The idea of ​​forming a coalition of Brazilian civil society organizations to discuss climate change came up in 2001 in Salinópolis, on the coast of Pará, during a dinner. It was a break from an annual meeting of USAID (the American government’s cooperation agency) and four environmentalists who were participating in the meeting took advantage of the free night to escape to a bar on the beach and – believe me – talk about work.

Miguel Calmon (The Nature Conservacy), Mario Monzoni (Amigos da Terra Amazônia Brasileira), Paulo Moutinho (Instituto de Pesquisa Ambiental da Amazônia) and Fernando Veiga (ProNatura) met to continue a conversation that had started that morning at Belém airport, about the direction that the debate around forests and climate was taking in Brazil. There was great dissatisfaction among several organizations regarding the way the issue of deforestation was handled by the government in the context of the Kyoto Protocol, the first climate agreement, signed in 1997.

Today it is obvious to everyone that deforestation has a huge impact on global emissions and that it needs to be contained, with some type of compensation for tropical countries that reduce their rates of forest loss. The REDD+ mechanism was created for this, and was the first component of the new climate agreement to be negotiated.

At the beginning of the century it wasn’t quite like that: the only place where forests could enter the Kyoto Protocol was the so-called Clean Development Mechanism, through which avoided emissions in developing countries could generate carbon credits for developed countries. Some people argued that avoided deforestation and the recovery of native forests in tropical countries should be included in the CDM and could generate credits, as a means of adding value to the standing forest. The Brazilian government didn’t even want to hear about it, citing issues of national sovereignty – 70% of our emissions came from deforestation in the Amazon. And several NGOs, represented in the Brazilian Forum of NGOs and Social Movements, the FBOMS, were also against it, because they did not want conservation here to serve as an excuse for rich countries not to cut emissions there.

The previous year, at the Hague Climate Conference in the Netherlands, some organizations tried to reach an agreement between NGOs to pressure governments to include forests in the CDM, but it did not work. “There were NGOs stealing material from NGOs on the subject and throwing it in the trash,” says Calmon.

It was necessary to try to build a consensus on the issue from the bottom up. And the best place to start was the country with the largest tropical forest assets on the planet, Brazil. Without space for this within the government and the FBOMS, it would be necessary to create a new forum. That night, in Salinópolis, the first ideas emerged about how this forum should be constituted and who should be called to constitute it.

Several email exchanges later, an initial meeting was called and held at a hotel on Rua Teixeira da Silva, in São Paulo. Representatives from 33 organizations attended, a significant presence, which gave an idea of the demand for debate on climate and forests in the country.

On March 22 and 23, 2002, a meeting in a classroom at Fundação Getúlio Vargas with 26 organizations*, the OC was officially founded, with the launch of its charter of principles on the 23rd, which marks the launch of the network. Four working groups were created: climate change, land use change (which includes forests and biodiversity), sustainable development and information and communication.

Between 2002 and 2005, the period before the implementation and entry into force of the Kyoto Protocol, the OC experienced its structuring, with much euphoria surrounding the debate on forestry projects. The concept of “avoided deforestation” began to give way to that of “positive incentives”, that is, instead of generating credit for leaving the forest standing, the country would be compensated for the deforestation rate that it was proven to reduce in relation to the past. A voluntary alternative coverage service for COPs was initiated by members.

It was also during this period that the network’s operating system was established: coordination would be collegial, with six organizations representing different biomes and areas of knowledge. A general assembly would take place once a year. And the network would not have legal personality. “It was defined that the OC would not have institutionality, so as not to lose its movement characteristics, nor enter into a dispute for resources with organizations”, says Rachel Biderman, from WRI Brasil, the Observatory’s first executive secretary.

After 2005, with the entry into force of Kyoto (no forests in the CDM), the OC entered a period of regular operation, with annual meetings and four working groups conducting activities. “This included discussions about national climate policy, the CDM, verification mechanisms, emissions inventories, communication and education”, says Rachel Biderman. The OC was hosted at GVCES, with the executive secretary mapping out possible new members and journalist Ricardo Barretto taking care of communication, including coverage of the COPs, which became more systematic.

Starting in 2007, a group within the OC began to discuss what would be one of the network’s main contributions: a set of guidelines for the formulation of public climate policies in Brazil. The country was beginning to signal a change of position in the debate on climate and forests, based on reducing the rate of deforestation in the Amazon. A National Climate Change Plan began to be discussed, and was finally presented in 2008. Climate policy bills were beginning to appear in Congress. In 2009, the OC produced a document with a set of proposals. Some of them were incorporated into Law 12,187/2009, which defines the National Policy on Climate Change.

The process of creating the document lasted almost a year, with public consultations in Rio, São Paulo, Brasília and Curitiba, with the participation of several experts. The Environmentalist Parliamentary Front facilitated a meeting with deputies who, upon learning of the “NGOs’ alternative PL”, wanted to incorporate a large part of it into the federal law then under discussion. In the same year, at COP15, in Copenhagen, the Observatory took its proposals to the three main candidates for the Presidency of the Republic (Dilma Rousseff, Marina Silva and José Serra). From 2009 to 2012, the Climate Observatory’s work was focused on public policies, with fights with the government especially over the Forest Code and monitoring the implementation of the national climate policy and the Copenhagen goals.

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In 2013, OC entered a new phase: data generation. In March, an annual estimate of emissions made for the first time by Tasso Azevedo the previous year was incorporated into the Observatory: the SEEG (Greenhouse Gas Emissions Estimation System) was created, the first non-governmental initiative in the world to calculate annual emissions across all sectors of the economy.

The SEEG has become a fundamental instrument for transparency in compliance with the law of national climate policy and a more dynamic way of monitoring changes in the profile of the country’s economy – national inventories are only released every five years, and are delayed by ten years in your books.

In September 2013, the OC created the executive secretary with exclusive dedication. Carlos Rittl, an ecologist with a doctorate from Inpa (National Institute for Amazonian Research), was chosen for the role. In 2014, the network participated in COP20, in Lima, demanding more ambition from the Brazilian government and adopting the SEEG methodology.

The fixed secretariat and SEEG helped bring regular resources to the network, through foundations such as Oak, Avina, Larci (today Instituto Clima e Sociedade) and Clua (Climate and Land Use Alliance). Fundação Grupo Boticário, SOS Mata Atlântica, Ipam, TNC, Ipsus, Conservação Internacional, ISA, WWF and GVCES are among the organizations that have also contributed resources to the network throughout its history.

In 2015, the OC created a communications department also with exclusive dedication. SEEG was expanded to Peru and gained two subproducts: the Electric Monitor, which allows the sector’s emissions to be monitored daily, and MapBiomas, a digital platform for monitoring changes in land use that will allow, for the first time, to monitor all years of deforestation in all biomes of the country. The network’s political action was marked by the elaboration of a proposal for an INDC (Intended Nationally Determined Contribution), which established a minimum bar for the ambition of the country’s official proposal and was decisive for the government to present an INDC with absolute targets for the entire economy.

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