Environmental Cooperation Between the United States and Brazil

The United States and Brazil enjoy a long, rich history of environmental cooperation ranging from management of parks to technical cooperation on forests, remote sensing, and fire science. We hope to make that relationship even stronger in the coming years. We look forward to discussing our many bilateral environmental interests during a high-level Common Agenda on the Environment meeting later this year in Brasilia, and to further strengthening our already strong partnership to protect and manage important natural resources.

The U.S. and Brazil plan to encourage the use of renewable energy and energy efficiency through workshops, information exchanges, technical assistance, and training. Our recent bilateral energy discussions helped strengthen our joint commitment to clean energy efforts, while a new energy strategy developed by the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) holds the potential for additional bilateral collaboration with NGOs and the private sector. Working together, we have installed hybrid-renewable village power systems in the Amazon, and we are beginning to build partnerships with universities to look at biomass resources and develop markets for clean energy. Officials of the state of São Paulo are working with the U.S. to promote technologies that can mitigate local air quality problems and reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

The U.S. and Brazil hope to collaborate closely to promote sustainable forest management, particularly in the area of reduced impact logging. USAID partners look forward to working with Brazil to develop forest management tracking technologies involving fire-detecting satellites operated by the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), Global Positioning Systems (GPS) for forest management, modeling of logging damage in disturbed forests, and Landsat-based maps reflecting compliance with Brazil's Forest Code. A consortium of Brazil-based institutions, together with USAID and the U.S. Forest Service, have created a new "Natural Ecosystems Sustained" program for forest management in Brazil that includes marketing of environmental goods and services and landscape-level planning and policy. Brazil and the U.S. now coordinate closely on initiatives such as satellite technology to detect forest fires.

Conservation of migratory birds is another key issue for cooperation. The U.S. looks forward to working with Brazil, and more broadly with the region, in a workshop this October to begin developing a framework for a Western Hemisphere strategy to conserve migratory birds - a response to the Summit of the Americas in 2001.

Recognizing Brazil's critical role in regional environmental issues across South America, the U.S. Department of State established one of the first of twelve regional environmental "Hub" offices around the world at the U.S. Embassy in Brasilia in 1999.