Determinants of CO2 emissions in Brazil and Russia between 1992 and 2011: A decomposition analysis

This paper deals with the decomposition analysis of energy-related CO₂ emissions in Brazil and Russia from 1992 to 2011. The refined Laspeyres index (RLI) method applied and both aggregated and sectoral changes in CO₂ emissions decomposed. Brazil’s and Russia’s economies divided into three economic sectors including agriculture, industry and services. Impact of four main factors, such as economic activity, employment, energy intensity, and carbon intensity in CO₂ emissions changes were analyzed. The aggregated decomposition analysis revealed that Brazil is still far from a decoupling between economic growth and carbon dioxide emissions where Russia achieved a substantial decline in carbon emissions mainly due to the improved energy intensity. The empirical findings of sectoral decomposition analysis emphasized that the economic activity was the major CO₂ increasing factor in Brazil’s economic sectors. On the other hand the economic activity effect followed a reducing impact in Russia’s sectoral emissions until 2000. The structural changes between sectors and their impacts on CO₂ emissions were captured by employment effect. Energy intensity and carbon intensity effects underlined that environmental sustainability widely neglected in Brazil and Russia during the study period. The results yield important hints for energy planning and sustainable environment.     

Measurement of Fruit and Vegetable Losses in Brazil: A Case Study

This research conducted on municipal solid waste management for the first time quantified food spoilage as being 8.8% weight of all officially collected household garbage in the Brazilian city under study. The unexpected size of this waste fraction gave rise to work on the causes of waste and on its distribution over the product life cycle specific to fruit and vegetables. Waste was defined as being the combination of losses and scraps. Administrative shortcomings were identified as basic reasons for waste. At the producer and consumer ends of the cycle, negligence was shown to be the single most important problem. Fruit and vegetables deteriorate during the operations of handling, transport, packaging, storage, selling and consumption. The study detailed the occurrence of waste at all of these stages. In the medium-size Brazilian city, the total waste of fruit and vegetables was shown to amount to 16.6% weight in the marketing stage of the life cycle. At the consumer level, it was measured as 3.4% weight of all household garbage. Specific reasons for this waste were identified at the levels of producer, wholesaler and retailer. Short-term remedies were pointed out that invariably corrected deficient management procedures. It was shown that very simple administrative measures can significantly reduce the spoilage of fruit and vegetables. Long-term strategies involve the creation of sample cases for administration of the fruit and vegetables life cycle at all stages.     

Educational hazards? The politics of disaster risk education in Rio de Janeiro

Disaster education outcomes are highly dependent on the political context of that education. Based on a rich, in‐depth case study of the creation of community monitors in a landslide and flood‐prone city in southeast Brazil, this paper demonstrates how developmental and political environments add much additional nuance to existing theories of behaviourist and transformative education for disaster preparedness and mitigation. Beyond identifying the benefits of education, it argues that disaster risk reduction outcomes are reliant on governance frameworks that alter over time. The study reveals the political complexity associated with programme implementation and cites the perspectives of a number of participants. Disaster education is shown to be the necessary yet underappreciated twin of the militarised and technical approaches that dominate disaster response in Brazil. Understated, however, is education's situatedness: how it can become an arena of conflict between government and civil actors over matters of state and society in increasingly hazardous urbanisation settings in Latin America.     

Environmental justice as a (potentially) hegemonic concept: a historical look at competing interests between the MST and indigenous people in Brazil

ABSTRACT

This article explores the need to recognise and compensate the plurality of environmental justice claims, while paying close attention to the outcomes of the most marginalised groups – cultural and ecological – in political decision-making to avoid vestiges of hegemony. The early history of the Movimiento dos Trabalhadores Rurais sem Terra (MST) serves as a case study in which environmental justice claims clash with indigenous rights claims. In recent decades, the MST has refused settling Amazonian indigenous territories, consistent with the organisation’s Via Campesina platform, which focuses on redistributing the 50% of national territory controlled privately by Brazil’s richest 4%. Yet, in the 1970s and early 1980s, Brazil’s military government pitted landless peasants and indigenous people’s struggles against each other, circumventing land reform potentially disruptive to the country’s de facto colonial fazenda land system. This tactic pressured competing groups – landless peasants and indigenous people – to fight against each other, concluding predictably: the most powerful factions ended up getting their way, conceding less in negotiations than their less-advantageously positioned, marginalised counterparts. When marginalised groups gain concessions in environmental justice struggles, often the goods comprising those concessions come at a cost to marginalised groups with even less political visibility. Hegemonic structures of power remain non-negotiable in the process of alleviating other injustices in perceived zero-sum politics. Such systemic displacement and dispersion of violence in systems built on violence suggests hegemony affects not just to other marginalised groups, but to nonhumans too.     

137Cs in marine samples from the Brazilian southeastern coastal region

The present work presents the results of ¹³⁷Cs concentration in seawater, fish and sediments samples collect in 11 sampling points, crossing the Brazilian Southeastern coastal region, from Vitória (ES) to Santos (SP), on a routine basis from 1997 to 2002. This monitoring program was carried out by the Instituto de Radioproteção e Dosimetria (IRD/CNEN/MCT), in cooperation with the Instituto de Estudos do Mar Almirante Paulo Moreira (IEAPM/Brazilian Navy), aiming at determining artificial radionuclides in marine samples. Additionally to the ¹³⁷Cs results, ⁹⁰Sr concentrations in fish samples from 1998 to 2002 are also reported.The ¹³⁷Cs in seawater follows a lognormal distribution, with a geometric mean of 1.8 Bq m^-3 and a geometric standard deviation of 1.4 (n=54), decay corrected to June/2002. For ¹³⁷Cs levels in fish samples a geometric mean of 0.19 Bq kg⁻¹ and a geometric standard deviation of 2.9 (n=39), decay corrected to June/2002, with a range of 0.03 to 1.7 Bq kg⁻¹, were obtained. Based on the ¹³⁷Cs mean concentration in fish as well as in seawater, a transfer factor of 1 × 10² was calculated, which is quite in agreement with the recommended value found in the Safety Report Serie 19.     

Avança Brasil: Environmental and Social Consequences of Brazil's Planned Infrastructure in Amazonia

“Avança Brasil” (Forward Brazil) is a package of 338 projects throughout Brazil; the portion of the plan to be carried out in Brazil's Legal Amazon region totals US$43 billion over 8 years, US$20 billion of which would be for infrastructure causing environmental damage. Brazil's environmental impact assessment system is not yet capable of coping with the challenge presented by Avança Brasil. Generic problems with the licensing process include stimulation of a lobby in favor of construction before decisions are made on the advisability of the projects, the “dragging effect” of third parties, whereby economic activity is attracted to the infrastructure but escapes the environmental impact assessment system, a tendency for consulting firms to produce favorable reports, a bureaucratic emphasis on the existence of steps without regard to the content of what is said, and the inability to take account of the chain of events unleashed when a given project is undertaken.The environmental and social costs of forest loss are high; among them is loss of opportunities for sustainable use of the forest, including loss of environmental services such as biodiversity maintenance, water cycling, and carbon storage. The benefits of export infrastructure are meager, especially from the point of view of generating employment. Much of the transportation infrastructure is for soybeans, while the hydroelectric dams contribute to processing aluminum. The example of Avança Brasil makes clear the need to rethink how major development decisions are made and to reconsider a number of the plan's component projects.     

Economic viability study of a separate household waste collection in a developing country

This article reports a study of the economic viability of a separate household waste collection project, and considers its social and environmental benefits. The study was developed from the database obtained through the pilot project on separate collections in João Pessoa, the capital of Paraíba, in the northeast region of Brazil. The pilot project had been supported by the local municipal council since September 2000. The methodology applied to this study of economic viability is based on the economic quantification of the benefits and costs involved in the process of a separate collection of household waste. The benefits to the environment, owing to the reduction of the final disposal of household waste, were also evaluated. The results of this research are encouraging for the benefit cost relation (B/C) of both the quantified economic components and the environmental aspects. The values found for the relation B/C ranged from 1.27 to 1.77 depending on the economic quantification of the direct and indirect benefits to the components involved in the project, i.e., the waste collectors, the municipal council, the sellers of recycled material, and the recycling industry.     

Tenure diversity and dependent causation in the effects of regional integration on land use: evaluating the evolutionary theory of land rights in Acre,Brazil

In the complex causation behind land change, dependent causation can play a central role. A case in point concerns land tenure diversity, where contrasting use rules for different lands may affect the impacts of other drivers on land use outcomes. We therefore evaluate the evolutionary theory of land rights (ETLR), which assumes homogeneous private property rights, in order to test for dependent causation due to distinct use rules among various types of private lands. In the present analysis, we focus on whether land tenure type modifies the effects of highway infrastructure on key outcomes highlighted in the ETLR framework. We take up the case of rural settlements along the Inter-Oceanic Highway in the eastern part of the Brazilian state of Acre, where there is considerable land tenure diversity. Findings from multivariate models for land titling, the castanha nut harvest, and cattle pasture all indicate that the effects of infrastructure depend on land tenure type. These results confirm the importance of dependent causation behind land use and bear implications for theory on land change, infrastructure impacts, and land system science.     

A confirmation of the indirect impact of sugarcane on deforestation in the Amazon

A widely discussed assumption that the expansion of sugarcane indirectly contributes to deforestation in Brazil has been backed statistically by only a handful of studies. The present research measures the indirect effect of sugarcane in Brazil’s frontier counties as a weighted summation of changes in sugarcane area in agricultural (non-frontier) counties, where weights are constructed using road distances and the bandwidth that minimizes overall model error. In addition to economic variables, indirect effect variables are employed to create a model that explains deforestation. Parameters are estimated following fixed-effects methodology. The results reveal that sugarcane indirectly contributed to deforestation in Brazil during the period from 2002 to 2012. The effect was estimated to be sizeable; in particular, 16.3 thousand km² of forest was cut by economic actors displaced by expanding sugarcane plantations. This figure constitutes 12.2% of deforestation in Brazil from 2002 to 2012 and is equivalent to 189.4 million Mg of carbon emissions.