Most municipalities that emit the most greenhouse gases are in the Amazon

Of the ten municipalities that emit the most greenhouse gases in Brazil, eight are in the Amazon region.

The finding is from the second edition of the Municipalities’ Greenhouse Gas Emissions Estimation System (SEEG), made by the Climate Observatory, to estimate the country’s annual emissions.

For the report, the system calculated the production of gases such as carbon dioxide (CO2), methane (CH4) and nitrous oxide (N2O) in the country’s 5,570 municipalities from 2000 to 2019.

According to SEEG Municipalities, the cities with the highest emissions are located exactly where deforestation is the main source of greenhouse gases.

Altamira, in Pará, appears first, with more than 35.2 million tons of carbon dioxide equivalent (MtCO2e) emitted in the two decades. Then appear São Félix do Xingu (PA), Porto Velho (RO), Lábrea (AM) and São Paulo (SP).

Together, the ten cities accumulate more than 198 million gross tons of carbon dioxide equivalent – ​​which, according to the report, is higher than the emissions of countries like Peru and the Netherlands.

The estimates are generated according to the guidelines of the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change), based on the Brazilian Inventories of Anthropogenic Emissions and Removals of Greenhouse Gases, from the Ministry of Science, Technology, Innovation and Communications.

For the report, the system analyzed various data sources from all 5,570 municipalities in the country to perform the cuts and analyze the main causes of greenhouse gas emissions.

per capita emissions

According to the SEEG Municipalities 2022, the Amazon region concentrates the ranking of per capita emissions in the country. Of the ten municipalities with the most emissions per inhabitant, six are in Mato Grosso, three in Pará and one in Amazonas.

In Novo Progresso, Pará, for example, the emission is 580 tons of carbon dioxide per year – which, according to the report, is 14 times the emission made by a citizen in Qatar, for example, which is considered the country with the highest amount of carbon per capita.

“It’s as if each resident of Novo Progresso had more than 500 cars running 20 km a day on gasoline. The global average is 7 tons of CO2e per year per inhabitant”, informs the report.

The city is the seventh largest emitter of greenhouse gases in the country.

The relationship between greenhouse gases and deforestation

Among the ten municipalities, four are in Pará: Altamira, São Félix do Xingu, Pacajá and Novo Progresso. And eight are in the Legal Amazon region, with Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo being the only ones outside the Amazon region.

According to SEEG Municipalities, in the analysis by sector responsible for emissions, all identified as the main ones in the change of land use and forests are in the region.

These 10 cities in the Amazon also represent 21% of total national emissions caused by land use change.

The North region is responsible for 60% of the sector’s emissions.

According to the Terra Brasilis platform, which gathers data from DETER from the National Institute for Space Research (Inpe), Pará is the state that concentrates deforested areas in the region.

On the platform, which gathers data from August 2015 and was updated until June 3, 2022, the state accumulates 771.9 km² in this period alone.

It is the federative unit that leads deforestation in the Legal Amazon according to the platform of this analysis.

According to an analysis by the Project for the Annual Mapping of Land Use and Coverage in Brazil (MapBiomas), the Amazon lost about 74.6 million hectares of vegetation cover between 1985 and 2020. The area is equivalent to one Chile.

Causes of emissions by sectors

According to the SEEG Municipalities 2022, the agricultural sector is primarily responsible for most greenhouse gas emissions in the country.

Among Brazilian cities, 3,731 have the sector as the main issuer – which represents 67% of the total number of municipalities in the country.

Next are 1,004 cities due to changes in land use and forests – 18% of the total.

Energy appears as the third sector as the main one among Brazilian municipalities, with 755 (13.6%); 62 (1.1%) have the waste sector and 19 have industrial processes and use of products (0.3%).