US climate envoy John Kerry has said the Amazon rain forest needs to be protected for the world to meet its climate goal to limit global temperature rise to 1.5 degree Celsius.
He said this in Brazil on Tuesday when he was discussing possible U.S. funding for jungle conservation under Brazil’s new President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva who has jump-started cooperation with the United States on climate change and deforestation after rocky relations under his right-wing predecessor Jair Bolsonaro under whose watch deforestation hit a 15-year high in the Amazon, as he rolled back environmental protections.
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Earlier in the month, Lula and U.S. President Joe Biden pledged to work together on climate change in a meeting at the White House during which the US announced it intended to contribute to Brazil’s Amazon Fund, which supports conservation projects in the jungle region.
“The truth is that unless the Amazon is protected from those who would deforest it and who abuse it, we cannot keep the temperature to 1.5 degrees (Celsius). The reality is that the Amazon is the test of all of our humanity,” Kerry said, referring to the climate target in the Paris Agreement.
Protecting the Amazon is vital to curbing climate change because of the vast quantity of greenhouse gas its trees absorb.
Kerry told reporters that he traveled to Brazil to work out the details of what Lula and Biden agreed to when he appeared alongside Brazil Environment Minister Marina Silva in Brasilia.
According to him, the United States was still considering how much to give to the Amazon Fund, with the U.S. Senate considering a bill with $4.5 billion in funding for forest conservation, while the House of Representatives is studying a proposal with $9 billion.
However, Kerry said the administration “will have to fight” to get those proposals through Congress.
Kerry and Silva said that the United States and Brazil had restarted a bilateral working group set up in 2015 to discuss cooperation on climate and environment, which had stalled under Bolsonaro.
Silva said she discussed with Kerry the possibility of opening up the United States to more sustainable sourced products from Brazil.
Story was adapted from Reuters
