When the Portuguese arrived in Latin America
about 500 years ago,
They found this amazing tropical forest.
And among all this biodiversity
that they had never seen before,
they found a species that caught their attention very quickly,
this species, when you cut the bark,
you find a very dark red resin.
It was very good to paint and dye fabric to make clothes
the indigenous people called this species "Pau Brasil".
and that's the reason why
this land became "land of Brasil",
and later on, Brazil.
that's the only country in the world
that has a name of a tree.
so, you can imagine that it's very cool
to be a forester in Brazil,
among other reasons.
Our forest's products are all around us.
Apart from all those products,
the forest is very important
for climate regulation.
In Brazil, almost 70 percent
of the evaporation that makes rain
actually comes from the forest.
Just the Amazon brings to the atmosphere
20 billion tons of water each day.
This is more than the Amazon river,
which is the largest in the world,
puts in the sea per day,
which is 17 billion tons.
If we have to boil water
to get the same effect of evapotranspiration,
we would need six months of the entire
power generation capacity of the world.
So it's a hell of a service for all of us.
We have in the world about 4 billion hectares of forest.
This is, more or less, China, US, Canada and Brazil all together.
In terms of size, to have an idea,
three quarters of that are in the temperate zone.
One quarter is one the tropics.
But this one quarter, 1 billion hectares
holds most of the biodiversity.
And very important,
50 percent of the living biomass in the carbon.
Now we used to have like 6 billion hectares of forest.
50 percent more than
what he had a billion years ago.
We actually use 2 billion hectares
in the last 2000 years.
In the last 100 years,
we lost half of that.
that was when we shifted form deforestation
of temperate forest
to deforestation of tropical forest.
So think of this,
in a hundred years,
we lost the same amount of forest
in the tropics that we lost in 2000 years.
That's the speed of the destruction that we are having.
Now Brazil is an important piece of this puzzle.
It's the second largest forest in the world,
just after Russia.
It makes makes 12 percent of all the world's forest is in Brazil,
most of that is in the Amazon.
It's a large piece of forest that we have.
It's a very big large area.
You can see that you can fit
many of the world's countries there.
We still have 80 percent of the forest cover,
which is good news.
But we last 15 percent in just 30 years.
So if you go with that speed,
very soon, we will loose the powerful pump that we have
in the Amazon
that regulates our climate.
Deforestation was growing fast and accelarating
at the end of the '90s and the beginning of 2000.
27 thousand square kilometers in one year,
this is 2.7 million hectares.
This is almost half of Costa Rica every year.
So at this moment,
this is 2003/2004,
I happened to be coming to work in the government.
And together with other teammates
in the National Forest Department,
we were assigned a task to try and find out
the causes of deforestation
and make a plan to combat that at a national level.
within the local governments,
the civil society,
and business, local communities,
on an effort that could tackle those causes.
So we came up with this plan with 144 actions
in different areas.
Now I will go through all of them one by one,
just giving some examples
of what has been done in the last years.
So the first thing, we set up a system
with the National Spacial Agency
that could actually see where deforeatation
is actually happening in real time.
So now in Brazil, we have this system
that where every month, or every two months,
we gather information on where deforestation is happening
So we can actually act when it's happening.
And all the information is transparent
so others can replicate it in independent systems.
This allows us, among other things,
to apprehend 1.4 million meters of logs
that were illegally taken.
Part of that, we saw and sell
and all the revenue became a fund
that now funds conservation projects with an endowment fund.
This is also allows us to make big operations to seize corruption
and illegal operations
that end up having 700 people in prison,
including a lot of public servants.
Then we make the connection
that areas that have been working
with illegal deforestation should not get any kind of credit or finance.
So we cut this through the bank system
and then link this to the end users:
to supermarkets, slaughter houses that but products
from illegal clearinghouses.
they also can be liable for the deforestation.
So making all these connections
to help to push the problem down.
And also we work a lot on land tenure issues.
It's very important for conflicts.
50 million hectares of protected land was created,
which is an area the size of Spain.
and from those, 8 million were indigenous lands.
Now we start to see results.
So in the last 10 years,
deforestation came down in Brazil 75 percent.
(Applause).
So if we compare it with the average deforestation of the last decade,
we saved 8.7 million hectares, which is the size of Austria.
Nut more important, it avoids the emission of 3 billion tons of carbon dioxide
in the atmosphere.
This is by far the largest contribution to reduce greenhouse gasses
contribution to reduce greenhouse gasses until today.
As a positive action, one may think
that when you do these kinds of actions to decrease, to push down deforestation,
you will have an economic impact,
then you will not be having economic activities,
or something like that.
But it's interesting to know that it's quite the opposite.
In fact, on the period when we have the deepest decline of deforestation,
the economy grew, on average double from the previous decade
when deforestation was actually going up.
So it's a good lesson for us,
maybe this is completely disconnected
and we just learn by having deforestation come down.
Now this is all good news
and it's quite an achievement
as we obviously should be quite proud about that.
But it's not even close to sufficient.
In fact, if you think of the deforestation in the Amazon in 2013,
that was over half a million hectares,
which means that every minute,
the area the size of two soccer fields
is being cut in the Amazon last year.
Just last year.
if we sum up the deforestation we have
in the other biomasses in Brazil,
we are talking about still the largest deforestation rate in the world.
It's more or less like we are forest heroes, and still,
deforestation champions.
We can't be satisfied or even close to satisfied.
So the next step, I think
is to have zero loss of forest cover in Brazil
and have that as a goal for 2020.
That's our next step.
Now I was always interested in the relationship
between climate change and forests.
Forests because 15 percent of the greenhouse gas emissions
come from forests.
So it's a big part of the problem.
Also, forests can be a big part of the solution
since it's the best way we know to sink, capture and store carbon.
Now there is another relationship between climate change and forests
that really stuck me in 2008 and made me change my career
from forests to working with climate change.
I went to visit Canada in British Columbia,
together with the chiefs of the forest services of other countries.
We have a kind of alliance with them, like canada, Russia, India, China, US.
And when we were there,
we learned about this Pine Beetle
that is literally eating the forest in Canada.
What we see here of those brown trees.
These are really dead trees,
they are standing dead trees.
Because of the larvae of the beetle,
what happens is that this beatle
is controlled by the cold weather in the winter.
For many years now, they don't have the sufficient cold weather
to actually control the population of this beetle
and it became a disease
that is really killing billions of trees.
So I came back with this notion that
the forest is actually the earliest
and the most effected victims of climate change.
So I was thinking,
if I succeed in working with all my colleagues
to actually help to stop deforestation,
maybe we will loose the battle
later on for climate change
by floods, heat, fires and so on.
So I decided to leave the forest service
and start to work directly on climate change,
finding ways to think and understand the challenge
and go for there.
Now the challenge of climate change is straightforward,
the goal is very clear.
We want to limit increase of t he average temperatrure
of the planet by two degrees.
There are several reasons for that.
I'm not going into that now.
But in order to get into this limit of two degrees,
which was possible for us to survive, the IPPCC
the International Panel on Climate Change
defines that we have a budget of emmisions
of 1000 billion tons of CO2
from now until the end of the century.
So if we divide this by the number of years,
what we have is an average budget of 11 billion tons of C02 per year.
Now what is one ton of CO2?
It's more or less what one small car,
running 20 kilometers a day,
will emit in one year.
Or it's flight, one way
from Sao Palo to Johanesburg or to London, one way.
Two ways, two tons.
So 11 billion tons is twice that.
Now the emissions today are 50 billion tons
and it's growing.
It's growing and maybe it will be 60 by 2020.
Now we need to go down to 10 by 2050.
And while this happens,
the population will grow from 7 to 9 billion people,
the economy will grow from 60 trillion dollars in 2010
to 200 trillion dollars.
And what we need to do is to
be much more efficient in a way
where we can go from seven tons of carbon per capita
per person per year
into something like one.
We have to choose.
You take the airplane
or you have a car.
So the question is, "Can we make it?"
And that's the exactly the same question
I got when I was developing a plan to combat deforestation.
It's such a big problem, so complex.
Can we do it?
I think so.
Think of this:
deforestation makes 60 percent of the greenhouse gas emissions
in Brazil in the last decade.
Now, it's a little bit less than 30 percent.
In the world, 60 percent is energy.
If we can tackle, directly, the energy,
the same way we could tackle deforestation,
maybe we can have a chance?
So there are five things that I think we should do.
First, we need to disconnect development
from carbon emissions.
We don't need to clear-cut all the forests to actually get more jobs
and agriculture and have economy.
That's what we proved when we decreased deforestation.
The economy actually grows.
Same thing could happen in the energy sector.
Second, we have to move these centers
to the right place
9move incentives to the right place)
today 500 billion dollars a year
goes into subsidies for fossil fuels
why don't we put a price on carbon
and transfer this to the renewable energy
third, we need to measure and make
it transparent where, when and who is
emitting greenhouse gases
so we can have actions specifically
for each one of those
fourth, we need to leapfrog the routes of development
which means, you don't need to go
to alandline telephone before you get
to the mobile phones
same way we don't need to go to fossil fuels
to the one billion people who don't
have access to energy to
get to the clean energy
fifth and last
we need to share responsibilities between government
business and civil society
there is work to do for everybody
and we need to have everybody involved
so to finialize
i think, the future is not like a fate
that you have to just to go to business and usual
we need to have the courage
to actually change the route
invest in something new
that we can actually change the route
i think we are doing this
with deforestation in brazil
i think we can do it also
with climate change in the world
thank you
applause