Brazil, France announce green investment plan
BRASILIA: French President Emmanuel Macron kicked off a visit to Brazil on Tuesday with the launch of an Amazonian green investment plan alongside his counterpart Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva.
The pair’s trip to Belem, the northern host city of a major UN climate summit next year, makes Macron the first president of France to visit Brazil in over a decade and comes after a stop in nearby French Guiana.
His public event with Lula on the jungle island of Combu, full of smiles and affectionate gestures, highlighted the stark reversal of relations since the term of Jair Bolsonaro, Lula’s far-right predecessor.
The ex-president had clashed with Macron’s government over environmental destruction – and even lobbed insults directed at French first lady Brigitte Macron.
The investment plan aims to raise “€1 billion (RM5.1 billion) of public and private investment over the next four years,” according to a roadmap published by the French presidency ahead of next year’s COP30 summit.
The leaders are seeking to promote “a great public and private global investment plan into the bioeconomy” in the Brazilian and Guyanese Amazon, the announcement said, especially as Brazil presides over the G20 for 2024.
France, the seventh largest economy in the world, and Brazil, the ninth largest, are considered key players in a geopolitical scene marked by rivalry between China and the United States.
Paris sees Brasilia as a bridge to large emerging economies whose voices Brazil is trying to amplify through its presidency of the G20, and membership of BRICS+.
“We are living in a Franco-Brazilian moment,” the Elysee presidential palace said earlier, highlighting “many points of convergence” with Lula, particularly on “major global issues”.
“France is an essential, unavoidable actor for Brazilian foreign policy,” said the head of Brazilian diplomacy for Europe Maria Luisa Escorel de Moraes.
Tuesday’s announcement proposes the creation of a “carbon market”, intended to reward countries which invest in natural carbon sinks, such as the Amazon rainforest.
The world’s largest tropical forest plays a key role in the fight against climate change by absorbing carbon dioxide emissions.
Deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon halved last year after soaring under Bolsonaro, as Lula’s government stepped up environmental policing.
The agreement also includes support for “indigenous people and local Amazon communities, which have an essential role in protecting biodiversity through their traditional knowledge and forest management practices”, according to the announcement. – AFP