Cop 27: New deforestation pacts, but Lula's win is key

The UN Cop 27 climate summit opened with new pacts and pledges on deforestation, but the biggest potential difference is likely to be recent presidential election win of Brazil's Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, who has pledged to revive a plan for the Amazon rainforest.

Lula, who will take office in January, has promised to replicate the Plan to Prevent and Control Deforestation in the Amazon, which contributed to a 67pc decline in deforestation when he was in office between 2003 and 2010. He has committed to reach zero deforestation, including in the Amazon, the Atlantic rainforest, the Pantanal grassland and the Cerrado tropical savanna biomes, which would require increased recovery and replanting of degraded and deforested areas.

Lula proposed to host the Cop 30 UN climate conference in Brazil's Amazon region in 2025.

His call to protect the Amazon was in line with remarks made by his Colombian, Venezuelan and Surinamese counterparts, showing a degree of regional unity in the fight to protect the world's biggest rainforest. Colombia's Gustavo Petro, Venezuela's Nicolas Maduro and Suriname's Chan Santoki committed to creating an alliance to draw the necessary guidelines and public and private funding, and Petro said his country will direct $200mn/yr to protect the Amazon. He called on other nations in the Americas, such as the US, to join the group.

Colombia and other Latin American countries were also part of a partnership launched in the opening days of Cop 27 that brought together 26 countries and the EU to target an existing commitment to stop and reverse forest loss and degradation by 2030. Although this is not a new ambition, the summit saw $4.5bn of private and public funding to protect and restore forests to add to the $12bn committed at Cop 26.

Agricultural commodity firms set out a promised roadmap to reduce emissions from deforestation and land use change in the cattle, soy and palm oil sectors. This plan has taken a year to produce, but the targets only focus on the Amazon, Cerrado and Chaco regions of South America, and the goals are in some cases less ambitious than existing regulation. One aim is to phase out illegal deforestation caused by the cattle industry in Cerrado by 2025.

New proposed legislation from the EU goes further than some private sector pledges, aiming to curb the bloc's imports of forest-risk commodities. It covers a wider range of products - cattle, cocoa, coffee, palm oil, soy and wood, as well as "products that contain, have been fed with or have been made using these commodities" - and states these must not have been produced on land deforested after the end of 2019.

A report from the UN Environment Programme (UNEP), released at the beginning of Cop 27, warned the world is not on track to reach its goals to halt and reverse deforestation by 2030. Funding commitments from the public and private sectors are at 24pc of the rate needed to hit 1bn t of emissions reductions from forests by 2025, UNEP said.

By Georgia Gratton and Jacqueline Echevarria