Brazil's Rousseff pledges 37% cut in greenhouse gas emissions

Brazil's President Dilma Rousseff on Sunday promised big cuts in greenhouse gas emissions by 2025, AFP reports.

Using 2005 as the baseline level, the reduction target will be 37 percent over the next decade and 43 percent by 2030, she said at a United Nations sustainable development conference.

Brazil will take this pledge to the major UN climate conference that will be held in Paris in December, where the goal is for countries to strike a binding, global agreement on how to curb climate change.

Specifically, nations are tasked with limiting the planet's warming to two degrees compared to the pre-industrial era.

Previous such gatherings have failed as rich polluters like the United States proved unable to reach agreement with big-polluter developing states such as China and Brazil.

Rousseff said the Paris conference will provide a "unique opportunity" to forge a common front.

At the Paris summit, Brazil will also pledge to recover degraded pastures and make available 12 million acres (five million hectares) of "integrated crop-livestock-forest area."

"We have been diversifying renewable sources in our energy mix, which is one of the cleanest in the world," Rousseff said.

At the summit Sunday Rousseff also endorsed a post-2015 plan to eradicate poverty within 15 years, which was agreed to two days.

"This innovative agenda requires global solidarity, determination from each one of us, and a commitment to confronting climate change, overcoming poverty and creating opportunities for all," Rousseff said.

On climate change, she said countries should set ambitious goals for themselves. And these objectives should be "consistent with the principle of common but differentiated responsibilities."

This was a wink at industrialized countries to urge them to make a proportionally larger effort than poorer, developing nations.

The 17-point sustainable development plan agreed Friday is much bolder than the Millennium goals set for the period 2000-2015.

Some experts estimate that $3.5 to $5 billion per year will be needed over the next 15 years to finance the new initiative.

The largest economy in Latin America has already cut carbon dioxide emissions and kept them relatively stable in recent years.

So Brazil is on course to  reach its 2020 goal of emitting fewer than two billion tons, according to recent studies.