AGENDA 21: THE FUTURE OF BRAZIL?

After the Rio '92 conference on sustainable development, every nation was sent home with the assignment of creating a country-specific plan of implementation of the accord signed there, known as Agenda 21. It was to be presented at the Rio +10 summit in South Africa, which it was. In the works for nearly a decade, the Brazilian Agenda 21 involved the consultation of virtually the entire nation. In 1994 an Interministerial Committee on Sustainable Development (CIDES) was created to begin the process. Then in 1997 that Committee was dissolved in favor of the Sustainable Development and National Agenda XXI Policies Commission (CPDS). That commission's job was to coordinate the development of Agenda 21, submit it to the legislature, and then assist in its implementation.

The first steps toward the creation of Agenda 21 were taken in 1995 with consultations on some initial sketches with govermental agencies and NGOs. There was a Preparatory Workshop for the Brazilian Agenda 21, held in Brasilia in April, 1996, which brought together representatives of government institutions, the private sector, NGOs and universities. Later there was national consultation in the form of – "Sustainable Development: 100 Brazilian Experiments", conducted between October 1996 and February 1997 according to themes, and the publication of information about 183 projects from all over the country. After that a seminar: "Agenda 21: The Concrete Utopia", held in Rio de Janeiro in March, 1997, concurrently with Rio +5, with discussions of strategic themes and priorities of the National Agenda 21. There was some national research entitled, "What Brazilians think about the environment, development and sustainability," carried out with the Museum of Astronomy and Related Themes (MAST), the Institute of Religious Studies (ISER), and IBOPE, which surveyed the opinions of around 2000 people from throughout the country. All of these culminated in the document: "The path of the Brazilian Agenda 21 – Principles and Actions, 1992-1997."

The structure was divided into three primary parts: an introduction to outline the situation of the nation on the threshold of the 21st Century, the body, devoted to six themes (sustainable cities, sustainable agriculture, infrastructure and regoinal integration, management of natural resources, reduction of social inequalities, and science and technology & sustainable development, and then third part about the means of implentation of the strategies espoused in the aforementioned parts.

Consultations were carried out on the six themes, headed up by civil societies, because, it is important to note, this is not a government document, although the Ministry of the Environment serves as the executive secretariat for the CPDS. After concluding the limited consultation process, the CPDS did a critical analysis of the development process and saw that the discussion on the issues needed to be broadened. Certain issues and segments of society had been absent from the process thus far. They consolidated their work thus far into the document: "Brazilian Agenda 21 - Basis for Discussion" and gave it to President Cardoso on June 8, 2000. It was then published and state-level debates commenced, later combined into regional meetings. From July 2000 to May 2001 all 27 states were visited. In the 26 debates, 5,839 proposals were presented and discussed. 3,900 representatives of government, civil and private institutions took part. A document came out of the debates and was produced for each Brazilian state containing that state's predominant feelings on the contributions presented by the various local entities and on "Brazilian Agenda 21 - Basis for Discussion".

At the regional meetings, from June to October 2001, the state documents were analyzed and debated towards the end of producing regional documents in the same fashion. The five regional documents were then brought together in April 2002 in the final comprehensive national Agenda 21. Since each of the meetings were preceded by "awareness raising sessions", particularly during the state consultation stage, when the State Environment Agencies held meetings in the interior of their states, over four years approximately 40,000 people came to be involved directly in the process. The final approval, in May 2002, consisted of a national seminar. There were five sectoral meetings: executive, legislative, productive (business), academia, and organized civil society. At the seminar the CPDS presented its comprehensive strategy to the groups and worked out the means and got commitments for implementation of the Agenda from the leaders of the groups.

For the first time, members from all walks of life were given the opportunity to input into the democratic process. There was no geographic discrimination either. There were forums held everywhere, with close to 6,000 plans from academia, business, elected government, the social service, and regular citizens coming in. Everything was boiled down to create the finished document, put into effect in July 2002 with an entire nation's hope's and dreams invested in it. Even now there are cases of over 240 local Agenda 21's being developed in Brazil with even more other initiatives on sustainable development. The Brazilians have put their stake in it to guide their future along the fine line between development, modernization, and the advancement of their nation, and destruction of their nation through the destruction of their environment."

Summary of Agenda 21: Priority Actions-

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Section 1: The economy of savings in the society of knowledge

Objective 1: Sustainable production and consumption against the waste culture

A national campaign should be started against waste.
The entire media should be mobilized towards this end.
Begin with a campaign against the waste of water and energy.
Promote savings and avoid superfluous actions, procedures, and expenditures.
Simplify all packaging and encourage recycling.
Enact legistlation on the disposal and recycling of solid residues.
Spread innovative ideas about "residue destination" so that they can be adopted locally.
Adopt civil construction technologies to promote adequate workers' safety.

Objective 2: Eco-efficiency and social responsibility of companies

Create conditions to encourage Brazilian companies to be eco-efficient and socially responsible.
Promote partnerships between companies of different sizes to disseminate knowledge about national and international market quality standards.
Promote partnerships between different-sized companies to spread the knowledge that eco-efficiency causes income to increase and resource spending and production input to decrease.
Motivate and encourage managerial eco-efficiency.
Create cleaner and renewable energy production centers.
Develop safer packing and labeling standards.
Develop voluntary procedures of self-evaluation, monitoring and performance, and corrective measure reports.
Help companies to recover from past environmental liabilities by getting clear commitments to recovery techniques, allocated investmests and workplan, and working with them on those.
Finance micro and small businesses from official banks and national, regional and local fomentation agencies to encourage sustainable production.
All companies should train and educate their employees to make them "agents of eco-efficiency".
Divulge the "Climate Change Framework and the Kyoto Protocol" convention, especially the "Clean Development Mechanism" to all people, to help the micro, small, and medium businesses benefit from reducing greenhouse gas emission and using carbon sequestration.
Promote partnerships between universities, research institutes, governmental institutions, civil society, and companies.
Integrate Brazilian companies into the international drive towards sustainable development by making it favorable to their growth and innovation.

Objective 3: Recovery of the strategic planning, infrastructure and regional integration.

Integrate regional planning as a key part of sustainable development planning.
Plan infrastructure in an integrated way.
Conduct a critical evaluation of regional policies, including fiscal incentives.
Build infrastructure projects taking into consideration the territory along the way.
Reinforce the role of long-term infrastructure planning
Create mechanisms to guarantee transparency in the accounting process.
Prioritize an increase in energy efficiency an conservation, then promotion of inter-modality of transports, then integrated planning of infrastructure.
Incorporate environmental dimension into planning.
Define and clarify roles of regulatory agencies to avoid conflict and overlap.
Interconnect the macro-axis of integration and development.
Respect the constitutional principle applied to subsidiaries, federation issues, and regional, state, and municipal attributions.
Create a national forum with significant participation from development agencies, entities, governments, and civil society to discuss the best way to use the regional funds managed by the new agencies.
Create a supportive infrastructure in middle-sized cities, all the while avoiding past urban-planning mistakes.
Make a management plan for national long-distance transports, encouraging railway and maritime methods, and create highway safety programs.

Objective 4: Renewable energy and biomass

Highly encourage energy efficiency and conservation rather than an increase in energy supply.
Have large, transparent, permanent debates on future expansion plans in order to recover short, medium, and long term energy planning.
Develop and incorporate renewable technologies and sources of energy.
Restructure the pro-alcohol program, detaching it from the sugar-alcohol sector to help it to recover.
Provide human and financial resource to research and develop renewable energies.

Objective 5: Information and knowledge for sustainable development

Provide incentives, financial and otherwise, to research sustainable development.
Promote scientific and tecnological literacy at all teaching levels.
Ensure adequate human resources in science, technology, and innovation for sustainable development.
Democratize the distribution of human resources in science and technology.
Provide financial and material resources for to keep Brazilian scientists in Brazil.
Strengthen science and technology education.
Incorporate sustainable development into project evaluations and Science and Technology iniatives.
Promote the generation and spread of knowledge about sustainable resource use.
Research and develop technologies and practices of sustainable agriculture.
Strengthen technological development to promote alternative energy sources and methods.
Increase integration between public and private sectors in investments in Research and Development.
Promote transfer, access, and development of clean technologies to encourage international cooperation in Science and Technology.
Get companies to work in partnerships with universities and public research centers.
Create an environment favorable to innovation.
Protect traditional knowledge and guarantee a fair distribution of benefits for use of that knowledge.

Section 2: Social inclusion for a solidarity society

Objective 6: Permanent education for work and life

Improve work and teaching conditions.
Introduce system of "scholarship for merit" financed by governments, private foundations, or companies.
Combat illiteracy by transforming schools into Centers for Excellency and Citizenship and integrating them into neighborhoods and cities.
Increase standards for qualifiying teachers.
Encourage parent participation in the children's education.
De-bureacratize education to avoid excess expenses.
Value above all technical training teaching.
Convert universities into centers of reference, research, and development geared towards sustainable development.

Objective 7: Promote health and prevent diseases by the democratisation of “SUS”

Promote the elaboration of the Brazilian hospitals Agenda 21 bearing in mind an improvement in the medical services and in the quality of assistance provided.
Intensify and universalise actions to promote health, prevention and control of diseases.
Improve the health network through a hierarchic medical assistance according to its complexity, level of seriousness and specialisation.
Promote the articulation between governmental sectors and between the government and society.
Improve mechanisms of implementation of health surveillance related to the quality of the water, soil, products and services as well as work environment.
Promote the development of educational, instructional, preventive and treatment actions with the aim to diagnose, treat and follow up students with health problems.
Broaden actions for spotting precautious health problems such as hypertension, diabetes, colon and uterus cancer, malnutrition, congenital defects, etc.
Prioritize as a public health policy the instructional / informative actions related to tobacco use, alcohol and drug abuse, adequate diets, reckless driving and safe sex practice.

Objective 8: Social inclusion and income distribution

Reduce the “Gini Index” which measures the level of distribution of property and income according to international standards.
Amplify governmental programmes at the three governmental levels, such as the government subsidised elementary school programme and the minimum income one.
Invest massively in human capital and in professional capacity building, especially in primary education and in high school teaching aiming at improving the quality of teaching and its pedagogical instruments.
Adopt an integrated management of public sustainable development policies within the 16 meso-regions officially recognised as focus areas where social disparities are more evident in the country.
De-bureaucratize procedures which make the citizen’s life and survival difficult.
Universalize the rules of access to credit making it more accessible to the majority of the population.
Democratize justice by means of using the “Small Court” system to bring justice to the common citizen.
Mobilize partnerships by means of the “social responsibility” of the companies, voluntary work of the third sector, and more effective public policies to reduce income disparity.
Promote a large mobilisation campaign of the different public and private institutions, as well as of the third sector, in order to discuss, propose and implement solutions related to the fate of “street children".
Establish policies of minimum income for women in general and black women who are family supporters, as well as compulsory equal salary policies.
Set up training and professional capacity building programmes for young people to guarantee employment.
Promote sports and culture activities as well as visits to theatres and museums for children in risky situations.

Objective 9: Universalisation of environmental sanitation to protect the environment and health

Prioritize investments in urban infrastructure, especially those destined to the universalisation of basic sanitation.
Promote the universalisation of access to water and sewage.
Work together with non-governmental and governmental organisations to divulge good practices of environmental sanitation.
Stimulate communities to supervise the accurate and complete execution of environmental sanitation works.
Prioritize the protection of polluted water bodies, in critical hydrographic basins and in densely populated bays and coastal zones.
Eliminate big garbage dumps by the end of the decade.
Promote habits of garbage reduction and implementation of selective collection.
Promote programmes to generate funds for urban centres poor population by means of the collection and recycling of garbage.
Insert urban drainage as a matter of public health and develop programmes to combat excessive impermeableness of the urban soil.
Divulge safe and hygienic techniques for obtaining and consuming water in the rural zones.
Adopt measures of incentive to reduce the impermeableness of urban soils.
Create a system of environmental sanitation in the country with a strong social control.

Section 3: Strategy for the urban and rural sustainability

Objective 10: Management of the urban space and the metropolitan authority

Promote the State reform, following the new philosophy of a cooperative federalism.
Guarantee the governance and sustainability of the cities by creating a “Metropolitan Authority”.
Strengthen the territorial dimension on the state planning.
Combat the production of irregular and illegal urban plots and of unnecessary growing of the urban expansion area of cities.
Develop specific lines for social leasing.
Create and /or strengthen urban and regional planning institutions.
Implement recovery instruments, by the Public Power, of part of the land appreciation resulting from infra-structure investments and urban improvements.
Promote the preparation of directive plans, which make available to governments and to the population new instruments of action, negotiation and control of urban intervention.
Promote the improvement of the Brazilian taxation system at the three governmental levels.
Implement systems of integrated urban management which contemplate the decentralisation and partnerships.

Objective 11: Sustainable development of rural Brazil

Revoke Decree-Law 311, of 1938, substituting it for legislation which contains new legal definitions for city and village.
Rural development actions will be decentralised, and organisations and local actors will be prioritized from basic guidelines well defined in sustainable development four-year plans for rural Brazil.
Promote partnership between the Union and States and municipalities in the rural development policies according to incentives to the diversification of economic activities.
Rural development policies of the Union and States will give incentive to small and medium size municipalities to form inter-municipal and micro-regional articulations.
The Union’s support and help to the inter-municipal articulations will be directed first towards the carrying out of the ecological/economic mapping, then to the expansion and strengthening of small family firms.
Rural development policies of the Union and States will integrate at least the following tem dimensions of governmental actions: I) education, capacity building and professional training; II) technical assistance and extension integrated to research networks; III) handling of hydrographic micro-basins natural resources; IV) health; V) lodging; VI) infra-structure and services; VII) credit; VIII) insurance; IX) cooperativeness and association X) commercialisation.
Sustainable development of rural Brazil must become one of the macro-objectives of the Pluriannual Plan (PPA), composed of several programmes, including a) the promotion of access to land ; b) the strengthening of family farming; c) the diversification of rural economics; d) the reconstruction on new bases of rural education.
All sustainable development programmes of rural Brazil will have a strong component of affirmative actions turned to women, children, Negroes, Indians and handicapped people.
Promote land decentralisation and access to land by rural workers through social, economic and ecological sustainability projects.
Elaborate a policy of technical assistance and capacity building of settled families.
Promote the necessary actions to implement a public record law and elaborate integrated plans for public land destination and for the territorial organization.
Enhance and consolidate public and private partnership networks.
Ensure that the Settlement Development Plan (PDA) – is prepared in a way to guarantee economic, social and environmental sustainability to the agrarian reform projects.

Objective 12: Promote sustainable agriculture

Stimulate the sustainable handling of the productive systems.
Promote the restructuring of public, federal, state and municipal bodies, in the research, teaching, technical assistance, rural extension and environment sectors.
Adopt the “precaution principle” in relation to the use of vegetal and animal transgenic food planting.
Create the obligation to use visible labelling on transgenic products whose production and commercialisation have been released according to the “precaution principle”.
Adopt soil-handling practices which satisfy the three basic principles of erosion control: avoiding the impact of rain drops, making difficult the superficial drainage, and facilitating the water infiltration in the soil.
Institute political, legal, educational and scientific mechanisms which ensure programmes of monitoring and control of agrotoxic residues in food.
Identify and systematise, in the different biomass and physical ecosystems, the main productive experiences in sustainable basis.
Develop a set of sustainability indicators for agriculture.
Identify and systematise a set of research necessary to the transition to sustainable agriculture.
Strengthen the basis for knowledge and development of information and monitoring systems for the regions susceptible to desertification and dryness.
Stimulate the setting up of information systems which allow the depicting of the real health conditions of the population in general.
Stimulate the capacity of health professionals and conduct regional research to obtain adequate dietary balancing of the rural population to suppress malnutrition.

Objective 13: Promote the local Agenda 21 and integrated and sustainable development

Give incentive to the accomplishment of the Local Agenda 21 in partnership with the government / society.
Elaborate indicators of sustainable development.
Establish the economic / ecological mapping to support the definition of an integrated local development plan.
Stimulate the inter-municipal and consortium partnerships.
Promote the strengthening of local productive chains to strengthen the sustainable economy of small and medium-size municipalities.
Define the productive vocation of the city in harmony with its culture and environmental identity.

Objective 14: Implement mass transportation and sustainable mobility

Promote the implementation of integrated mass transport networks in the large agglomerations.
Promote the decentralisation of cities by stimulating the establishment of companies outside the more dense urban centres.
Companies should study the possibility of establishing working hour shifts as well as the option to offer transport to their staff.
Conceive instruments and adequate political-institutional agencies to guarantee public and private resources.
Create consistent programs of optimisation of integrated urban transport systems, mainly in the metropolitan regions.
Avoid concentrating resources on infrastructure for individual transportation.
Stimulate the production and use of vehicles moved by energy with a lesser polluting potential.
Stimulate the use of combustible such as alcohol and gas.
Implement systems of traffic management.
Involve cargo transports in the sustainable mobility planning.
Rigorously apply the principle of prevention against traffic violence.
Monitor official statistics and death and accident indexes on the roads and streets, as a means to mobilise citizens against traffic violence.

Section 4: Strategic natural resources: water, biodiversity and forests

Objective 15: Preserve the quantity and improve the quality of the water in the hydrographic basins.

Divulge the awareness that water is a limited good which is poorly distributed in our country.
Implement the “National Policy for Water Resources Management” by establishing the Committees and Hydrographic Basins Agencies for the “Paraíba do Sul, São Francisco, Paraná – Tietê and Araguaia-Tocantins” rivers.
Channel a big environmental education programme in the Northeast.
Promote the environmental education, mainly of children and youngsters in the urban centres, in the consequences of water waste.
Ensure the preservation of springs through the plantation of protective forests to protect the river margins and the tops of the Central Brazil plateaus.
Implement a system of environmental management in the port areas in a way to ensure its international competitiveness.
Promote the modernization of river infra-structures of common use and of irrigation.
Stimulate and facilitate the adoption of agricultural practices and irrigation technologies of low impact.
Develop and divulge technologies of re-utilization of water for industrial use.
Prevent the illegal occupation of rivers and lakes margins in the urban centers.
Combat pollution of soil and water and monitor its effects over the human environment in its most diversified modalities.

Objective 16: Forestry policies, deforestation control and biodiversity corridors.

Deforestation Control: More Subsidies and Credit Stimulus

Accomplish the transition from predatory forms to sustainable ones to be put to the use of the Brazilian ecosystems.
Radically limit the use of burnings as an instrument of soil handling.
Stimulate the recovery of deforested and abandoned or underused lands in the form of mosaics of natural biota areas.
Strategically apply the technological resources available in a way to maintain the integrity of the protected areas.
Limit the concession of credits for the expansion of agricultural borders in areas of environmental fragility.
Respect the environmental legislation in its agrarian policies initiatives within Brazil, in both federal and state spheres.

Planted Forests: Increase in the Forest Products Offer

Ensure the control of offer and demand of forest products through the mechanism of concession of sustained exploration of national forests.
Strengthen the policy of utilisation of forest replacement credits.
Develop mechanisms of access to credits and subsidies for the recovery of degraded areas.
Support forest research, mainly as to the utilisation of native forest species for reforestation.
Support measures to improve the economic exploration of standing forests.
Promote a large campaign of recomposition and averbation of legal reservation areas.
Stimulate the silvo-cultures (forest planting).

Protection and Use of Biodiversity

Expand the public system of conservation unities in a way to ensure the conservation of all the Brazilian biome species.
Enable the maintenance of a biotechnology sector based on the remuneration of biodiversity services.
Support programmes of biodiversity scientific inventory.
Attribute economic value to biodiversity by inlaying the cost of natural goods depletion.
Provide resources and capacitate personnel for the biotechnological research.
Establish planning mechanisms for sustainable landscapes.
Use indemnisation and environmental compensation resources for the implementation of protected area systems.
Institute norms and create systems of surveillance and control.
Guarantee that detectors of raw materials and/or knowledge be duly remunerated.
Guarantee the presence of governmental action for a just and equal access, remittance and distribution of the benefits stemming from the use of national genetic resources.
Revise the “official list of the Brazilian fauna and flora species threatened with extinction” to establish protection, plantation development, and recovery breeding areas
Exemplary Actions in Threatened Biomass
Implement programs of biodiversity corridors in every biomass.
Educate the local populations making them aware of the importance of preserving the biomass.
Offer locals options for subsistence and opportunities to improve their quality of life.
Encourage the transition from extractable activities to environmental services activities.
Stimulate the local communities to be the main beneficiaries of preservation activities.
Incorporate the Amazon into the national community.
Speed up the elaboration of the economic ecological mapping.
Effectively integrate the Amazon with the remainder of Brazil by enlarging and strengthening the number of research unities placed there.
Promote actions of reforestation to recover the “caatinga”.
Replant commercial species to reduce the pressure over the native vegetation.
Abolish emergency fronts assistance in the semi-arid area.
Promote the handling of the “caatinga” in the semi-arid area.
Help rural people to make them able to live with the drought.
Combat the desertification in the North-eastern region.
Provide means and resources for the use of alternative energy sources.
Prioritize the execution of the “Pantanal Programme”.
Preserve the savanna and substitute the extensive soya culture whenever possible.
Guarantee zero deforestation in the critical zones of the Atlantic Forest.
Develop conservation projects of the same conceptual and geographic scale of the big infrastructure projects.
Condition the implementation of infrastructure projects to those which are incorporated in conservation projects.

Section 5: Governability and ethics for the promotion of sustainability

Objective 17: Decentralization and the federative pact: partnerships, consortiums and local power

Strengthen cooperative federalism and define competencies among the federal, state and municipal governments.
Elaborate a complementary law for article 23 of the Federal Constitution.
Institute the principle of subsidiary that determines priority actions in the interest of civil society when the entity situated at an inferior level does not do its job.
Regulate article 241 of the Federal Constitution to strengthen inter-municipal cooperation.
Build capacity in social leaderships for sustainable development.
Build capacity and rationalize competencies and the actions by the councils.
Improve social control mechanisms, transparency and monitoring of public commitments made by governments.

Objective 18: State modernization: environmental management and economic mechanisms

Stimulate strategic planning in all organizations and entities.
Institute an information system with the definition of sustainable development indicators for management of public policies.
Strengthen the regulatory capacity of the State.
Improve performance in the provision of public services under responsibility of the State.
Support and give capacity to inter-municipal consortiums.
Implement the necessary changes in the environment legislation to accomplish these objectives.
Establish the commitment terms of the solution of the environment liabilities based on financial terms.
Introduce a new management plan integrated with government sector interventions in a matrix structure.

Objective 19: International relations and global governance for sustainable development

Strengthen government institutions that represent Brazil in international discussions.
Widen the involvement on the part of citizens with international relations issues.
Defend more equitable rules for international trade that benefit developing countries and not only developed ones.
Exert leadership and implement resolutions and conventions approved by the United Nations.
Strengthen the United Nations as a representative organization of a just and compassionate order, and accelerate its institutional reform.
Propose viable reform actions to the United Nations in the field of sustainable development.
Create the Tobin Tax against speculative capital.
Strengthen the production of international indicators that enable sound comparisons among countries and regions.

Objective 20: Civic culture and new identities in the communication society

Value the Brazilian identity and cultural diversity.
Promote the Afro culture to reducing social differences and increase professional opportunities.
Strengthen the important role of women in society.
Value indigenous culture and its preservation.
Implement cultural, economic, environment, education and health projects for indigenous peoples.
Get Brazilian elites, big companies, and intermediary leaderships to support the civil spirit, partnership actions, and volunteer work.
Mobilize work related to formal and informal education, in neighbourhoods or communities.
Consolidate a balance of experiences of environment education and sustainable development in Brazil and evaluate its results.
Undertake environmental education projects.
Motivate young and elderly persons for volunteer work, community actions, health assistance, and nature conservation.
Implement the Integrated Government Action Plan for the Development of the National Policy for the Elderly Person.
Unchain a popular movement of media consciousness for the development of its social pedagogic role.

Objective 21: Pedagogy of sustainability: ethics and solidarity

Disseminate “Carta da Terra” and debate its principles amongst government institutions, organized civil society, schools, universities, and companies.
Establish codes of professional ethics that guarantee transparency in actions of social control of citizens over the services that affect them.
Strengthen the Ethics Council of the public sector.
Motivate the largest possible number of companies to adopt the principles of social and cooperative responsibility.
Adopt the principle of precaution in regards to new technologies.
Combat corruption, bribe or any other form of complicity.