. In Brazil, this issue is particularly relevant, since the agricultural sector and its related activities account for a significant share of the country's GDP and employment. Using a fixed effects panel model and data from 1990 through 2012, this paper empirically analyzes the vulnerability of agriculture to climate variables in Brazil's ten main agricultural states and the possible resulting loss of agricultural value in the face of future climate change. Our work is differentiated from prior studies in that it employs state level annual data series, which allows the aggregation of a great deal of relevant current information to the analysis. The results indicate that climate variables have a significant impact on most of these states' agricultural production, especially air temperature, whose effects showed higher estimated magnitude than those from rainfall. Considering the estimated elasticities and climatic projections, the most severe damage to agriculture is expected in Espírito Santo, Minas Gerais, and Rio Grande do Sul. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

All over the world, there is a pressing need to better understand how climate change has been incorporated into governmental agendas, and evaluate the status of adaptation planning and interventions at the local level. In this paper, we seek to contribute towards bridging this gap by identifying local practices connected to climate adaptation in six large Brazilian cities, and presenting a framework, based on the existing literature, for assessing constraints to adaptation across the municipal level. Although local governments are not the only actors who can take the lead through their actions, the employed framework considers that effective adaptation planning in urban areas is highly dependent on municipal efforts. Our findings indicate that six aspects have the highest levels of impact on adaptation in the Brazilian cities studied: administrative practices, political will, level of commitment, mismatch between the scale of urban issues and the extent of local government authority, pressures from private sectors, and inspection. Although these barriers are not specific only to climate issues and can be identified in other environmental arenas, when combined, they cause and worsen constraints to advancing urban adaptation at the local level. Specifically concerning the local dynamics of urban planning, the combination of pressures from private sectors and insufficient inspection negatively affects the ability of these cities to consolidate adaptation interventions. Our results are helpful in the context of large cities, particularly in Global South, where, as in Brazil, competitive urbanism and specific interest groups confront municipal efforts, and make achieving adaptation more difficult. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper measures the economic impacts of Brazil's climate mitigation strategies contained in its Nationally Determined Contribution (NDC). To do so, we employ the computable general equilibrium MIT Economic Projection and Policy Analysis model and simulate alternative carbon pricing scenarios (sectoral versus economy-wide carbon markets), set to achieve the country's overall emissions targets announced under the Paris Agreement. The results show relatively cheap emissions reductions from land-use changes and agriculture in the short run: the cost of the Brazilian NDC is predicted to be only 0.7 per cent of GDP in 2030. Further efforts to reduce carbon emissions beyond 2030 would require policy changes, since all the potential emissions reductions from deforestation would be finished and the capacity to expand renewable energy sources would be constrained. In this case, an economy-wide carbon pricing system would help substantially to avoid higher compliance costs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Amazon River, its huge basin, and the changes in biological processes that are rapidly occurring in this region are unquestionably of global significance. Hence, Global Change Biology is delighted to host a special thematic issue devoted to the Large-scale Biosphere-Atmosphere Experiment in Amazônia (LBA), which is a multinational, interdisciplinary research program led by Brazil. The goal of LBA is no less modest than its subject: to understand how Amazônia functions as a regional entity in the Earth system and how these functions are changing as a result of ongoing changes in land use. This compilation of 26 papers resulting from LBA-related research covers a broad range of topics: forest stocks of carbon (C) and nitrogen (N); fluxes of greenhouse gases and volatile organic compounds from vegetation, soils and wetlands; mapping and modeling land-use change, fire risk, and soil properties; measuring changes caused by logging, pasturing and cultivating; and new research approaches in meteorology to estimate nocturnal fluxes of C from forests and pastures. Some important new synthesis can be derived from these and other studies. The aboveground biomass of intact Amazonian forests appears to be a sink for atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2), while the wetlands and soils are a net source of atmospheric methane (CH4) and nitrous oxide (N2O), respectively. Land-use change has, so far, had only a minor effect on basin-wide emissions of CH4 and N2O, but the net effect of deforestation and reforestation appears to be a significant net release of CO2 to the atmosphere. The sum of the 100-year global warming potentials (GWP) of these annual sources and sinks of CH4, N2O, and CO2 indicate that the Amazonian forest-river system currently may be nearly balanced in terms of the net GWP of these biogenic atmospheric gases. Of course, large uncertainties remain for these estimates, but the papers published here demonstrate tremendous progress, and also large remaining hurdles, in narrowing these uncertainties in our understanding of how Amazônia functions as a regional entity in the Earth system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is a 50% possibility that global temperatures will have risen by more than 5 °C by the year 2100. As demands on Earth's systems grow more unsustainable, human security is clearly at stake. This narrative review provides an overview and synthesis of findings in relation to climate change, air pollution, and human health within the Global South context, focusing on case study geographic locations in South Africa and Brazil. Two case study regions—the Kruger to Canyons Biosphere region of South Africa and the Amazon region of Brazil—were the subjects of PubMed literature searches. Technical reports, policy briefs, and grey literature were also narratively synthesized. The burning of wood for fuel, as witnessed in Agincourt, and forest fires, such as those seen in the Amazon rainforest, release air pollutants such as methane and black carbon, which are strong short-lived climate pollutants (SLCPs) which fuel climate change and adversely affect human health. SLCPs have a brief lifetime in the atmosphere, but they frequently have a far larger potential for global warming than carbon dioxide (CO2). Most air pollution in geographic case study areas, that are home to human settlements, is due to the burning of wood and other biomasses that are pollutants. These areas are seen to be important for climate and health responses, and if constructive action is taken to switch to other modes of electricity generation (such as solar power) and the prevention of deforestation, the worst of the impacts may still be mitigated in these regions. Authorities should also establish a monitoring strategy for air quality, as well as enforce air quality regulations that safeguard public health. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyses an ongoing paradigm shift in how engineers have responded to the persistent problem of flooding in São Paulo, Brazil. Until recently, civil engineers largely attempted to expel water from the landscape as fast as possible. Over the past three decades, however, engineers have begun to articulate new mechanisms for responding to flooding that store stormwater in the urban landscape. In this paper, I analyse the construction of what are commonly referred to as piscinões, large-scale detention ponds that pool stormwater in the event of heavy rain events. Drawing from literature in urban political ecology, I argue that piscinões attempt to correct for a complex and unequal landscape, but that they do so in a way that mainly prioritises large-scale engineering solutions to the problem of flooding. As such, in spite of being hailed as indicative of a paradigm shift in flood management, piscinões are instead a continuation of the city’s broader hydraulic and urban paradigms. In response, I consider alternative approaches to the development of multifunctional piscinões that could serve both social and ecological aims. Ultimately, however, I draw from urban political ecology to argue that flooding is fundamentally a political problem that requires a political solution.

Given the crucial role of the mass media in influencing public discourse, this study examines the discourses around climate change within the Brazilian press, covering the time period of 2003-2013. Survey evidence has shown that Brazilians' degree of concern about climate change is higher than almost anywhere else, with nine out of 10 Brazilians considering climate change a serious problem. The primary purpose of this study is to investigate how the press engendered Brazilians' striking level of climate change concern, with special attention to how the discourse developed over time. To this end, I undertake a corpus-assisted discourse analysis to examine the most dominant linguistic patterns in the discourse, presenting evidence on an unprecedented scale and with considerable depth. The corpus consists of 19,686 newspaper texts (11.4 million words) published by 12 Brazilian broadsheet papers. The results are interpreted in the light of available opinion polls on the public's perception of climate change as well as Brazil's national context and environmental governance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A number of public policies have emerged worldwide as a response from governments facing climate change effects, drawing the attention of the scientific community to the outcomes and actual effects/benefits these policies have brought so far. One of the challenging aspects related to this context is the integration of the objectives set by climate change policies within the sectoral and regional planning. In this respect, the literature recognizes the relevance of Strategic Environmental Assessment (SEA) as an instrument to deal with climate change issues in the planning process and to support the development of alternatives to respond to climate change policies. The influence of climate change policies on the plans and programs supported by SEA in emerging economies is yet to be verified. The paper relies on the case of Brazil, recognized by its relevance in terms of biodiversity, water resources and climate regulation. In 2009, Brazil introduced the National Policy of Climate Change (NPCC), which established guidelines to reduce the emissions of greenhouse gases (GHG) by 2020. The present paper is based on the analysis of the current SEA practice and the corresponding level of integration of climate change issues, considering the objectives of the NPCC. A set of 29 statements, delivered by the literature, was applied, combined to the content analysis techniques to review the quality of 35 SEA reports produced in Brazil between 1997 and 2014 (out of 40-odd cases). The outcomes indicate the performance is similar to what was found in other contexts, i.e., SEA areas barely address climate change issues. This thus reveals an important gap between the objectives of NPCC and sectoral/regional planning. SEA can contribute to reducing this gap, but it needs more strength to influence the development of sectoral and regional policies and plans. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]