Publicações

Analyzing the politics and policy implications in Brazil of attributing extreme weather events to climate change, we argue for greater place-based sensitivity in recommendations for how to frame extreme weather events relative to climate change. Identifying geographical limits of current recommendations to emphasize the climate role in such events, we explore Brazilian framings of the two tragic national disasters, as apparent in newspaper coverage of climate change. We find that a variety of contextual factors compel environmental leaders and scientists in Brazil to avoid and discourage highlighting the role of climate change in national extreme events. Against analysts general deficit-finding assumptions, we argue that the Brazilian framing tendency reflects sound strategic, socio-environmental reasoning, and discuss circumstances in which attributing such events to climate changeand, by extension, attribution sciencecan be ineffective for policy action on climate change and other socio-environmental issues in need of public pressure and preventive action. The case study has implications beyond Brazil by begging greater attention to policies and politics in particular places before assuming that attribution science and discursive emphasis on the climate role in extreme events are the most strategic means of achieving climate mitigation and disaster preparedness. Factors at play in Brazil might also structure extreme events attribution politics in other countries, not least some other countries of the global South.

Fire activity has a huge impact on human lives. Different models have been proposed to predict fire activity, which can be classified into global and regional ones. Global fire models focus on longer timescale simulations and can be very complex. Regional fire models concentrate on seasonal forecasting but usually require inputs that are not available in many places. Motivated by the possibility of having a simple, fast, and general model, we propose a seasonal fire prediction methodology based on time series forecasting methods. It consists of dividing the studied area into grid cells and extracting time series of fire counts to fit the forecasting models. We apply these models to estimate the fire season severity (FSS) from each cell, here defined as the sum of the fire counts detected in a season. Experimental results using a global fire detection data set show that the proposed approach can predict FSS with a relatively low error in many regions. The proposed approach is reasonably fast and can be applied on a global scale.

The unpredictable Anthropocene poses the challenge of imagining a radically different, equitable and sustainable world. Looking 100 years ahead is not easy, and especially as millennials, it appears quite bleak. This paper is the outcome of a visioning exercise carried out in a 2-day workshop, attended by 33 young early career professionals under the auspices of IPBES. The process used Nature Futures Framework in an adapted visioning method from the Seeds of Good Anthropocene project. Four groups envisioned more desirable future worlds; where humanity has organised itself, the economy, politics and technology, to achieve improved nature-human well-being. The four visions had differing conceptualisations of this future. However, there were interesting commonalities in their leverage points for transformative change, including an emphasis on community, fundamentally different economic systems based on sharing and technological solutions to foster sustainability and human-nature connectedness. Debates included questioning the possibility of maintaining local biocultural diversity with increased connectivity globally and the prominence of technology for sustainability outcomes. These visions are the first step towards a wider galvanisation of youth visions for a brighter future, which is often missing in the arena where it can be taken seriously, to trigger more transformative pathways towards meeting global goals.

This work analyzed sustainability performance of 26 municipalities in the so-called amazon arch of deforestation in the state of Pang Brazil in the years 2000 and 2010, using the Sustainability Barometer with 31 indicators in social, economic and environmental dimensions. The results show that Altamira and Novo Progresso have intermediate performance in two years and five municipalities progressed to the intermediate level in 2010 while the other remained in a critical situation. There was a slowdown in deforestation in municipalities, but despite the positive results achieved they were unsatisfactory to change the sustainability status of municipalities.