Madrid, 12 December 2019 – A joint statement signed by over 100 civil society organizations on the crisis of deforestation and burning in the Amazon was launched today at the 25th annual conference (COP 25) of the UN Convention on Climate Change in Madrid, Spain. The document was presented by environmental and human rights activists at a press conference and a special event organized by the environmental caucus of the Brazilian Congress.

Congressman Nilto Tatto, who chairs the environmental caucus, said the declaration represents a “provocation” to members of Parliament and government agencies to address “what is necessary and possible for Brazil to meet its goals for reducing deforestation and greenhouse gas emissions under the Paris Agreement”.

The document, endorsed by Tatto and other members of Congress, calls attention to the causes of a major increase in deforestation and burning rates in recent months that jeopardize both ecosystem services of the rainforest and the rights of local populations, highlighting the need for major changes in policies and rhetoric of the administration of President Jair Bolsonaro.

A major criticism focuses on the dismantling of public institutions responsible for prevention and control of deforestation and burning in the Amazon, facilitating illegal activities of predatory land grabbing, miners and loggers. Both direct actions and omissions of the Bolsonaro government are directly linked to the spike in rates of Amazonian deforestation and burning in 2019, according to the co-signing organizations.

At the declaration’s launch at COP 25, Márcio Astrini, Public Policy Coordinator for Greenpeace Brazil stressed that Amazon deforestation is not synonymous with development.  “If deforestation brought development, the Amazon would be the most developed place in South America,” he quipped.

Astrini recalled that in the past, Brazil implemented strategies that contributed to an 83% decrease in deforestation rates between 2004 and 2012, combining actions to expand protected areas – including territories of indigenous peoples and other traditional populations – improved enforcement against environmental crimes and incentives for sustainable management of forests and more efficient use of already cleared lands.

“This has all been discarded by the current government and that is why deforestation is on the rise again.  With the Amazon, Brazil has a tremendous opportunity, but unfortunately the choice of the Bolsonaro administration has been to transform it into a problem” stated Astrini, stressing that the Brazilian Congress needs to work assiduously, together with civil society organizations, to prevent further backsliding on the country’s social and environmental agenda.

The co-signers of the declaration call on the Bolsonaro government to change course and to reorient decision-making towards respect for the Brazilian Constitution and associated environmental and human rights legislation, including international accords to which Brazil is a party; including efforts under the Paris Agreement to avoid a rise of average global temperatures beyond 1.5 degrees Celsius in relation to pre-industrial levels.

Specific demands on the federal government, highlighted in the declaration, include the resumption of a successful action plan for the prevention of deforestation in the Amazon (known as PPCDAm), strengthening of enforcement capacities vis-à-vis environmental crimes and a halt to official incentives for public land grabbing, deforestation and other predatory uses of natural resources.

The signers of the joint statement also called on the international community to guarantee effective mechanisms to ensure that imports of agribusiness, logging and mining commodities from the Amazon do not originate from areas marked by illegal deforestation, land grabbing and human rights violations.  Similarly, the declaration challenges foreign investors to adopt robust guidelines aimed at ending deforestation and strengthening a low carbon economy in the Amazon, with respect for the rights and livelihoods of indigenous peoples and other local communities.

The joint declaration stemmed from a seminar recently organized by CSOs, Federal Deputy Tatto and the environmental commission of the Brazilian Chamber of Deputies, entitled “Deforestation and Burning in the Amazon: Trends, Dynamics and Solutions”. The event brought together members of parliament, scientists, public institutions and representatives of social movements and other civil society organizations.

At the closing of the launch event at COP 25, Tatto assured participants that the Congressional environmental caucus will carefully review the joint civil society declaration in order to identify proposals that can be translated into parliamentary action.

Link to read the full CSO declaration (in Portuguese, English and Spanish) and watch a companion video: www.inesc.org.br/deforestation

Photographs: Agnes Franco.

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In December 2019, at COP 25 of the UN Climate Change Convention (UNFCCC) in Madrid, Brazilian environmental and human rights activists launched a joint declaration on the crisis of deforestation and burning in the Brazilian Amazon.  Signed by 110 civil society organizations, networks and social movements, the declaration presents a critical analysis of recent trends and drivers of deforestation and burning in the Amazon, as well as consequences for the global climate crisis and other social and environmental impacts.   The declaration also presents a call to action, aimed at mobilizing Brazilian society and the international community to take concrete actions to defend the Amazon and the rights of its peoples.  The declaration was issued in English, Spanish and Portuguese:

Read the civil society declaration here

Read the civil society declaration in portuguese

Read the civil society declaration in spanish

The joint declaration followed the organization of a seminar entitled “Deforestation and Burning in the Amazon: Trends, Dynamics and Solutions “ hosted by the Comission for Enviroment and Sustainable Development (CMADS) of the Chamber of Deputies in the Brazilian Congress.  The event was held in Brasilia on November 28, 2019.More information about the seminar is available here: www.inesc.org.br/seminariodesmatamento/

The launching of the joint declaration at COP 25 was accompanied by a short video on produced by documentary filmmaker Todd Southgate.  The video, with versions in English and Portuguese, includes images from the Amazon and highlights from the Congressional seminar, including testimony from representatives of indigenous peoples, social movements, NGOs and public institutions.

The Institute for Socio-Economic Studies (Inesc) presented, alongside civil society partner organizations, an analysis of the implementation of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) in Brazil during the parallel events of the United Nations High Level Political Forum (HLPF) on 2030 Agenda in New York.

On July 17 the organizations presented the Spotlight 2019 report, one of the most comprehensive and independent assessment of the implementation of the 2030 Agenda. Inesc contributed with the analysis of the situation in Brazil. Text of Ana Cernov, a human rights activist, Iara Pietricovisky, Inesc’s co-director, and Nathalie Beghin, coordinator of Inesc’s policy team, shows the negative results of fiscal austerity measures compromising the viability of the goals. The authors highlighted that “nothing prepared civil society for the kind of setback that is undergoing since the new government took office in January 2019.”

Cutbacks in education, the consequences of the labor reform, the increase of child labor and social inequality, and threats to environmental protection systems are topics addressed in the text. “Not only Jair Bolsonaro, his cabinet and allies are feeding the anti-rightist and antidemocratic discourses that elected him, but also the path to the destruction of human rights achieved through mobilization and engagement with civil society,” the report warns. Read the text in English here.

Inesc also contributed to a detailed analysis by Cleo Manhas, policy adviser, on the educational goal (SDG 4), which reveals how the Constitutional Amendment, known as “the Ceiling of Expenditure” (CA 95), left a lot of children out of school, mainly in the most vulnerable regions. Available in English here.

“The new government, despite its previous commitment, will not submit a National Voluntary Report on this HLPF, which makes this effort of civil society organizations even more relevant,” said Iara Pietricovisky. “Now, in addition to the lack of funding to achieve internationally agreed goals, we are facing an even greater problem: the destruction of our institutions,” he concluded. The co-director of Inesc will participate in other agendas of the Forum to contribute to the analysis and monitoring of SDGs also representing Forus International and Abong.

About the 2030 Agenda

In 2015, Heads of States, including Brazil, meeting at United Nations Headquarters, decided on the adoption of the 2030 Agenda, with 17 Sustainable Development Goals, in 169 targets, aimed at the eradication of extreme poverty, the fight against inequality and the injustice and containment of climate change.

About the Spotlight Report

The Spotlight Report is published by the Arab NGO Network for Development (ANND), Center for Economic and Social Rights (CESR), Development Alternatives Development Alternatives with Women for a New Era (DAWN), Global Policy Forum (GPF), Public Services International (PSI), Social Watch, Society for International Development (SID), and Third World Network (TWN), supported by the Friedrich Ebert Stiftung.

It was presented in New York at the HLPF side event titled “How can ODS thrive in adverse political contexts?”

You will find the report here: https://www.2030spotlight.org/en

In 2018, the International Budget Partnership (IBP) set out to learn more about budget credibility – the degree to which governments implement their budgets. Budget credibility challenges arise all over the world, in a wide range of sectors and programs. This report summarizes budget credibility research undertaken in partnership with 24 civil society organizations in 23 countries between October 2018 and January 2019. Each partner organization identified a budget credibility challenge in their country and scrutinized a case where the government consistently failed to raise or spend funds as it said it would at the start of the fiscal year. Partners looked for explanations for deviations in published documents and then sought interviews with public officials to further understand the deviations.

The example from Brazil,  explanation of underspending on women’s programs, was the subject of investigation by INESC.

Brazil recently had significant success in implementing measures to fight hunger and poverty and to improve the population’s overall living conditions. These measures were enabled by growing public investments in health, education, social welfare, agrarian development, and the labor market, among others. The GDP share of federal spending on social programs, for example, grew from 13.4% in 2005 to 15.7% in 2015. During those 10 years, there was intense participation by social organizations and movements in the drafting of public policy guidelines and objectives that took place in councils, commissions, conferences, consultations, and public hearings, as well as other mechanisms.

Expanding the coverage of public policies combined with the intensification of social participation contributed to a more than 60% drop in extreme poverty from 2004-2014. During that decade, income inequality fell by 10%, with the Gini Index moving from 0.570 to 0.515. The fall in inequality would have been even greater in recent years, but for Brazil’s extremely regressive tax system.

Things have drastically changed since 2015, when victories in redistribution quickly began to “melt into air” with the adoption of severe austerity measures to reverse the public deficit. The government also took initiatives to privatize public goods and services, deregulate the labor market, and boost fiscal incentives. One of the most drastic federal cost-cutting measures was the 2016 adoption of a constitutional amendment that froze public spending, in real terms, for 20 years. And additional budget cuts at the state and municipal levels undermined public services even further.

By spending less, the government and the National Congress made living conditions more precarious for millions of Brazilians. As a result, we have seen greater rates of unemployment, infant mortality, poverty, inequalities, homicides, and deforestation, among other social and environmental woes. The decline in public safety for millions of Brazilians, along with profound shortcomings felt by people in terms of representation, leadership, and the overall legitimacy of the political system, exacerbated their irritation and anti-system feelings to the point of electing a far-right government in 2018.

These same concerns have now intensified, as the first measures announced by the Bolsonaro government – inaugurated in January 2019 – have radicalized those austerity measures, torn apart important institutions that defend the rights of indigenous peoples, blacks, women, the environment, the climate, and others, intensified privatizations, and cut off dialogue with organized civil society by shutting down the national policy councils and other participatory mechanisms. We have the strong sensation that Brazil is becoming a Yellow Thule – one of the four scenarios of the Fiscal Futures Project. In this environment – from democratic backsliding to rising poverty and inequality – gains made in fiscal transparency and accountability are under severe threat.

To try to change the current power relations in benefit of the 99% we must face the fragmentation of our struggles and the hierarchy of our agendas. A popular development perspective needs to bring together class, socioenvironmental, and identity movements that put people at the center. For that purpose, it is fundamental that we spend more energy acting within the society than disputing the State in order to build a genuine popular pact in which the State is effectively at the service of its citizens.

In the transparency and accountability field, as civil society organizations we will act in support of alternative strategies to address public deficits with less of a burden on the poor, making those who have more pay proportionately more through progressive tax reforms, increasing taxes on higher incomes, wealth, profits, and dividends. Tax exemptions, which amount to 4% of the Brazilian GDP and bring few clear benefits, must also be urgently revised. Other pressing problems we must fight include tax evasion, tax avoidance, illicit financial flows, and corruption – all of which drain billions of reais from the treasury every year.

Our immediate task is to resist. Spaces for dialogue with the Executive have all but disappeared, and we need to protect ourselves against the growing criminalization of our organizations and actions. To that end, we will adopt different strategies. We will work with politicians who are more progressive and willing to fight for fiscal transparency and accountability to avoid backslides in human rights and democracy. We will be part of litigation activities to protect human rights. We will participate in campaigns and networks that fight for improvements in fiscal transparency and accountability at the international, national, and local levels. We will intensify our capacity building work on budgets and human rights and share tools with social movements to help them fight for their rights.

To bring Brazil back to its path towards more justice and equitable development in the long term, we need to rebuild the idea of democracy that has been eroded in recent times. We are already working with progressive politicians, sensitive bureaucrats (including the executive and judiciary branches), other NGOs, the unions, and the traditional social movements like rural, urban, and women among others. We will also work with the more recent social movements – LGBTI+, traditional communities, indigenous people, youth, black communities, black women’s movements, and movements for the democratization of communication – to revisit our concepts, methods, and practices since they’ve proven to be insufficient to deal with the current reality.

One of our biggest challenges is communication. In order to grow and get other players involved in our struggle for fiscal accountability and for the progressive realization of human rights, we need to innovate in our use of information and communication technologies to promote our causes while avoiding the big companies like Google, Facebook, etc. An important first step would be to call together activists, researchers, developers, designers, statisticians, and others at hackathons and jamborees to conceive our own social networks, built and run by us, based on our values. We can create wide-ranging collaborative digital tools (a mix of apps, sites, platforms, chats, virtual working groups, interactive capacity building, etc.) for public participation on fiscal justice policies.

Times are challenging in Brazil. Uncertainty and fear are prevailing, and injustice and violence are growing. The general feeling is that we are making strides towards the abyss. For our fights to improve fiscal transparency and accountability to make sense, we need to connect them to the progressive realization of human rights and to democracy in its different dimensions – representative, participatory, and direct – more than ever.

Nathalie Beghin is Head of Policy and Carmela Zigoni is a Policy Advisor at the Institute for Socioeconomic Studies (Inesc), a Brazilian public-purpose, non-partisan, democratic and pluralist non-profit organization working to strengthen civil society and enhance social participation in public policy-making. The authors would like to thank Warren Krafchik and Paolo de Renzio from IBP for their precious comments.

Inesc study reveals total destined to the oil, gas and coal sectors through tax exemption, special tax regimes and even guaranteed budget. With this publication, we continue the work started in 2018, when we present the balance of subsidies applied between 2013 and 2017 in the sector, with the objective of knowing, evaluating and reforming possible distortions in this scenario.

Digital tools to present projects are, as expected, more in vogue than ever and gaining the attention of many funders. But some organizations recognize limitations on the usefulness of such tools when they are not adopted by the intended users and maintenance costs are too high with every update of data.  This was all explored in the Open Budget Data Exchange Workshop organized for Civil Society Organizations by the International Budget Partnership and Center Eidos of Ukraine, in which GIFT coordination team participated providing guidance and examples.

During this three-day workshop we got to know and analyze the potential and challenges of projects related to open data implemented by Center Eidos in Ukraine, INESC in Brazil, ACIJ in Argentina, Inisiatif in Indonesia and BudgIT in Nigeria. This gave way to explore the user-centered approach of designing a product that is fed through open data and the importance of advocating for publishers to provide tools that allow updating interactive platforms in an automatic way.

When we are talking about publishing open data, we always try to emphasize the importance of “publishing with purpose”. This means thinking of a higher objective than the publication per se and thinking of the intended user.  In this workshop we approached the other side of the equation, “using open data with purpose”