Hopeful lessons from the battle to save rainforests

When the Portuguese arrived
in Latin America

about 500 years ago,

they obviously found this
amazing tropical forest.

And among all this biodiversity

that they had never seen before,

they found one species that caught
their attention very quickly.

This species, when you cut the bark,

you find a very dark red resin

that 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.

Forest 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 boons to the atmosphere

20 billion tons of water everyday.

This is more than what the Amazon river,

which is the largest river 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
four 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 is
in the temperate zone,

and just one quarter is on the tropics,

but this one quarter, 1 billion hectares,

holds most of the biodiversity.

And very important,
50 percent of the living biomass,

the carbon.

Now we used to have like 6 billion
hectares of forest.

50 percent more than what we have,

2000 years ago.

We actually lost two billion hectares

in the last 2000 years.

But in the last 100 years,

we lost half of that.

That was when we shifted
from 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

in temperate forests.

That's the speed of the
destruction that we are having.

Now Brazil is an important
piece of this puzzle.

We have the second largest
forest in the world,

just after Russia.

It means 12 percent of all
the world's forests are in Brazil,

most of that is in the Amazon.

It's a largest piece
of forest that we have.

It's a very big, large area.

You can see that you can fit
many of the European countries there.

We still have 80 percent
of the forest cover.

That's the good news.

But we lost 15 percent in just 30 years.

So if you go with that speed,

very soon, we will loose this 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.

It's almost like 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 join a a team and find out

the causes of deforestation

and make a plan to combat that
at a national level,

involving the local governments,
the civil society,

the 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.

No, 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 happening,

almost in real time.

So now in Brazil, we have this system

that where every month,
or every two months,

we got information on where
deforestation is happening

so we can actually act
when it's happening.

And all the information
is fully transparent

so others can replicate that
in independent systems.

This allows us, among other things,

to apprehend 1.4 million
cubic 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
of local communities

as an endowment fund.

This is also allows us to make
big operations to seize corruption

and illegal activites

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 linked this to the end users.

So supermarkets,

the slaughterhouses, and so on

that buy products from
illegal clear-cut areas,

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 areas were created,

which is an area the size of Spain.

And from those, eight 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

that we had of the last decade,

we saved 8.7 million hectares,
which is the size of Austria.

But more important, it avoids
the emission of three billion tons

of CO2 in the atmosphere.

This is by far the largest contribution to
reduce greenhouse gas emissions,

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

because 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, in 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

as we just learned 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 about
the deforestation in the Amazon in 2013,

that was over half a million hectares,

which means that every minute,

an 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 biomes in Brazil,

we are talking about, still, the largest
deforestation rate in the world.

It's more or less like we are
forest heroes, but still,

deforestation champions.

So we can't be satisfied
or even close to satisfied.

So the next step, I think,

is to fight to have zero loss
of forest cover in Brazil

and to 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 deforestation,

so it's a big part of the problem.

But also, forests can be
a big part of the solution

since that'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

that we have a kind of alliance of 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, 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 beetle

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
one of the earliest

and the most affected
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 from there.

Now the challenge of climate change
is pretty straightforward.

The goal is very clear.

We want to limit increase of the
average tempreatrure

of the planet to two degrees.

There are several reasons for that.

I will not get into that now.

But in order to get into
this limit of two degrees,

which was possible for us to survive,

the IPCC,

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 one 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 61
by 2020.

Now we need to go down to 10 by 2050.

And while this happens,

the population will grow from
seven to nine billion people,

the economy will grow from
60 trillion dollars in 2010

to 200 trillion dollars.

And so what we need to do

is to be be much more
efficient in a way

that we can go from seven
tons of carbon per capita

per person, per year,

into something like one.

You 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 really do it?

I think so.

Think of this:

deforestation means 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.

So 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 more economy.

That's what we proved when we
decreased deforestation.

The economy continues to grow.

Same thing could happen
in the energy sector.

Second, we have to move
the 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 opportunities.

Fourth, we need to leapfrog the
routes of development,

which means, you don't need
to go to the landline 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

before we get to the clean energy.

And fifth and last,

we need to share responsibility
between government,

business, and civil society.

There is work to do for everybody,

and we need to have everybody onboard.

So to finalize,

I think the future is not like a fate

that you have to just to go
as business and usual goes.

We need to have the courage

to actually change the route,

invest in something new,

think that we can actually
change the route.

I think we are doing this with
deforestation in Brazil.

And I hope we can do it also
with climate change in the world.

Thank you.

(Applause).