Brazil Puts Forward Global Plan to Wean World Off Fossil Fuels

Storage tanks near an oil refinery in Duque de Caxias, Rio de Janeiro state, Brazil.

In Dubai three years ago, the world struck a landmark agreement to transition away from burning fossil fuels. Yet how nations should go about achieving that mammoth task to curb climate change was largely left an open question.

Brazil, the host of last year’s United Nations COP30 climate summit, is now trying to answer it. On Tuesday it put forward a road map to help countries wean their economies off oil, gas and coal over the next decade. The idea is to diagnose just how reliant economies are on fossil fuel exports and imports, and then to design tailor-made solutions to phase them out.

“We need to move this agenda forward,” Ana Toni, an economist and chief executive officer of COP30, said in an interview. “Every country needs to start now.”

Since Dubai, countries have sparred over what shifting from fossil fuels actually means. The government of Saudi Arabia, for example, a major fossil fuel exporter, tried to walk back the Dubai deal by saying the pledge was just one component of an “a la carte” menu to tackle climate change. More than 80 countries called for a global deal to adopt a road map at COP30, but the initiative failed due to heavy opposition.

In the end, host Brazil took it upon itself to come up with plans for the fossil fuel transition and ending deforestation. As such, they are voluntary and don’t need to be negotiated by countries at a UN climate summit.

The fossil fuel road map sets out three phases. In the first, lasting the next two years, countries will be invited to assess their dependence on fossil fuel imports and exports, as well as the capacity of their economies to transition off them. Each country will then be categorized under a dozen “archetypes” — ranging from frontrunners to those constrained by fiscal challenges — which in turn point to different policy “levers” that can accelerate the green shift. That will inform COP33 in 2028, which is when the UN’s next so-called Global Stocktake falls due.

In the second phase, countries will evaluate how much climate progress they’ve made and outline what more they can do to close the gap with the Paris Agreement goal of keeping global warming to 1.5C above pre-industrial levels.

The final period from 2031 to 2033 will focus on how to curb fossil fuel supplies, marking a decade since countries first agreed to move away from them. The road map expects broad deployment of measures to limit their usage by 2035.

The scale of the challenge is immense. Last month the UN Environment Programme said that emissions would have to fall 18% by 2030 from 2025 levels in order to achieve the “lowest possible” overshoot of 1.5C. Only five countries out of an assessed 71 have an active pledge to phase out fossil fuel subsidies, according to a report from the London School of Economics published Tuesday. Countries including the UK, Canada and Brazil are exploring opportunities to boost fossil fuel production.

The fossil fuel and deforestation road maps come little more than a week after Brazil’s President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva defied expectations to secure a fourth term, beating climate skeptic Flávio Bolsonaro. For Toni, the result shows why the transition needs to be implemented at both national and international levels in order to safeguard progress.

Brazil registered its lowest deforestation rate on record over the past year. The deforestation road map focuses on how to measure levels of forest degradation, as well as making sure there’s sufficient finance to halt and reverse deforestation by the end of the decade.

Turkey will host COP31, which starts next week in the coastal city of Antalya. Negotiations are expected to focus on electrification and cutting methane emissions, rather than the underlying need to shift from fossil fuels, since the final agreement will require consensus of the nearly 200 nations that plan to attend. Still, there will be intense discussions on the sidelines about the overarching objective, according to Toni.

“This is a new phase of implementation,” she said of the path away from fossil fuels. “It cannot be a taboo.”

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