Sol e Sombra; Green Futures special edition on Brazil

Sol e Sombra Brazil’s search for a sustainable future

Green Futures October 2009

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Sunlight and shadow on the green and the gold

if Brazil can both exploit, and protect, its vast resources, it could be a powerhouse of the 21st century. conor foley and Jonathon Porritt sift the possibilities.

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B

razilians often joke that their country has a bright future ahead of it – “and always will have”.

More recently, however, there is a genuine sense of optimism that they could again be assuming what they see as their rightful place on the planet.

For over a century, up until 1980, Brazil had one of the highest economic growth rates of any major country in the world. It transformed itself from a predominantly rural to a mainly urban society in the space of a few decades with one of the fastest and largest population movements ever seen in peacetime. By the 1950s, the country was on a trajectory to overtake the US, and it was Brazil, rather than China, which fascinated Western policy-makers. President Juscelino Kubitschek pledged his nation would achieve “50 years in five”, and created a brand new capital city, Brasilia, in the heart of the country. The land of bossa nova, samba, carnival and football genius also became the favourite destination for holidaying film stars like Ginger Rodgers and Fred Astaire.

It wasn’t to last. A military coup, appalling economic mismanagement and the oil and debt crises of the 1970s hit Brazil hard, leading to what is often referred to as the ‘lost decade’. Economic growth went into reverse, and crime and poverty spiralled out of control. Democracy returned falteringly, but, by the mid-1990s, Brazil was a byword for urban violence and rural destruction. Police death-squads murdered street children in the cities while pistoleiros,

assassins paid by cattle barons, despatched environmental activists and landless workers to the same fate in the countryside. Brazil had become one of the world’s most violent and unequal societies, while corruption wore away at its governing institutions.

But eventually the nightmare came to an end. The military were forced back into their barracks, and a vibrant democracy took hold. Today Brazil’s stock-market is booming, inflation is low and the real is strong. Millions have been lifted out of poverty by a combination of economic growth, the creation of eight million new jobs, and innovative social programmes, like the Bolsa Família minimum income benefit, which goes to 11 million families.

Brazil has shrugged off the worldwide financial crisis – which its popular President Lula famously blamed on ‘blueeyed bankers’ – and Finance Minister Guido Mantega recently predicted that its economy will be the fifth largest in the world by 2026. It has a highly profitable agricultural industry, in sharp contrast to the subsidised farmers of much of the rich world, and has benefited from the recent rise in commodity prices.

And when Rio de Janeiro was chosen, in October 2009, to host the Olympics, President Lula triumphantly declared: “We have left behind being a second-rate country to become a first-rate one”.

Brazil is also becoming an increasingly significant player on the international stage, at the United Nations, the World

“There is much we can learn from Brazil”

Sue Cunningham Photographic/Alamy

UK Environment Secretary Hilary Benn introduces Sol e Sombra – and the Sustainable Development Dialogues.

As the UK Secretary of State responsible for sustainable development, it is a great pleasure to introduce Green Futures’ special supplement on Brazil – the latest in its series of publications on key emerging economies. During my recent visit I saw the great potential Brazil has to show global leadership on sustainable development. It is a country on the move, with a growing international reputation and presence. I was impressed with the scale of Brazilian leadership on climate change, underlined by its recent progress in significantly reducing deforestation.

The Sustainable Development Dialogue between the UK and Brazil, which began in 2006, goes from strength to strength. Brazil has a lot of knowledge and expertise and there is much we can learn from each other.

Our work together involves an array of partners at national and regional level and covers a wide range of topics from climate change, biofuels, forestry, and biodiversity, through food security, sustainable consumption and production, to international environmental governance. We are currently assessing the value of ecosystem services, strengthening environmental law and helping state governments procure sustainable goods and services.

Brazil has real environmental wealth: its biodiversity is one of the world’s richest, and its forests act as important carbon sinks; it has a thriving agriculture, and its innovation and research into food security and biofuels are very impressive. There are big challenges ahead for all countries, but in our interconnected world we have learned that nations cannot achieve environmental protection and sustainable development alone. The UK looks forward to further joint working with Brazil, in particular on the Olympics: a unique opportunity to promote sustainable development for the benefit of the Games themselves, and of future generations.

Green Futures Futures January October 2009 Green 2010

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Logging on to the future: can Brazil make the shift from an economy based on wasting assets...

Trade Organisation, the International Monetary Fund and the G20. Brazilians expect and deserve international respect for their achievements.

As this publication makes clear, Brazilian leaders in government, business and communities are coming together to build a brighter and more sustainable future in a variety of ways. We’ve dubbed it Sol e Sombra (‘Sun and Shade’) to illustrate Brazil’s potential to be a leader in sustainability – and to highlight some exciting work already underway – while recognising the obstacles on the road.

Brazil is now the world’s leading producer of biofuels, and the largest exporter of ethanol from sugarcane – one of the most competitive biofuels in the world. But, more than 30 years after the country first hit upon ethanol as the means to decrease dependence on oil imports, and just as the rest of world is getting excited about the next generation of more sustainable lignocellulosic biofuels, Brazil has discovered ‘Sugar Loaf’. This huge light crude oil field just off the coast of São Paulo is expected to put Brazil among the world’s biggest fossil fuel players, causing President Lula to quip that “God must be Brazilian” [see ‘Oiling the future’, p14].

Financial success such as this has propelled Brazil to the forefront of the debate as to how economic development can be made compatible with both preservation of the environment and the reduction of poverty. At the heart of this debate lies the Amazon rainforest.

The search for solutions that last Back in 1989, Al Gore enraged the nation with his comment that: “Contrary to what Brazilians think, the Amazon is not

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their property, it belongs to all of us”. For many, this clumsy statement endorsed suspicions that eco-colonialism was on the rise - but it also expressed frustration at the Brazilian Government’s apparent unwillingness to tackle a mounting catastrophe of truly global consequences.

Amazonia is one of Brazil’s poorest states, and no one who knows it can doubt the need for sustained investment in its transport infrastructure. But there is a direct connection between deforestation and new roads, with the access they provide to previously undisturbed places for loggers, miners and plantation companies. A glance at the ‘herringbone’ pattern of roads that are already branching out from the main routes into the forest provides a frightening vision of the future.

Like many of Brazil’s social and environmental problems, deforestation is partly a legacy of the dictatorship. Colonising the Amazon was deemed a strategic necessity by the military, whose rule also exacerbated Brazil’s already starkly unequal patterns of land ownership. Almost 50% of the country’s land is controlled by a mere 1% of the population, and the concentration of ownership in Amazonia is even higher, with 82% of Brazil’s largest landowners holding estates there. By contrast, most of the poor people who were encouraged to settle in the forest have no land rights, or at best, well-faked property deeds.

Lack of secure tenure renders it nearly impossible for poor farmers to invest in modern techniques. Instead, they simply clear land by slashing and burning the forest. Loggers and farmers work in tandem, with the former taking the best wood – often illegally – and the latter sowing grass to raise

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Galen Rowell/Mountain Light/Alamy. Cynthia Brito/ddbstock. Sue Cunningham Photographic/Alamy

...towards a 21st century, renewable model of development?

cattle. The planted pasture soon becomes overrun with native grass, which is unsuitable for grazing, and so farmers move on, knocking down adjoining forests, leaving swathes of wilderness in their wake.

President Lula promised to tackle deforestation when he came to office in 2003. An estimated 20% of the Amazon had already been lost by then, and about 10,000 square miles had disappeared in the previous two years alone. The President appointed a strong advocate for conservation, Marina Silva, as Minister for the Environment and, by August 2007, euphorically announced that the rate of destruction had fallen by nearly a third – a success attributed to a crackdown on illegal logging. The Government has jailed 600 people for environmental crimes and also prosecuted the killers of Sister Dorothy Stang, an American environmentalist, assassinated in 2005. President Lula’s Government increased the protection given to indigenous people’s land rights and faced down protests from some ranchers and farmers.

But Silva resigned in 2008, saying she had “lost the strength to carry on”. During her tenure, she clashed repeatedly with other ministers, including President Lula’s Chief of Staff and chosen successor, Dilma Rousseff. The agribusiness block, bancada ruralista, accounts for nearly a quarter of the Brazilian Congress, and President Lula is courting its support for Rousseff in the forthcoming presidential elections.

Its attitude was best summed up by Blairo Maggi, Governor of the state of Mato Grosso, who six years ago said that “a 40% increase in deforestation doesn’t mean anything at all… there is nothing to get worried about”. Maggi is also the world’s largest soybean farmer, and Greenpeace recently awarded

him a ‘golden chainsaw’ for his contribution to environmental destruction.

There is a growing recognition that the best way to halt deforestation is to make it more valuable to preserve trees than to cut them down [see GF74, p26]. Last year, Brazil launched a $20 billion Amazon fund to do just that. It’s intended to fund everything from monitoring illegal logging to developing alternative livelihoods for Amazon farmers and ranchers. Norway has already pledged $1.1 billion over ten years for the fund, contingent on government performance, and has called on other countries to follow. Announcing the scheme, President Lula declared: “Brazil has policies aimed at conserving the Amazon forest and its priceless natural heritage. But the forest is also home to a culturally diverse population of 25 million, including some 170 indigenous peoples, along with hundreds of communities of rubber tappers, hunters and gatherers, and riverbank dwellers.

Preservationist approaches alone are ineffective in tackling deforestation – a cause of global warming. We need to find enduring solutions. This is why we are investing in sustainable management of the forest that will provide a decent living for its inhabitants”.

President Lula argues that Brazil’s experience shows how developing countries can contribute to combating climate change globally. Indeed, since poorer countries stand to suffer more harshly from the climatic disruptions than the rich world, they have a strong incentive to do so. He rightly notes that it was the unsustainable consumption patterns of the richer countries which largely caused the problem and so these cannot shirk their core responsibilities for dealing with it.

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Sugar sweet? Brazil’s vast ethanol industry has the potential to cut transport emissions, but questions over land use remain

But when it comes to contrasting lifestyles, few countries showcase such extremes of consumerism and wealth. São Paulo, one of the world’s biggest metropolises, is also the helicopter capital of the world, ahead of both New York and Tokyo. For São Paulo’s super-rich, the helicopter is the vehicle of choice for the daily commute. Brazil is also home to the world’s largest fleet of privately owned jets, but there are places in the Amazon where tribes of indigenous people have never previously had any contact with outsiders. The small towns in the interior, meanwhile, with their rodeos, cowboy hats and country-and-western music, have an atmosphere that resembles nothing more than the mid-west of the United States.

Brazil is the fifth largest country in the world, both in terms of land mass and population size. It is also one of the world’s most diverse, and can best be described as a country of different continents, where Europe and Africa come together in America. About half of its population have some African blood in their veins, and Salvador, its first capital city, is 80% black. Most of the light-skinned population of Curitiba and Porto Alegre, in the south, by contrast, come from Germany, Italy and Poland. Parts of São Paulo have a ‘Little Italy’ feel to them. There are more Japanese people in Brazil than anywhere outside Japan and more Arabs than anywhere outside the Middle East.

With such a complex and diverse country as its subject, this supplement is only able to look into a key sample of the environmental challenges facing Brazil, and give a flavour of the creativity, ingenuity and determination of the responses.

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CO2 ambition Brazil seems set on shaming the US and other developed nations into deeper carbon cuts.

Following criticism of a lack of ambition in the US

by Brazilian Environment Minister Carlos Minc, President Lula announced challenging targets for Brazil’s own greenhouse gas emissions, with a 39% cut below levels currently projected for 2020, meaning a total saving of one gigatonne of carbon. The details include an 80% reduction in deforestation, and new approaches in agriculture, hydroelectric and biomass electricity generation.

The target must yet be brought into the national climate change plan to become binding, but throws down the gauntlet to other developing economies – and developed ones – to set more challenging targets of their own. – Ben Tuxworth

Brazil contains within its own borders examples of virtually all the major issues confronting global policy makers concerned with sustainable development. How it deals with these will have huge implications for all of us, and for the world in which we all live.

Conor Foley is a consultant on human rights and development who has lived in Brazil for the last six years.

Jonathon Porritt is Founder Director of Forum for the Future.

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Going for green, going for gold

What began as a volleyball training initiative in the state of Paraná has become a far-reaching programme for sustainable social transformation across Brazil’s major cities. With 46 centres in São Paulo, Paraná and Rio de Janeiro, the Rexona-AdeS Sports Citizen programme has trained over 4,000 school teachers, and encouraged 72,000 children to develop social values and skills through sport and team activities.

The programme began in 1997 through a partnership between Unilever’s Rexona brand and the Government of Paraná, led by the Brazilian volleyball team coach Bernardo Rocha de Rezende, better known as ‘Bernardinho’. It uses sport to promote the social value of teachers, and to create a sense of community and responsibility amongst young people from low-income families in urban areas.

With Rio to host the 2016 Olympic Games, sport is acting as a powerful catalyst for economic and social change. The goal to transform a city with a reputation for drugs and violence into a safe and flourishing place was the winning aspect of Rio’s bid. As Mayor Eduardo Paes said during the official presentation: “Rio 2016 will deliver…many years of inspiration, social change and sports development that will make a difference for generations to come”. – Lottie Butler

Pulling power: the Olympics could lift support for a wide range of social initiatives

Green Futures January 2010

sumarioexecutivo-galeria-provi_03. David Silerman/Staff/Getty

Social rally

Rio’s 2016 Olympic bid made much of its environmental credentials. National Tree Day saw 3,580 trees planted in an effort to neutralise the carbon emissions of the campaign. The vision for the ‘Green Games’, set out in the proposal, includes planting more than three million trees in strategic areas, restoration projects in Pedra Branca National Park and the mangroves of Barra da Tijuca, and Clean Development Mechanism schemes in communities near to the site. Secretary General of Rio 2016, Carlos Roberto Osório, also promised that all the facilities built for the Games will have a plan for long-term use.

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Back from the brink? after years of seemingly unstoppable destruction, Brazil appears to be turning the tide on the amazon frontier. is this just a recessioninduced calm before the storm, asks Martin wright – or the start of a rainforest revival?

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The simplest cut After energy, the destruction of tropical forests is by far the largest contributor to climate change – emitting ten times as much as aviation. As has been pointed out elsewhere in Green Futures [‘Forest Futures’, GF74, p26], destroying forests by fire produces a particularly nasty ‘double whammy’ of warming.

As they burn, they send vast swathes of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. And once they’re gone, they can’t soak up the carbon emitted from other sources, like industry, cars and power plants.

The other side of the coin, though, is that conserving forests is one of our most effective tools for staving off runaway climate change. And, since it doesn’t involve making major cuts in industrial or transport emissions, it can be one of the simplest, too. In Brazil’s case, says Smeraldi: “This means that our past and current emission record is not strongly associated with activities which are essential for jobs and economic growth – at least in comparison to the other ‘greenhouse gas superpowers’. This is excellent news for anybody struggling [to mitigate] climate change, since it might prove cheaper for us to engage in radical emission reductions [than it will for other countries].” Some specific good news came with the announcement in November 2009 that Brazil had cut deforestation to its lowest level in more than two

Green Futures January 2010

Jacques Jangoux forward slash Alamy. Simon Rawles/Getty

n EUrOPE, it’S rarE to be able to drive for an hour through solid, unbroken forest. In the deep countryside of northern Sweden, perhaps, or on a particularly slow and winding road through the Carpathians.

In Brazil, by contrast, 747s fly for at least that time above an apparently endless sea of forest. If you’re lucky enough to have a window seat, you can look down and see a solid slab of green, from horizon to horizon. A green cut only by the winding loops of vast rivers, and the occasional tiny circular clearings, with no roads leading to or from them, which mark the Amerindian villages.

Until you reach the forest fringes, where the roads, and the fires, begin. Through the haze of smoke, you can see how the forest is being steadily frayed, torn into patches, and eventually destroyed altogether, apart from the odd remnant strip running along a gully.

The sheer visible scale of both the destruction, and of what remains, is breathtaking. It’s one of Brazil’s greatest hopes, and greatest challenges.

Roberto Smeraldi, Founder of Amigos da Terra – Brazilian Amazonia, and one of the most influential of the country’s environmentalists, sums it up: “Brazil ranks third in the list of global contributors to climate change – and two-thirds of its greenhouse gas emissions over the last five years result from land use changes – principally deforestation.”

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decades. Just 2,705 square miles of the Amazon were lost between August 2008 and July 2009, almost half that of the previous 12 months, and the lowest annual total since reliable records started being kept in 1988. Among the factors behind the success, officials said, was the 2004 decision to make the Government as a whole responsible for enforcing forest laws, rather than it being ‘ghettoised’ in the Environment Ministry alone. This led to dramatic improvements in real-time satellite monitoring, which allows forestry police to respond immediately to evidence of logging or burning.

Significant swathes of Amazonia are coming under official federal protection. In the four years to 2008, some 50 million hectares were turned into forest reserves or national parks, and another ten million became indigenous reservations for Amerindian communities.

The news was welcomed by environmentalists. “We have to recognise the great efforts of the federal government, together with state governments, that brought about this drop in deforestation”, said Cláudio Maretti, Head of Conservation at WWF-Brasil. But he warned that there was still a pressing need to firm up the enforcement of forest conservation laws – and to expand other government programmes aimed at offering those living near the forest viable economic alternatives to forest clearance. “That is essential if Brazil is to assume clear commitments in relation to carbon emissions, and if we are really going to take a leadership role in the new green economy.”

Economic factors may well have played a role in the dramatic drop, says his WWF-Brasil colleague, Conservation Director Carlos Alberto de Mattos Scaramuzza. “We have to recognise that it’s related to the [global recession], particularly to the reduction in demand for commodities, which has meant there is less pressure” on standing forest. As that demand picks up, it will test the Government’s commitment to make further reductions, he warns.

A vital step now, say environmentalists, is for the Government to properly apply – and strengthen – the Forest Code, which dictates that landowners must preserve as forest 80% of any Amazon land they hold. The law is notoriously poorly enforced, and hopes were depressed when the Government recently delayed until 2011 a plan to start prosecutions of those not complying with the law.

Conveniently perhaps, this transfers responsibility to President Lula’s successor, who will take office in January of that year.

Tasso Azevedo, Senior Adviser to the Minister of the Environment on Forest and Climate Change, agrees that the hard work lies ahead. “We have actually done most of the cheapest and straightforward things – basic law enforcement, restructuring of the monitoring system, and so forth…

Now we’re onto the second level – placing constraints and disincentives in the way of any investment which involve deforestation.”

Some action is underway here, too. The Government has invested in sustainable logging initiatives, and some states are even paying people a small stipend to keep their land forested. And there’s noticeably less reticence on the part of the federal government to getting stuck in at the local level.

In a new initiative called Mutirão Arco Verde, Brasilia sent hundreds of officials to the 43 municipalities responsible for more than half the region’s deforestation, to help farmers and authorities there “better understand” and comply with environmental legislation. While this may not have exactly been welcome intervention (shades of “I’m from head office – I’m here to help!”), the Government insisted the aim was to help the municipalities plan for economic growth – albeit of a sustainable kind.

Consumer groups, too, are starting to ratchet up the pressure [see box, ‘Backing the backlash’]. But meanwhile, there’s growing focus on the Cerrado – the vast swathe of savannah-woodland that borders the jungle to the east and

Cattle crunch

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South American Pictures/Tony Morrison

Intensive farming may have a bad press in Europe, but in Brazil, it could be key to saving swathes of forest. Intensive in relative terms, that is. As Roberto Smeraldi points out, “in the Amazon, we have 71 million heads of cattle on 74 million hectares of pasture” – over one hectare per cow, in other words.

Increasing stockage rates to three hectares per cow would still provide ample grazing land, while taking pressure off the forest.

Smeraldi argues that “investments in increased yield productivity should be matched by investment in forest restoration”. Carbon finance could play a role here, he says, helping fund agricultural intensification which, by allowing the forest to recover, would indirectly result in increased carbon sequestration.

Products such as beef or leather which were produced from such ‘intensified’ ranches could be certified as such, he suggests. This would give them a market advantage among purchasers who are increasingly seeking to avoid products associated with rainforest destruction.

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Backing the backlash

committing by telling their suppliers they expect to see zero deforestation or they will stop buying from them,” said Tatiana Carvalho, Greenpeace’s Amazon campaigner. “That is a big leap forward.” “The beef sector had been very resistant to change”, says Scaramuzza, “but now they are starting to come to the table.” WWF is working with a sustainable cattleranching group – a phrase that would have been an oxymoron just a few years ago. “There is a lot or room for improvement, but they’re starting to recognise the problem – and they want to be part of the solution.” – Andrew Downie / Martin Wright

Atlantic ambition Not all business waits for a backlash before taking action. On the eastern coast, several companies, including Michelin and Veracel, are taking action to preserve and expand the last remnants of the Atlantic Forest, home to the golden lion tamarin (pictured). They are combining sustainable plantations of eucalyptus, rubber and cocoa trees with ecological corridors linking surviving fragments of woodland. The once vast Atlantic Forest has shrunk to 10% of its original area, but has an unrivalled capacity for regeneration. So projects such as these can make a real difference, say experts.

Green Futures January 2010

Simone van den Berg /hutterstock. Gustavo Jonovich/CIWEM Environmental Photographer of the Year competition

Consumer power is starting to slow forest destruction. Environmental groups led by Greenpeace have carried out damaging campaigns against major soy bean, beef and leather producers. Under an agreement signed in 2006 by Abiove, the Brazilian Association of Vegetable Oil Industries, and several environmental groups, major soy bean traders – including food giants such as Cargill – agreed not to purchase soya from areas inside the Amazon Biome deforested after July that year.

WWF is working with these and other companies on a monitoring system to ensure they can live up to their commitments. “It’s been a really positive outcome, building new relationships between NGOs and the private sector”, says Scaramuzza. But he warns that a focus on ‘Amazon-free soya’ might be helping drive destruction in the Cerrado. “It was relatively easy for companies to make this commitment, because only 8% of soya comes from Amazonia”, he says. “So now it’s time for them to raise the bar: to show the same commitment for other regions that they have for the Amazon.”

Meanwhile, the ‘soy moratorium’, which has been extended until at least July 2010, is being held up as a possible template for the beef sector. It’s the combination of the demand for Brazilian beef, soy beans and ethanol, say campaigners, which is behind much of the country’s deforestation. Cattle farmers sell land in the south to soy and sugar cane growers, and use the money to buy cheaper land in the Amazon which they then cut down for cattle pasture.

A Greenpeace study released in June 2009 claimed companies including Wal-Mart, Carrefour, Nike, Adidas, Clarks and Tesco bought beef and leather from Brazilian firms that raised cattle on deforested land.

On occasion, it said, forced labour was even involved.

The report caused a furor, and wary of a consumer backlash, those and other blue chip firms gave their suppliers until 2010 to implement a serious traceability system that enables them to identify where their beef and leather is coming from.

Just how effective the boycott will be is questionable. There are an estimated five million cattle ranchers in Brazil, and only a tiny percentage have any reliable traceability systems in place. Experts estimate it will take two years just to set up proper monitoring systems for beef. For leather, the issue is even more complex, as it is sold on the open commodities market and so is much harder to track. Nevertheless, the socalled beef moratorium is being heralded as another step in the right direction. “These companies are

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overall forest remained in good health.

All such schemes, of course, are potentially eligible for carbon funding, too – hence Brazil’s growing enthusiasm for international agreement on the issue. And there may also be ways in which the other huge regional benefits of standing forests, particularly sustaining the water cycle on which so much of Latin American agriculture depends, can be ‘monetised’. [For more details on this work, see ‘Forest Futures’, GF74.]

Azevedo advocates a simple system in which areas which reduced their rates of deforestation would be rewarded on a ‘payment by results’ basis. Brazil could use international carbon funding to invest in a whole range of initiatives to help forest preservation, and he’s particularly excited by the potential of satellite monitoring. This is fast reaching such a level of sophistication that someone with a laptop or even an iPhone could use a Google Earth-style tool to get detailed images of forest cover down to as little as half a hectare. Radar will help ‘see’ beneath cloud cover, so overcoming one of the obstacles to effective monitoring. The results, he promises, “will be totally publicly available. People will be able to download the information”.

None of this will succeed, though, cautions Smeraldi, without successfully engaging those on whom the forest most depends to survive: the people who make a living from it, and live within it. “This is especially true here in Brazil, given the very limited governance in forest areas and on their fringes”, he says, and he identifies two key challenges. First, set up practical financial mechanisms for rewarding local stakeholders directly. Second, sort out the tangle of land titles – or in many cases, lack of them. It won’t be straightforward.

“In those cases where you have a clear legitimacy (i.e. legally established indigenous land, extractive reserves and so on) there is usually political reluctance, if not outright resistance, to remunerating local communities. Where you have ranchers and settlers with strong political support, it’s rare to have established land rights.”

Smeraldi acknowledges the recent progress that has been made on curbing Amazon deforestation, but warns that overall it remains fragile. And in terms of Brazil’s performance on climate change more generally, it could still be undercut by the recent oil discoveries [see ‘Oiling What’s in it for them? the future’, p14]. “We need to keep a close eye on the overall consistency of national policies”, he says – and that means setting clear caps for total carbon emissions. “São Paulo state has set a positive example here, with its goal of a 20% cut in total emissions by 2020.”

For his part, Scaramuzza is cautiously optimistic that Brazil might indeed have pulled its vast forests back from the brink of destruction– and he thinks politics has played its part. “The Government wants to take a strong leadership position; it wants to really establish itself as a major player in the UN. [So President] Lula is assuming a lot of public commitment on this area – we already have a national climate change policy which includes an 80% reduction in deforestation as a target.”

Tasso Azevedo, too, thinks a corner has been turned. “I think that in Brazil, people are finally waking up.”

Martin Wright is Editor in Chief of Green Futures.

Additional reporting by Andrew Downie.

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Eye Ubiquitous /Alamy

south. Deforestation there is increasing, and is thought to be running at twice the rate of that in the Amazon. According to Smeraldi, it’s accounting for around 30% of the emissions resulting from all Brazilian forest destruction, so “it needs to be better measured and taken into account”. Scaramuzza agrees: “The Cerrado is actually much more endangered than Amazonia, because [it’s the focus of] a huge expansion of soya, corn and other commodities”.Setting tough targets for one while ignoring the other could make matters worse, says Smeraldi. “It could create perverse incentives, encouraging developers to switch their destructive activities to the Cerrado.”

Incentives of a positive kind are increasingly seen as the key to forest preservation. Andrew Mitchell, Founder of the Global Canopy Programme and one of the world’s most experienced forest policy thinkers, summed up the challenge when he spoke to Green Futures in 2009 [see GF74, p27]: “At the moment, you can only make money out of forests when you convert them to something else – timber or beef, soy or palm oil... So in global markets, forests are worth more dead than alive. This is what we need to turn around. Philanthropy and governments won’t do it. You have to look to markets to overturn what is in fact a market failure… What we’ve got for free, we don’t pay for.”

As Azevedo put it, unless you pay people not to do something, they’ll carry on doing it. “Say you want to close down an illegal logging site. You can do so in 15 minutes. You just send in the police or the army and lock everything down.

But 50 people will lose their jobs.” And unless you create better paid alternatives, they’ll soon be back cutting trees, there or elsewhere. “We have to put something else in place to keep the money flowing and to create a new economy.”

He believes that sustainable forest management – in which timber concessions are awarded and renewed on the basis solely of social and environmental good practice, rather than money – could be at its heart. In Acre state, WWF is working with local communities to implement such a scheme.

It would allow the harvest not only of carefully selected, highvalue timber, but other products such as Brazil nuts, rubber and essential oils – so long as it could demonstrate that the

Daniel Beltra /Getty

Making ‘protection’ mean what it says A rare combination of supermarkets, banks and determined government action is giving teeth to forest protection laws.

Between the Xingu and Tapajós rivers in the Terra do Meio, or Middle Land, lie 3 million hectares of protected forest. The conservation areas were created in 2005, following the assassination of Sister Dorothy Stang, who spoke out against illegal logging and in defence of peasant farmers trying to make a living without deforestation. But authorities are struggling to protect the mahogany-rich land and its people. According to a report compiled by the Amazonian non-profit research institute Imazon, with the support of the British Embassy in Brazil, poor administration and chronic delays in judicial proceedings mean that illegal exploitation of the land often goes unpunished.

The report found that, due to a shortage of attorneys and inefficient use of their time, only 3% of cases reached any conclusion, with the vast majority held up in never-ending appeals. Moreover, out of the few rulings that were made, only 10% of fines were collected – with environmental protection agency IBAMA totting up R$11.8 billion in outstanding penalties.

These failures have allowed an estimated 40 million hectares to be seized illegally, making deforestation much more profitable for exploiters than investment to improve the productivity of land outside the protected area. In June 2009, the Government put its foot down with a bill to regularise landholdings, and a programme to implement it. But an analysis of the bill by Imazon

raised concerns that the low price offered for the rights to smaller areas – with some even given away free – could drive deforestation rather than put a stop to it.

And yet, in spite of the legal minefield, there’s hope. A number of effective incentives for compliance are beginning to shine through the shadows. Among them, embargos agreed by three major supermarkets, Wal-Mart, Carrefour and Pao de Acucar – and three footwear giants, Adidas, Clarks and Timberland – on meat and leather from ranches on illegally deforested land. Perhaps buoyed by such commercial action, government authorities are starting to get tougher, too. Cattle found grazing on protected land have been seized, and sold at auction. The confiscation of 3,000 head of cattle in 2008 led to the voluntary removal of 30,000 more. And credit restrictions have been imposed by the federal government for anyone with more than 400ha of untitled land. As a result of these measures, deforestation rates have begun to drop – even as commodity prices rise.

According to Imazon, there’s now a clear way forward. The organisation hopes to drive public pressure on landholders to adopt more sustainable practices, through embargos, procurement regulations and public prosecutions. If this civil force goes hand in hand with a higher conviction rate for offences and the proper application of penalties to fit the crime, then the ‘protection’ offered to Terra do Meio on paper could take effect in practice, too. – Anna Simpson

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Oiling the

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n 9 november 2007, Brazilian authorities called a press conference and finally confirmed what most natives had long suspected: that God was Brazilian.

After years of deep water testing and drilling, the state oil giant Petrobras had announced the discovery of vast new reserves of light crude, located thousands of kilometres under the Atlantic Ocean, beneath a thick layer of salt. These reserves were so big that they would change the country forever, politicians said. So big, in fact, that Brazil’s President insinuated that divine intervention, as well as geology, must have played a part.

Immediately after the find was announced, President Lula da Silva’s Chief of Staff, Dilma Rousseff, claimed the find could elevate Brazil’s oil wealth “to the level of Saudi Arabia and Venezuela”, and help lift millions of Brazilians out of poverty.

Carnival had arrived early.

Two years on, and the excitement is undiminished.

Petrobras’s CEO, Jose Sergio Gabrielli, recently declared: “If we reach 5.7 million barrels per day, we will be producing more than half of all the other companies in the world put together”.

He’s not alone in dreaming big. “Conservatively, I’d say that we will become the eighth biggest [oil producer in the world],” says Mauricio Tolmasquim, President of Brazil’s stateowned Energy Research Corporation (EPE) and one of the main architects of national energy policy.

Yet amid the euphoria there are many voices of concern.

Some fear that new legislation currently being debated in

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Congress, designed to ensure oil wealth is distributed fairly across the country, will stifle Brazil’s pre-salt exploration campaign by reducing the opportunities of foreign companies.

Others, though, are more alarmed by the environmental implications of the find. For Roberto Smeraldi, FounderDirector of Amigos da Terra – Amazônia Brasileira, the pre-salt drilling represents “a true carbon bomb, releasing four times the amount of greenhouse gas per unit than conventional drilling”. Along with new planned investment in coal power, he argues, “this would offset the gains that might be obtained by achieving zero deforestation”.

Sergio Leitao, a Director at Greenpeace Brazil, agrees. “It is estimated that the total emissions from the pre-salt reserves could reach 56 billion tonnes of CO2. This means that over the next 40 years Brazil will be emitting around 1.3 billion tonnes of CO2 annually through refining and burning oil. [This would] double its total emissions…making Brazil one of the top three CO2 emitters in the world.”

Then there is concern as to what this oil bonanza might mean for the country’s much-vaunted renewables revolution.

Recent years have seen Brazil held up as an international example, leading the way in the use of low carbon sources of energy – principally large-scale hydro and ethanol from sugar cane.

Brazil’s huge dams supply around 90% of the country’s electricity, not without controversy [see ‘Hydro worth a dam?’, p19]. As a result, its power generation is largely fossil fuel-free – even though hydro’s wider impacts, in terms of drowned forests and displaced indigenous peoples, raise serious

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Massive new discoveries of ‘black gold’ off Brazil’s coastline are triggering excitement and concern in equal measure, says Tom Philips.

Flaring up: can Brazil stick to its carbon goals while exploiting its new found oil wealth?

question marks over its sustainability.

It’s much the same story with transport fuel. Large-scale investment in the country’s ethanol programme on the part of the military regime of the 1980s laid the foundations for future development. Now, of all cars produced in Brazil, 90% are ‘flex fuel’ – designed to run on both ethanol and petrol. Investment in biofuels remains buoyant, and industry leaders are working alongside NGOs and Government in an effort to ensure that increasing demand for suitable cropland does not drive deforestation or limit food production [see ‘Sugar shack’, p16].

Other sources of renewable energy have yet to play a major role. There’s a small, but growing, wind economy, with five new farms taking total capacity to 341MW. Solar photovoltaic (PV) installations are also beginning to tap Brazil’s 280 days of sunshine a year, bringing electricity to remote off-grid communities, particularly in the Amazon. But the potential far exceeds achievements to date. A 2009 industry analysis identified a $25 billion future renewable energy market, involving biomass, solar PV, solar thermal, hydro and wind.

It is possible, of course, that new-found oil wealth will unlock more funds for renewables. Petrobras is making much of its commitment to cleaner sources of energy, including biofuels.

But environmentalists are sceptical. Leitao argues that the Government’s focus on new legislation covering the pre-salt oil has already “taken attention away from attempts to draw up a new regulatory framework for renewable energy”. This, he fears, “will prevent Brazil from making a technological jump in

Power planting The Brazilian Government is to impose targets on power stations – for planting trees. The Environment Ministry is proposing that stations burning oil, gas or coal should plant huge numbers of trees to earn their operating licenses. This would both help to offset their emissions, and contribute to the national re-forestation effort. The scheme could result in a further three million trees by 2017.

But critics argue that even this would not mitigate the 14 million tonnes of greenhouse gas emitted by the existing fleet of power stations each year, never mind the emissions of another 82 new coal-burning plants planned for construction over the next eight years. – Ben Tuxworth

its energy matrix by investing in clean and renewable sources, which [could] revolutionise the patterns of consumption and production around the world”.

Tolmasquim disagrees. “Brazil will continue with a high level of renewable fuels... In terms of transport, ethanol will still play a key role in the market,” he insists, pointing out that 75% of flex fuel car owners choose to use ethanol. But he admits that, when it comes to global demand, ethanol is “not a substitute” for oil.

Gabrielli of Petrobras also envisions “no significant shift” in global energy consumption patterns over the next 30 years.

“Coal, oil and gas” will be used in the same proportion, he predicts, adding: “Any change will be long term. But this doesn’t mean there will not be more sustainable energy, more biofuels”. “Oil will be fundamental to humanity for a long time,” agrees Brazil’s Minister for Energy and Mining, Edson Lobao.

And it is this reluctance to envisage a world without oil that some see as holding Brazil back. “Just as the Stone Age didn’t come to an end because of a stone shortage, the oil age won’t end because of a lack of oil, but as a result of the technological race to substitute it,” comments Leitao.

By putting all of its energy eggs in one basket, Brazil could fall behind other countries in research, investment and infrastructure for sustainable energy. And that would not be good news for Brazilians – even with God on their side.

Tom Phillips is a British journalist and documentary maker who lives in Rio. He writes for The Guardian.

Green Futures January 2010

Luis Veiga /Getty. DanDriedger/istock

future

How many trees for each of these?

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ethanol refineries often generate power from bagasse, the residue left behind when the sugar cane is crushed, and sell any excess to the grid. It is measures like this which mean that ethanol produced from sugar cane can reduce greenhouse gas emissions (when compared with conventional petrol) more than other biofuels made today.

lift yields of cane from 500,000 tonnes a year to over 2.4 million. And with the prospect of further innovations to improve efficiency – such as the use of GPS to enable more precise planting, harvesting and application of fertilizers – this production is expected to reach five million tonnes in the future. For the local community, this increased capacity means the creation of jobs demanding a more varied skill set, from managing the machines and the truck fleet, to overseeing the operations.

the only viable solution for secure, scaleable and competitive low carbon energy for transport in the short to medium term,” says Mario Lindenhayn, President of BP Biofuels in Brazil. “That is not to say that electric cars will not play a role in the future, but to get the material reduction of GHG emissions, we think that biofuels are the best option. And they are a reality today.”

Four-fold increase As the world’s largest exporter of ethanol from sugar cane, and with the second largest domestic market, it’s important for Brazil to ensure that good harvests are viable and sustainable far into the future. The Brazilian Government recently announced ‘Agrizones’ – areas where sugar cane production is to be limited, with a ban on plantations close to the Amazon and around the coast. Recognising the importance of preserving Brazil’s forests, and the sugar cane industry’s dependence on both the seasons of rain and drought, BP’s biofuels business is focusing on producing biofuels on degraded pastures that can be maintained through rain-fed irrigation. This may seem limiting, but even within these tight conditions, Brazil could increase its sugar cane planted area four-fold from the number of acres planted today.

BP is also looking at the lifecycle of the ethanol production process to help to minimise waste. For example,

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Secure, scaleable, competitive The challenge, according to Philip New, CEO BP Biofuels, is “to bring together humanities’ two most important value chains – agriculture and energy”. Ethanol has been a major source of energy in Brazil since the 1970s, when the key driver was to overcome dependence on imported oil. Now, sustainable transport is the primary motivation. “Biofuels are

Flex fuel future Flexibility will be the key to keeping ahead of the game.

Already, BP is looking beyond ethanol to more efficient biofuels, such as biobutanol, which has properties closer to petrol than ethanol and can also be produced from sugar cane, and cellulosic ethanol, which can be made by using the entire plant, including non-edible wastes.

Today, over 90% of the cars produced in Brazil are ‘flex fuel’ – able to run on any combination of ethanol and petrol – and they are expected to represent 75% of the total fleet by 2020. Honda has already introduced the first flex fuel motorbike, and there are hopes to convert agricultural equipment, now powered by diesel, to biofuels in the future.

The combination of even more efficient flex fuel vehicles with advanced biofuels will help to drive a lower-carbon future for transport in Brazil and worldwide. – Anna Simpson Opposite: A sweeter harvest: new techniques increasing yields while cutting out unsustainable practices such as burning the cane

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SambaPhoto/Paulo Fridman/Getty. AFP/Stringer/Getty. Superstudio/Getty. Ricardo Teles/ddbstock

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he sun is weighing down upon the high plateaus of Goiás where the long, dry season has set in, and the sugar cane harvest – which stretches from April to November – is in full swing.

But there isn’t a traditional cane cutter or a burning field in sight. Instead, large machines loom over the fields, sucking up the tall thick grass and spitting out pure cane.

This conversion of the harvest from mostly manual techniques to 100% mechanical impacts on much more than the scenery, by improving safety conditions for those who work on the harvest. It is also one of many efficiency improvements at Tropical BioEnergia – a joint venture involving theBrazilian companies Santelisa Vale and Maeda Group, and the international energy company BP – which have helped to

Green Futures January 2010

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revolut in the s Antonio Ascoli: before the hydro, we were just clinging on

Martin Wright. South American Pictures/Tony Morrison.

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Farmers are doing it for themselves

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n tHE DEEP SOUtH of Brazil, in the rolling countryside of the Rio Grande do Sul, there’s a revolution under way.

This isn’t about political turmoil – but it is transforming lives. It’s a very physical revolution. The kind that happens when a rush of water hits the blades of a turbine and spins it around, generating electricity.

Brazil’s big dams are a mixed blessing, but the hydro power here is on a much more human – and sustainable – scale. Two ‘mini-hydro’ plants, installed by the Cooperativa Regional de Eletrificacao Rural do Alto Uruguai Ltda (CRERAL), a cooperative owned and run by local people, are bringing robust, reliable supplies of power to thousands of farming families across the remote Alto Uruguai region.

Local co-ops such as CRERAL were set up in the 1960s and 70s in an effort to speed the electrification of remote areas.

They are responsible for buying in power and selling it onto their members.

But by the mid-90s, their members were increasingly frustrated by persistent power shortages and blackouts. It made it difficult to modernise their homes and farms, and their children were starting to turn their backs on rural life to seek better opportunities elsewhere. They voted in a new leadership, under President João Alderi do Prado, with new ideas – notably that of generating their own power. It seems to have worked.

Now that the two mini-hydro plants, with a combined capacity of 1.9MW, have come onstream, things are changing. More power means there’s enough juice to run everything from irons, showers, fridges and freezers, to agricultural equipment like milking machines. This has not only improved people’s quality of life, but also their income. As farmer Vilson Antonio Ascoli told me: “It was a huge difference when the hydro came.

Green Futures January 2010

Before we were just clinging on, really. Now we’ve got the milk cooler, and the freezer for the meat, so we can store more and sell more as a result. Our income’s gone up by at least 50%.

So we’ve bought more cows – we have 10 now”. His wife, Terezhina, added: “We can have different things going at the same time. I can have a shower while he’s watching the TV”.

A neighbouring farmer, Alcir Bertiol, agreed. “It’s much better now I can rely on the fridge. It means I can store the milk till the tanker comes. I had the fridge before, but you never knew for certain if there’d be power or not. If the power was out, you’d still have to milk the cows, but your work would go literally down the drain.”

At present, the two plants meet around a quarter of CRERAL members’ total electricity needs. (The rest is bought in from conventional sources.) The co-op is now investing in a further four mini-hydro schemes, which should enable it to cover most, if not all, of the demand – giving it effective energy independence. It is doing so on a purely commercial (not subsidised) basis. And it has started to attract carbon funding, as well.

There’s no reason why others can’t follow CRERAL’s example, says Alderi, as surveys show this region alone has “hundreds” of sites suitable for mini-hydro.

CRERAL’s prospects were boosted by a flood of publicity in Brazil and elsewhere when it won an Ashden Award for Sustainable Energy in 2008. As electricity prices increase, so the economic logic of its approach – and of decentralised energy in general – seems set to become ever more apparent. And now that Alderi has served as an adviser to the Government’s ‘Luz para Todos’ (Light for All) programme, there are hopes that it will influence national policy, too. – Martin Wright

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tion south

Soft power Unlike the big dams, mini-hydro has a minimal impact on the environment. Rather than flood vast areas, they work by diverting just a small portion of the river along a small channel (or ‘leat’). This runs along the contours of the hillside until the difference in height between it and the valley below is enough to give a sufficient ‘head’ of water power. At that point it cascades down a large pipe (‘penstock’) into the hydro plant, where the force of the falling water turns the turbines. It then escapes back into the river.

Unlike Brazil’s big dams (below), mini hydro plants like this one at Abauna (main photo) allow both the river and the salmon to pass freely

Hydro worth a dam?

There’s a huge amount at stake on the Madeira river. As the largest tributary of the Amazon, it’s seen by Brazil’s energy planners as a vital resource for hydropower.

Giant dams at Jirau and San Antonio, slated to deliver in excess of 3,000 megawatts each by 2013, have been described as the top priority in the drive to meet the country’s electricity needs. But the opposition, it’s clear, just won’t go away.

However much the Government tries to minimise it, the displacement of indigenous forest dwellers is one flash point. Protests have already held up construction at Jirau, where cost estimates are spiralling away from the original $5.3 billion budget. Flooding could be greatly aggravated, as the Government of neighbouring Bolivia has complained, by the accumulation of huge quantities of sediment normally carried down by the flow of the Madeira.

Environmental disruption in the construction phase could be substantial, with massive equipment and teams of workers coming in. The contractors have already incurred penalty fines over incidents of illegal forest destruction and fish killed by dynamite. More fundamentally, the dams risk upsetting the breeding cycles of catfish and other species by obstructing their way upstream.

There’s a further dimension, too, which casts differing drivers of the future of the Amazon region into sharp relief. The scheme’s opponents have nightmares about what they fear is the developers’ dream: a dammed Madeira as a massive commercial waterway. A cost-effective way of getting soybeans out to export markets would make developmental pressure on the surrounding forests and tropical savannah even harder to resist. What price, then, the protection of its native peoples, its rich biodiversity, and its vital global role as a carbon sink? – Roger East

Green Futures January 2010

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Downloading the

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increasingly self-sustaining by stimulating local entrepreneurial activity. So project manager Bob Bortner helped create a Community Empowerment Network to provide ongoing assistance, encourage the creation of more local telecentres, build internet awareness and skills – and facilitate relationships via the web.

For instance, the community of Xixhua, 500km to the northwest, already has some experience of how internet access can open up a market for ecotourism and local art and artefacts. So links with Xixhua can help Suruacá see some of the opportunities – and the pitfalls. For all the benefits of email and web access, the community wants the technology to sustain their way of life, not undermine it.

It’s been part of the essence of the Suruacá project that it is community driven. It was local people who designed and put up the telecentre building, right next to the school – where the children soon found out that computers were for education as well as playing games. Access to information over the internet has helped hugely with healthcare too. It has also inspired the launch of a micro hydro scheme to improve the availability of electricity for local homes. And with Suruacá’s existing generator only switched on in the evenings, local interest in off-grid renewables is surely set to grow. – Roger East

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LOOK Die Bildagentur der Fotografen GmbH/Alamy

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here is no road to Suruacá. The river’s the highway for small Amazonian settlements like this. A full six hours by boat up the Tapajós from the nearest sizeable town, it’s not where you’d expect to find the model for a modern, linked community.

Yet Suruacá’s 100 or so families are pioneers in a project bringing internet access to local people – via the region’s first solar powered telecentre.

Providing access to energy is one of Brazil’s great development challenges, with an estimated 12 million people currently living out of range of electricity supplies. Sunshine, though, is something the country does have in plenty. And for the last six years a 2kW photovoltaic system on the top of the telecentre in Suruacá has been turning that sunshine into electric power. It’s enough to run four computers for eight hours a day, plus a local radio service that’s on air for four hours a day, the satellite that hooks the whole thing up to the internet, and a set of associated printers, scanners and cameras.

Initial funding came from the US development agency USAID, working alongside local NGOs with the GreenStar Corporation as technology providers. The idea was that an emerging internet enabled network should become

Opposite page: BrazilPhotos.com/Alamy. Sue Cunningham Photographic/Alamy

sun

Pole position: solar brings power to remote communities

Access all areas The mean streets of São Paulo seem far removed from rural Amazonia – but lack of electric power points in poor communities is a common thread. So is the potential for solar powered internet solutions. And Professor Marcelo Zuffo at São Paulo University, a powerhouse of innovation in what he calls “interactive electronics”, has now come up with “wifi access in a box”. It doesn’t need plugging into anything, and it’s inexpensive and small enough to hang from a lamp-post or a tree, but Zuffo believes it could turbocharge such “IT for all” access initiatives as the global One Laptop Per Child scheme.

Essentially what he has done is combine a solar panel with a cheap motorcycle battery to store the charge, and some electronic circuitry to run a mini wifi access point. If a number of access points are set up in a honeycomb configuration, each one will provide relaying services to the others, giving a wide area network with the best available links to the internet. The hard part is the energy management.

It’s good enough already to keep running for two days without sunlight, says Zuffo, but he’s aiming to stretch that to ten – enough for real standalone capability even in the dark days of the rainy season. – Roger East

LOW RES

“All we need now are the bikes”

Sun and speed Energy giant Petrobras is taking a first step towards solar power for the nation’s vast motorbike fleet, with a new charging station in Rio de Janeiro. The station, which uses grid power at night, is powered by photovoltaics while the sun’s up. There are currently just a few hundred electric bikes on Brazil’s roads, but Petrobras hopes to raise awareness of solar technology and the potential for change by providing infrastructure for bikes in places where it is hard to park, for example. According to the head of Petrobras’s distribution division, Edimar Machado, the solar charging stations will build “environmental awareness by showing people that it is possible to use energy without harming the environment”. – Ben Tuxworth

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Creativity

begins “ when you cut a zero from your budget”

Green city blue: Curitiba makes space for floodplains and forests

Jaime Lerner tells Green Futures how to redesign a city, what Brazil’s major metropolises have yet to learn, and why urban acupuncture is the way forward.

David Silerman/Staff/Getty

“w

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hen it comes to urban design, here’s the rule of thumb: city = life, work and mobility.” Jaime Lerner, former Mayor of Curitiba turned green city guru, is never short on soundbites. They helped him get elected back in the 1970s, when his urban master plan did so much to transform the city. And he wields them neatly to sum up the various successes along the way – from the celebrated rapid transit system, to overcoming the city’s notorious flood problems. Or as Lerner puts it: “While other cities buried rivers in concrete, we created parks along ours.”

And the parks aren’t just for the pleasure. As natural floodplains, they offer a more effective defence against seasonal flooding than concrete barriers, and can be used as boating lakes when the Iguazu River bursts its banks. It’s a strategy now being adopted as far away as the Netherlands, as governments look to adapt to climate change.

This respect for the pre-urban landscape helped Curitiba to hang onto a dwindling resource that many cities destroy, only to spend millions bringing it back: green space. “When we started planning, we came up with the idea of establishing

Green Futures January 2010

a ‘grid’ for Curitiba, and occupying some of its cells with parks. But as time went on, we saw that a better idea was to save the existing – but endangered – forest remnants. With this policy, even as the population tripled, we were able to increase the amount of green areas per inhabitant from 0.5 metres squared (m2) to 52m2.”

The importance of green space to good health and quality of life is undisputed, “and if a city has quality of life,” says Lerner, “naturally it has a very strong sustainability component”. By way of example he comments that by living close to your work, or bringing your work closer to home, you’re both improving the quality of life and reducing demand for transport.Curitiba is perhaps best known for its extraordinarily cheap and effective transport system, the Bus Rapid Transit (BRT). With triple-section bendy buses in dedicated bus lanes, it carries two million passengers a day, as many as some subway systems. But where an underground rail network costs as much as $100 million per kilometre, the BRT costs just $1 million per kilometre. “Creativity begins when

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Paradise Glazed: The main greenhouse of Curitiba’s Botanical Garden offers a reference collection of native flora and tropical plants from the Atlantic Forests of eastern Brazil. Appearing almost imperial in its scale and grandeur, but built as recently as 1991, the greenhouse is a symbol of the city’s growing self-confidence and its commitment to conservation.

A quick, precise touch Of course, Lerner acknowledges, this system can’t just be copied and transferred to any urban area. “Every city has to make the best out of each mode of transportation it has, be it on the surface or underground. The key resides in not having competing systems on the same space, and using everything that the city has in the most effective way.”

Lerner began with a simple dream for Curitiba: health, education, childcare. But he is quick to acknowledge that he couldn’t have changed a thing if others hadn’t shared his vision. “A city is a collective dream,” he says, “and to build this dream is vital.” This is where leadership and good communication skills come in. Building the dream means creating scenarios of a possible future that are “desired by the majority”. Because unless the inhabitants share the dream and can believe in it, their “essential involvement” will be lacking.

The downside, he jokes, is that once you start the population dreaming, it’s hard to get them to stop: “The more the population gets used to advances, the more demanding it becomes. Managing Curitiba became a commitment of constant innovation”. Rather than stem the dream, Lerner recommends ‘urban acupuncture’ as a cure for all sorts of urban problems from neglect of the natural environment to poor economic management.

“It’s a quick, precise touch in a key point,” he explains.

“Just as in the medical approach, strategic ‘punctual interventions’ create a new energy that will trigger positive chain-reactions, helping to cure and enhance the whole system.”

And the cure for environmental damage on a larger scale – like climate change? The same rule applies, says Lerner.

“Around 75% of global carbon emissions are related to cities.

And little by little, it is becoming clear that it is in the cities that we can bring about more efficient and effective changes.” – Anna Simpson and Ben Tuxworth.

Adriano Valenga Carneiro/Shutterstock. Paulo Fridman/Corbis

you cut a zero from your budget,” Lerner laughs. Fares on the buses are flat, and the city’s growth has been planned along the routes, so that no one lives or works more than 400 metres from a bus stop.

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All aboard the bendy bus

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Mais vida – This page: A & J Visage/Alamy. Opposite page: Xico Putini/Shutterstock, EVARISTO SA/Staff/Getty, James P. Blair/Contributor/Getty.

Imaginative new initiatives are help out of poverty. But effective lan

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from white gold to green revival

a carpet of leaves

Four hundred years ago, the hills and plains by the Capibaribe River in Pernambuco were home to over 60 sugar cane mills, making ‘white gold’ for trade in Europe. It was a rich business, but the Portuguese elite took much of the profit, leaving local workers little to show for their labour.

Time has passed, but the sugar cane industry still defines socio-economic conditions in the small city of Araçoiaba, on the outskirts of Pernambuco’s main industrial zone and commercial centre, Recife. The availability of work, and often the wage, depends on the season and the climate, and a year of drought can mean no work at all.

By 2005, high unemployment and low wages had granted Araçoiaba the lowest Human Development Index rating in the Metropolitan Region of Recife, and an increasingly unreliable climate made for grim prospects. So why, in the few years since, has the city seen a rise in family income, more people in education than ever before, and the inauguration of five new libraries?

It’s largely down to Mais Vida (‘More Life’), a social project that’s encouraging local families to take their health, rights and quality of life into their own hands. Set up by the Unilever Institute in partnership with a number of trade, industry and craft associations in 2005, Mais Vida recruits local residents to raise awareness of new initiatives and drive change in all aspects of their lives, from health and education, to digital inclusion and handicraft.

Success stories include a medical check-up for over 4,000 children, combining oral healthcare with diabetes and blood tests, all while promoting leisure activities like the Afro-Brazilian art form, Capoeira. – Anna Simpson

Luca Allegro found himself at the annual World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, with the words “social entrepreneur” printed on his name badge. “It didn’t sound quite right because I’m just a farmer, really.”

But behind Allegro’s modesty lies a mission.

He is International Business Consultant for the Association of Small Farmers of Valente (APAEB), a co-operative farming organisation founded in 1980 to support farmers working in semi-arid region of Bahia, in the northeast of Brazil. Their main crop?

The native succulent agave plant, sisal.

Sisal has striking sword-shaped leaves that reach up to two metres high, and each of these leaves contains as many as 1,000 fibres that can be extracted and dried to make rope, paper, cloth, wall coverings, carpets – even dartboards. Thirty years on, APAEB works with 2,000 local farmers and has an annual revenue of over $7 million.

Allegro describes the venture as a direct trade initiative. The co-operative grows, buys and processes sisal to make high-quality finished carpets, adding value to the product before selling it on.

And, although the fibres only account for 5% of the plant’s weight, there’s little waste. The APAEB mixes the remaining vegetable matter with pulp from cactus leaves to feed to goats. The result is an integrated system that produces raw material for textiles and dairy products for the community – all on relatively infertile land that has few other agricultural uses. The money from these sales has allowed the community to set up a local radio station and a small bank, which helps fund other income-generating activities, so diversifying the local economy. – Arran Frood

Green Futures January 2010

– mais terra?

ping lift Brazil’s agricultural workers nd reform remains a challenge.

Fertile feuds Occupy. Resist. Produce. That’s one strategy carried out by the largest social pressure group in Latin America, the Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra, or Movement of Landless Workers (MST). The group organises over 1.5 million people to win legal rights to the land that they farm.

And occupy and produce they do. By seizing land that would otherwise have been left fallow, the MST has set up co-operative farms, and constructed houses, schools and clinics for the communities that work them. Moreover, by adding value to the land, they have won legal ownership for more than 350,000 families.

So far so good. But it’s come at a price, both human and environmental. In some areas, occupations

have led to lethal armed conflict between landowners and settlers. (The settlers usually come off worse.) And conservationists are concerned that a movement aimed at alleviating poverty is also driving deforestation.

For its part, the Movement claims that its unauthorised occupations are in line with Brazil’s constitution, which requires the Government to “expropriate for the purpose of agrarian reform, rural property that is not performing its social function”.

And under President Lula, the Government seems to be responding – to a degree. At his election in 2002, President Lula pledged to fight rural poverty by settling 400,000 families during his first term. But he is lagging behind target. Part way through his second term, the total number of resettled families is 380,000.

On the thorny question of Amazon settlement, there is some progress underway in the form of blossoming partnerships between the Ministry of Agrarian Development, state governments, and programmes such as Terra Legal. This latter aims to win tenure for 300,000 holdings occupied by MST squatters in the Amazon. Working together, they hope to harness this legal tug of war to push through strong forest conservation and restoration measures.

If the settlers can conserve remaining rainforest, rather than drive its destruction, then Brazil could go some way to reconciling social progress with environmental sustainability. – Arran Frood

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The greening of the

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razilian business isn’t always seen as a natural ally of the green movement. Its largest company, for example, is Petrobras, whose aggressive exploitation of oil and gas reserves is pumping vast quantities of carbon into the atmosphere. Other businesses have profited handsomely from the conversion of forests to cattle ranching or soya farming. But the country is no stranger to paradox: many Brazilian companies have shown a willingness to pursue sustainability with a zeal unmatched by other ‘developing’ countries.

Take Petrobras. Its core activity may be fundamentally unsustainable – but it is widely acknowledged as a leader when it comes to sustainability reporting and good governance. Its CSR report came top out of a field of 800 in a stakeholder poll conducted by the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI). It features prominently on the Dow Jones Sustainability Index, which tracks the financial performance of the world’s leading sustainability-driven firms. It even won plaudits for openness from Transparency International…

And it’s not alone. Altogether, some 27 Brazilian firms have registered their sustainability reports with the GRI - an impressively high number. Of fellow BRIC nations, China has just eight companies on the list, while India has 11. Brazil also has its own sustainable business index, the Indice de Sustentabilidade Empresarial (ISE). And the São Paulo stock exchange (BOVESPA) has recently introduced the Novo Mercado listing for companies that voluntarily undertake to deliver corporate governance and transparency targets beyond compliance.

A 2008 survey by consultants SustainAbility, titled The Road to Credibility, placed Brazilian business as among the leaders in emerging economies when it came to corporate disclosure of sustainable performance – although it highlighted continuing concerns over a lack of transparency in some areas.

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For Fernando Almeida, the Executive President of the Brazilian Business Council for Sustainable Development, all this comes as no great surprise. “The big companies know that… when you get involved with sustainability you get better media coverage, you become more efficient and more competitive, and your clients are more loyal. So they realise that the road to sustainability is always a good one to go down.”

The economy’s swift exit from recession means that many of Brazil’s major companies have avoided some of the cost pressures which have squeezed sustainability budgets in Europe and the US. But it’s the next tier down where the real innovation is happening. No company reflects that better than Natura Cosmeticos, a direct sales cosmetics and beauty products firm that is perhaps the most respected of all Brazil’s green enterprises. It topped the table of all Brazilian companies in the SustainAbility survey.

As its name suggests, Natura’s focus is unabashedly on natural ingredients, including essences and oils of everything from avocado to passion fruits. It was the first Brazilian company to use refillable containers, and is committed to reducing its greenhouse gas emissions by 33% before 2011.

It’s phased out animal testing, along with all petroleumand animal-based ingredients.The company employs an astonishing 800,000-plus freelance sales agents, providing them with basic training in environmental literacy. And its suppliers and partners are contractually bound to meet Natura’s own ecological and social standards.

All of which makes good business sense, says Marcos Vaz, Natura’s Director of Sustainability. “Society will pay more and more attention to the balanced use of natural resources, to social inclusion and social justice.” It seems to have served Natura well. Since 1969, it has grown from a small São Paulo enterprise to become Brazil’s biggest cosmetics firm, its vast network of agents selling 740 products door-to-door across Latin America. Around 2 billion reais (£660 million) of the company’s 4.9 billion reais turnover in 2008 ended up in the

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SambaPhoto/Araquem Alcantara/Getty

Business in Brazil is surprisingly keen on sustainability.

Andrew Downie and Martin Wright find out why.

Banking on the planet No fewer than four of the seven Brazilian companies that made the Dow Jones Sustainability Index (DJSI) are banks. It’s not down to their use of recycled paper or low-energy light bulbs, but their lending policies. That, at least, is the view of officials from Itau-Unibanco, the company formed last year when two of Brazil’s biggest financial institutions merged.

Itau-Unibanco values the so-called ‘triple bottom line’ of social, economic and environmental criteria. So when deciding who gets credit, the bank gives special consideration to companies that reduce their carbon footprint and their energy spending, that recycle, hire minorities, and invest in the environment.

Sticking to these principles led Itau to be named Latin America’s Most Sustainable and Ethical Bank by Management and Excellence Consultants. It has also been on the DJSI for ten years, longer than any other Brazilian bank. Both are a matter of pride to Itau president Roberto Setubal. “The ranking ratifies our work in continuously broadening the value we generate for our investors, shareholders and clients”, he declared.

Meanwhile, in 2006, Banco Real – a Brazilian subsidiary of Santander – became the first financial institution from an emerging economy to be named overall winner in the Financial Times Sustainable Banking Award. The judges praised its “radical vision for sustainability in Latin America: it believes a bank is only as sound as the society that surrounds it… Sustainability”, said the judges, labouring a rather well-worn cliché, “is in its DNA”.

Leaving aside the question of genetic make-up, there’s no doubt that with Brazilian interest rates among the highest in the world, its banks are ridiculously profitable. They can put that money to good use, said Fernando Almeida – financing everything from recycling to green regeneration, to micro-credit style loans for people living at the “bottom of the pyramid”.

bottom line pockets of its sales agents. “Sustainability and corporate social responsibility is part of Natura’s DNA,” says Ana Luisa Almeida, head of the Reputation Institute in Brazil. “It is in the value chain of all their products and in the way they deal with the consumer. [Natura] has responsibility written all over it.”

Such success stories have not always been typical in a nation with a reputation for boom and bust. Brazil grew quickly for most of the 20th century but was hit by oil shocks and fiscal mismanagement in the 1970s, and in the 80s, Latin America’s lost decade, it was swimming in debt. Things improved in the 90s, but there were still unsettlingly rapid periods of growth and sharp downturns.

All that uncertainty, though, had the upside of forcing Brazilians to become creative in finding solutions to everyday problems. One typical example is recycling.

Brazilians are among the world’s most assiduous recyclers. In plastic bottles, for example, only Japan recycles more than Brazil. In aluminium, too, Brazil is out in front, recycling 96.5% of all cans sold – which in 2007 came to an astonishing 11.9 billion, equivalent to 1.4 million an hour. It’s the same story in glass and steel.

Smart companies have seized on this enthusiasm and made an innovative business model out of it. The Ecoelce electricity company, based in the northern city of Fortaleza, is one of them. It allows residents to swap recyclable products for credits off their electricity bills. Citizens of Fortaleza and another seven nearby municipalities separate their refuse and then hand over anything from plastic bottles to paper to cooking oil. Each kilo or litre is worth a set price at special collection points set up across the region, and this is recorded on a credit card issued by Ecoelce.

Citizens can also get cards in the name of charities or community services such as crèches. At the end of the month,

Protocol promise For the 30 companies which together account for 20% of the country’s commercial CO2 emissions, the Brazil Greenhouse Gas Protocol is an opportunity to show serious intent on measuring, reporting and cleaning up their act. Launched in May 2008, the Protocol makes Brazil the third country, after Mexico and the Philippines, to develop an emissions accounting system based on the model developed by the World Resources Institute. Petrobras, Ford Brasil, Walmart Brasil and Whirlpool were among the first to join up. Altogether, a total of 27 Brazilian companies are now logging annual emissions in preparation for any future legislation. – Ben Tuxworth

the money recorded is subtracted from their electricity bill.

Around 160,000 people have signed up to the scheme, says Odailton Arruda, the programme’s manager. “People in the middle and working classes can pay their entire bills this way, and people in the upper classes use it because they want to do something for the environment and help charitable institutions pay their bills.”Although still early days, it is already self-sustaining. “Today we neither make nor lose money on it,” Arruda says. When you bear in mind that the governments of more developed countries constantly fret about the cost of recycling, that is quite an achievement. And a tribute, in its way, to Brazilian enterprise.

Green Futures January 2010

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Favela futu It’s time to make Rio’s favelas an integral part of its success, says Damian Platt.

Mauricio Hora

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he colourful sprawl of make-shift housing over the hillsides of Rio de Janeiro are as much a symbol of the city as Christ the Redeemer or Copacabana beach. Taking their name from a resilient shrub found in northern Brazil’s inhospitable backlands, the favelas have been home to the city’s poorest communities since the end of the 19th century, and now number over 1,020 in Rio alone.

Relations between city authorities and the vibrant favela communities have always been strained, with officials unwilling to recognise the economic benefit their inhabitants bring to the city through poorly paid service jobs. But though held back by labels of poverty and violence, the favelas are home to an aspirational population ready to take its place in society. Initiatives that integrate the favelas with the city are an essential step on the road to a sustainable Rio, and forwardthinking businesses are beginning to wake up to this reality.

Mobile phone and computer companies are among those taking a lead. Many of the favelas now have free wifi,

Green Futures January 2010

and inhabitants are turning the technology to their advantage.

One non-profit organisation, Rede Jovem or “Youth Net”, has recruited five young women to log and name the unmapped streets, shops and meeting points of five favelas. The project is funded by a research institute belonging to Oi, Brazil’s largest telephone operator. “People think that there’s nothing here but violence,” says Alini dos Santos Silva, a ‘wikireporter’ from Pavao-Pavaozinho. “But I want to show them! The favelas are above all places of life, of meetings.”

Mixed messages Favelas have other advantages, too. For many, they provide the best low-cost housing currently on offer. And the central location of favelas like Rocinha takes some weight off the heavily congested public transport system.

But while businesses are recognising their potential, the state is sending out a different message. 2009 saw the start of construction of a three metre high concrete barrier around 11 of Rio’s favelas. The authorities argue that the wall will help the

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police to overcome violent drug gangs, and that it will protect the edges of the Atlantic rainforest, which borders on the city, from deforestation due to expanding settlements.

But for many residents, it means further rejection and segregation, inciting comparisons to Israel’s much criticised ‘security wall’. According to the national newspaper O Globo, over 500 houses will be destroyed to make way for the wall in Rio’s South Zone. Its construction has been planned to coincide with social investment programmes aimed at residents of the favelas, such as micro-credit schemes for small businesses.

While many dismiss these programmes as cynical attempts to win over the locals, they do suggest that the state government is beginning to recognise the potential social and economic value of the favelas, and to invest in their future. Now perhaps, it needs to reassure them that it isn’t trying to wall off the favelas from the future Rio. Damian Platt is a writer and cultural activist based in Rio de Janeiro.

On the hillside above Rio’s beach district of Leme, looking down over the ocean and across to Sugarloaf Mountain, sits the favela of Babilônia – home to some 4,000 people. Bird-watchers can catch a glimpse of rare species, including the toucan and jacupemba, and well designed ‘ecopaths’ mean tourists can get a close-up of the natural wonders without any threat to the wildlife.

It hasn’t always been so idyllic. Deforestation, to make way for informal settlements like Babilônia on the mountain slopes, had caused severe erosion, leaving the city vulnerable to landslides. But in 2001, a group of residents set up CoopBabilônia, the Co-operative for the Reforestation of Babilônia. With financial support from the nearby Rio Sul shopping centre, one of the largest in the city, the Co-operative employs 23 workers to clear areas of weeds and grass, and replant species native to the rainforest using tools supplied by the mayor’s office. And it has begun to earn its way like a business, hiring out its technical expertise to both public and private sector clients, and designing environmental projects for them.

Recently, CoopBabilônia has begun to encourage eco-tourism, organising walks three times a year that are open to the public. The design and maintenance of ‘eco-paths’ has also served as a means of setting and protecting the borders of the APAs (‘Areas of Ambiental Preservation’) with a specific objective of monitoring irregular construction projects.

It was also involved in the construction of one of Rio’s first green roofs. The naturally filtered rainwater is captured for use in the school – a welcome bonus in Babilônia, where water shortages are commonplace. For Carlos Antônio Pereira, a founder of the project, this sort of reward is no more than expected: “The more you invest in a community and its workers, the more xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx benefits you reap for the entire city”. – Damian Platt

Green Futures January 2010

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Yes, toucan...

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rags to riches

Q

UEStiOn: what do you get if you cross some old rags with a favela co-operative?

anSwEr: a commercial-scale designer label which has graced the pages of vogue.

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From trash to fash

“Coopa-Roca enables women to fulfil their potential,” Leal said. “They can earn money without abandoning their homes or their children.”

In some ways, Coopa-Roca is an exception. Brazil’s fashion industry is worth over £18.9 billion annually – and growing. Much of it is geared to providing cheap clothes, with little or no consideration given to sustainability issues.

But some companies are looking for more innovative ways to design the fashion of the future. One such is E-Fabrics, a collaboration between Brazilian label Osklen and E-brigade, a network of retail stores selling sustainable Brazilian products internationally. E-Fabrics uses only fair trade or recycled materials, including Amazon rubber, treated cotton that takes on the quality of leather but involves no animal products, and even the skins of goldfish and frogs.

And it’s not just about clothes. Brazilian label Melissa makes stylish footwear from recycled plastics - including last year’s unsold stock. Following sales of more than 25 million pairs worldwide, they have set up high-profile collaborations with UK designer Vivienne Westwood and the renowned Iraqi architect Zaha Hadid. – Andrew Downie and Anna May Shamoon.

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Stephanie Maze / Contributor forward slash Getty. Paulo Whitaker/Corbis

At least, that’s the answer if you’re Rio sociologist María Teresa Leal. Back in the 1980s, Leal found untapped potential in the women of Rocinha, one of the sprawling favelas perched high on the hills above the city. She saw that they were regularly recycling rags to clothe their children, and thought they could make a living from their skills without having to compromise on domestic duties. Drawing on the women’s mutual love of fashion, Leal managed to bring them together in a sewing cooperative – and gave birth to Rocinha Co-operative of Women’s Artisans and Seamstresses, or Coopa-Roca for short.

She convinced textile companies to give her their unused scraps of cloth, and then trained the women in techniques such as fuxico (broidering with pieces of fabric), crochet and patchwork, all using recycled material. The women’s attempts at fashion design were not as brilliant as their sewing, however, and so they concentrated on making their mark on other people’s garments.

So they crochet, knit, attach and sew pieces together with their own touches that include pom-poms, frills, sequins and other accessories. The sheer quality of the finished garments has kicked deep into touch outdated notions that work from favelas is always of a low standard. Thirty years on, and Coopa-Roca has gained a worldwide reputation for craftsmanship, with a client list which includes internationally renowned designers such as Paul Smith, Todd Boontje and Carlos Miele.

Coopa-Roca’s women have crocheted CD covers for Gilberto Gil’s 28-CD boxed set, and put the finishing touches on Agent Provocateur lingerie. In 2009, they signed their biggest ever contract, to sew hundreds of limited edition Lacoste polo shirts. The deal will enable Coopa-Roca to double its workforce to more than 200 full- or part-time seamstresses.

“It’s a huge expansion for us,” says Leal.

Although Leal is the brains behind the organisation, Coopa-Roca is true to its cooperative background and the women vote on all big decisions and set their own production targets. They can choose to work from home, which is vital given that most of them have children to look after. Each is paid on a piece-rate basis and the only demand is that they meet their own targets.

Save the forest – Brazil’s image as a land of easy-going sensuality could be harnessed to help save the Amazon, says Conor Foley.

Green Futures January 2010

Gustavo Gilabert/Corbis. Damian Palus/istock

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help preserve the world’s largest rainforest. It opened a new razil’s reputation as a ‘sexy country’ factory, located in the northwestern Acre state, which will dates back to the seminal work of Gilberto Freyre, produce 100 million condoms a year. The latex comes from who wrote a rather idealised account of how its the Chico Mendes Reserve, named after the celebrated sensuous and promiscuous past had produced conservationist and rubber tapper who was killed by ranchers a beautiful inter-racial population. Although the country’s in 1988. shocking levels of contemporary inequality and violence Tapping rubber has long been a traditional way of life for cruelly mock his central thesis of a ‘racial democracy’, the many in the Amazon. It is sustainable because it does not kill ‘sexy Brazil’ image lives on. It’s there in Rio’s famous carnival, the trees, but the rubber is more in the beautiful bodies in bikiniexpensive than oil-based synthetic floss that adorn its beaches and, They’re giving you protection products, which have driven down more darkly, as home to one of the prices and put rubber-tappers world’s largest prostitution and sex out of business. By contrast, trafficking industries. the condom project is both But Brazil has also developed environmentally and economically a highly effective anti-HIV/AIDS sustainable. It will provide an campaign, which is widely credited income to around 550 families with having prevented the type and reduce the incentives for of epidemic that has devastated deforestation. The Government other developing countries. It’s says the condoms are the only succeeded despite the wrath of the ones in the world made of latex Catholic Church, of the previous harvested from a tropical forest.

US Administration – which made Similar schemes are also health funding conditional on being developed to produce countries signing ‘morality pledges’ and market handbags and purses from sustainable rubber.

– and of the big drug companies, whose patents Brazil has Treetap, for example, has patented a latex, which it sells under flouted to bring down the cost of antiretroviral drugs. In the its own brand name, certifying that its goods are produced face of such criticism, Brazilian officials refused to change their from natural rubber on a fair trade basis. approach, arguing that a key part of their success has been The company has placed rainforest because they deal in an accepting, open way with high-risk preservation at the centre of groups. The Director of its national AIDS programme famously its business plan, and rejected the US Government’s restrictions as “theological, works closely with fundamentalist the Rubber Tappers and Shiite”.

Association which The Brazilian Government is the largest single buyer Mendes founded. of condoms in the world, importing around a billion of ‘Sexy Brazil’ them every year. These are promoted using high profile is an already advertisements and a variety of outlets targeted to reach established at-risk groups. Most recently, the Government has started to brand, and if the include condoms in the basic basket of goods that it distributes Government’s for free to low income families as part of its strategy to combat sustainable hunger. This serves a double purpose, since there is a clear condoms project link between family planning and poverty reduction. When proves successful the Pope visited Brazil two years ago, President Lula took the domestically, then opportunity to speak out strongly in favour of sex education they could become a and proper provision of contraception for teenagers. product for export.

In 2008, the Government announced the start of a After all, who could new programme to produce condoms using environmentally refuse a longer-lasting sustainable rubber, which will curb its dependence on Brazilian orgasm? imported contraceptives, provide jobs for local people and

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BP Biofuels: www.bp.com/biofuels Defra: www.defra.gov.uk Unilever: www.unilever.com WWF: www.wwf.org.uk, www.wwf.org.br Editorial: Anna Simpson, Martin Wright Commissioning Editor: Ben Tuxworth Editorial Consultant (Brazil): Conor Foley Production: Katie Shaw Design: Jenny Searle Associates Printed on Sylvan Silk paper, made from 100% de-inked waste and FSC certified sources, by Beacon Press, using their pureprint® environmental print technology and vegetable based inks.

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