Humanity is dealing with four key challenges in the 21st century: the management of the global economy, significant mitigation and effective adaptation to climate change, the battle against poverty, and overcoming the combined threat of terrorism and proliferation of weapons of mass destruction.  In 2009 the simultaneous and convergent responses to the first two have become extremely urgent.

Many analysts, opinion formers and leaders argue that the global financial crisis and economic downturn mean that we should delay our efforts to tackle climate change. But delaying action on climate change would mean dangerous growth in the stock of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, making the task of dealing with the problem much more costly and difficult in the future.

In order to cut carbon emissions and combat the threat of climate change, while also tackling the global economic downturn, we need to propel four driving forces: energy efficiency, low-carbon technologies, reduction of irrational consumption of carbon-intensive goods and a halt to deforestation. The policies necessary to drive these forces are: carbon taxation and regulation at the national level, an international carbon cap-and-trade system, increased public spending in science and technology in developed countries, support for technology transfer to middle-income and poor countries, and international support for measures that halt deforestation in poor countries.

Most Western elites now recognize that issues of historic responsibility and global fairness should be clearly present in a future agreement to mitigate climate change. Consequently, it is assumed that developed countries must engage a bigger and more immediate effort in effectively reducing carbon emissions in order to legitimize demands for strong stabilization efforts from emergent countries. This is a major breakthrough in awareness about the urgent need of a dramatic increase in systemic international cooperation.

The long term viability of an effective climate regime depends on the engagement of the most important carbon emitters – China, the U.S., the European Union, India, Russia, Indonesia, Brazil, Japan, Canada, Australia, South Korea, Mexico, South Africa and Turkey – with meaningful and demonstrable commitments to improve the profile of their carbon emissions. Of these countries only the European Union and Japan have already internalized carbon constrains in their legal framework, though their goals are still rather modest compared to the need. Within the European Union, only Sweden, the U.K., Germany and Denmark are performing relatively well in terms of reducing carbon emissions.

In order to secure a breakthrough in international cooperation for climate change, the Brazilian stance could be very relevant; it is the best positioned among the key emerging countries to assume reduction commitments. Brazil’s carbon-emissions profile is the most irrational among the major players of climate change. Half of them are derived from deforestation, which is not a driver of economic growth. The reduction of carbon emissions in Brazil would not have any significant impact on the rate of economic growth. Brazil’s situation, therefore, is very different from that of other emerging countries like China, India, Mexico and South Africa, where emissions reduction would slow economic growth because these emissions mostly come from the energy, industry and transportation sectors. For this reason, Brazil has the possibility to be a co-leader in the transition to a low-carbon economy and to support the necessary leadership of the United States, the European Union and Japan.