Brazil publishes first global ‘roadmap’ for phasing out fossil fuels

Cop30 host sets out steps to break link with coal, oil and gas as it aims to move focus from negotiating to implementing

All countries can start to break their dependence on fossil fuels now without needing to wait for new technologies or economic changes, Brazil’s government has said ahead of a global climate summit.

Brazil, the host of last year’s UN climate conference, set out the world’s first global “roadmap” for phasing out fossil fuels on Tuesday, showing that countries could boost their economies and pull people out of poverty while breaking the link with coal, oil and gas.

But Joeri Rogelj, a professor of climate science and policy at Imperial College London, said that although the Brazilian roadmaps represented a step forward, they were limited. “The roadmaps are valuable but fall short of clearly indicating the pace of change needed by including no timeline or key benchmarks,” he said.

“Because of this omission, they still leave much to be imagined about what is needed to achieve the Paris agreement’s ultimate goal: limiting global warming to well below 2C, and preferably to 1.5C, to avoid dangerous climate harm.”

André Corrêa do Lago, Brazil’s president of the Cop30 summit, said the roadmaps were intended to help move the annual UN Cops away from their previous focus on negotiating global agreements to tackle the climate crisis, and on to implementing the targets that had already been agreed. Cop31 takes place in Antalya, Turkey, this month.

“They are documents of implementation,” Corrêa do Lago told the Guardian in an interview. “There is a different group of people that negotiate and that implement. The problem we’ve had at many Cops is to think that the same people who negotiate might also need to coordinate the implementation – this is not the case.”

He said the roadmaps should be taken up by ministries of finance, transportation, energy and infrastructure to work on how they could be implemented in each country.

Brazil hosted the Cop30 summit last November in the coastal city of Belém, in the Amazon rainforest, where a bitter dispute broke out over whether the final set of resolutions should include pledges on fossil fuels. As a compromise, the presidency agreed to produce two roadmaps, one on “transitioning away from fossil fuels in energy systems in a just orderly and equitable manner” and the other on halting and reversing deforestation.

These roadmaps are separate from similarly named plans from governments that met after Cop30 at a conference in Santa Marta, Colombia, in April, to discuss the transition away from fossil fuels. At that conference, nearly 60 countries formed a new “coalition of the willing”, separate to Cops, to set out their own national roadmaps to phase out fossil fuels. Several countries have since produced national plans, including Germany, France and the Netherlands.

The roadmaps produced by governments under the Santa Marta initiative are much more specific and prescriptive than Brazil’s, as each of those is written by the national government responsible for implementing the policies recommended.

The Brazilian roadmaps only set out steps that are possible. They are not binding, they contain no deadlines or milestones for actions, and they leave it to countries themselves to “diagnose” their degree of dependence on fossil fuels and select steps to reduce it.

“Every country will have a different rhythm [for moving away from fossil fuels] – it’s very important to concentrate on the diagnoses of countries’ circumstances,” Corrêa do Lago said. “Based on these diagnoses, they can choose their levers [of policy] and implement the transition.”

Among the steps Brazil suggests is for oil and gas producers to urgently cut the flaring and venting of gas from extraction sites. Methane is a greenhouse gas 80 times more powerful than carbon dioxide, so this would have an immediate impact. Other steps are for countries to reduce their subsidies to fossil fuel use or production, and building up renewable generation.

The roadmap on deforestation notes the large sums that are expected to be needed to help poor countries with heavily forested areas such as the Amazon, the Congo rainforests and south-east Asian tropical forests that are under threat from fires and palm oil exploitation.

About $300bn is likely to be needed every year for forests by 2030, and $500bn a year by 2050, according to the roadmap, citing UN figures. The current amounts available fall far short at about $85bn a year.

At Cop30 last year, Brazil set up the tropical forests forever facility, a fund aiming to preserve forests, to which the UK contributed £400m and other countries combined contributed about $7bn.

The deforestation roadmap also notes the importance of regulating trade between forested countries and consumer countries. At present, there are few trade checks to stop unscrupulous companies from selling goods from deforested areas.

In some cases, deforestation has appeared to be condoned or encouraged by local or even national administrations. Indonesia is being sued by civil society groups for “gross negligence” over the record-breaking fires over the last few months that have cleared swathes of forest and destroyed wildlife habitats, most likely to be replaced by palm oil plantations.

Brazil was able to publish the roadmaps after its president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, won a fourth election term just over a week ago. In the last four years under Lula, deforestation rates have fallen by about 70%. His defeated opponent Flávio Bolsonaro, son of the jailed ex-president Jair Bolsonaro, had been expected if elected to return to his father’s policies of rampant exploitation of the Amazon rainforest.