Notice
We are delighted to welcome as a speaker Professor Daniel Vargas, Professor of Law and Public Policy, and Coordinator of the Bioeconomy Observatory at Getulio Vargas Foundation (FGV) in Brazil. He will join us in-person with a talk ‘Green Transition in the Tropics.’ Please find below the abstract of the talk.
In the international climate agenda, “green” is not a color, but an economic condition set by scientific and regulatory standards, designed over the last 20 years, based primarily on the reality of temperate-developed countries. Over the last decade, however, these “green standards” have increasingly turned into “global standards”, used to mediate and organize commercial transactions all over the world. As these standards touch the ground in developing countries, especially in the tropical world, a series of tensions tend to emerge, often associated with the proper definition of which economic activities are sustainable and which ones are not. The purpose of my presentation is to shed light on the most visible aspects of these tensions, based on the reality of Brazil. I will focus my analysis on four paradigmatic cases, coming from four key sectors of the Brazilian economy: agriculture, livestock production, transport and commerce. Taken together, these tensions suggest a new kind of intellectual and political divide that constrains the progress of the green climate agenda in the Tropics. Understanding and overcoming such divide is key for the future of the global climate transition.
