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Brazil’s Leadership at a Turning Point in Global Climate Action

by Climate and Clean Air Coalition Secretariat (CCAC) - 24 December, 2025

As the host of COP 30, Brazil steps into the presidency at a moment of profound consequence for the future of global climate ambition. The first Global Stocktake has made clear that the world is falling short of the trajectory needed to keep warming within 1.5°C, and Brazil has seized this moment to steer negotiations toward recovery, acceleration, and renewed collective purpose. Its presidency has embraced a holistic vision: strengthening multilateralism, elevating adaptation alongside mitigation, and ensuring that climate policy speaks directly to people’s daily realities, from public health and food security to urban resilience.

This leadership has opened political space for Brazil to champion a new model of climate governance—one rooted in cross-sectoral coordination and supported by all levels of the Brazilian government. As Brazil calls on the world to intensify climate action, it is simultaneously demonstrating how such acceleration can be achieved domestically. Through the COP 30 Action Agenda, Brazil has supported themes that mirror the Climate and Clean Air Coalition’s priorities: tackling super pollutants for rapid climate gains, primarily methane as a non-CO₂ GHG, promoting inclusive participation, scaling up sectoral transformations, and aligning climate strategies with public well-being. By linking climate justice to finance, weaving together sectoral reforms, and firmly positioning the mitigation of short-lived climate pollutants (SLCPs) as a key lever to curb global warming, the presidency has enabled Brazil to set an example of integrated climate and air-quality leadership.

A key component of Plano Clima, Brazil’s National Mitigation Strategy (ENM) is the strongest marker of this integrated vision. Supported by CCAC, UNEP, the Global Methane Hub, and ICAT, the ENM mainstreams SLCP mitigation across multiple sectors and elevates non-CO₂ pollutants as a national priority including though a specific Annex of this National Strategy. Twelve national mitigation goals guide the strategy, including:

  • Goal 11: Undertake specific actions to mitigate non-CO₂ pollutants with high global-warming impact.

  • Goal 12: Prioritize mitigation measures that deliver co-benefits for adaptation, resilience, and sustainable development.

These goals are backed by sectoral targets that directly address Brazil’s largest sources of methane and nitrous oxide—particularly agriculture and waste, which together account for nearly all of the country’s non-CO₂ emissions.

 

Targeted Actions to Deliver Measurable Impact

WASTE

Brazil’s waste sector remains a significant and persistent source of methane, largely driven by the disposal of organic municipal waste in landfills and the continued use of controlled landfills and dumpsites in many regions. Despite important advances in solid waste governance, high volumes of untreated organics, limited selective collection, and uneven technical capacity have kept emissions high—reaching nearly 1.9 million tonnes of methane in 2022. Tackling these emissions is central to meeting Brazil’s national climate goals and offers substantial co-benefits, from reducing environmental degradation to improving public health and strengthening municipal waste systems across the country.

To shift this trajectory, Brazil has set ambitious national targets across its sectoral climate plans and the forthcoming National Plan for Reduction and Recycling of Municipal Organic Waste (PLANARO). These include reducing waste sent to disposal units by 25.3% by 2030 and 35% by 2035, alongside treating or recovering 14.3% of organic waste by 2030 and 19% by 2035. PLANARO extends these commitments further, charting a long-term pathway to divert 31.6% of organic waste from landfills by 2030 and 73.5% by 2050. Reaching these goals will require significant investment—an estimated R$12 billion in capital costs by mid-century and R$5.1 billion per year in operating costs—but also promises substantial returns. By expanding composting and biodigestion capacity, improving landfill gas capture, and strengthening the integration of waste picker cooperatives, Brazil can generate more than 40,000 new jobs while recovering billions of reais in currently lost biogas and compost value.

To underpin and accelerate this agenda, Brazil is working with the Climate and Clean Air Coalition to build the technical and institutional foundations needed for sustained methane reductions in both urban and agricultural waste streams. This collaboration has enabled the most comprehensive multi-level data collection effort ever conducted for the sector, producing the first nationally representative dataset on organic waste management and identifying critical gaps in methane monitoring systems. These insights have already shaped national policy development, including PLANARO and Brazil’s updated climate plans. A major achievement of this work is the creation of a new Decision-Support Tool for Urban Organic Waste Management, which expands upon earlier instruments to integrate multicriteria analysis across composting, biodigestion, decentralized recycling, and landfill gas-to-energy pathways. By combining scenario modeling, life cycle assessment data, and newly consolidated national datasets, the tool equips federal, state, and municipal agencies with the analytical capacity needed to design policies, plan investments, and achieve rapid, verifiable reductions in methane across Brazil’s waste sector. 

AGRICULTURE

Brazil’s livestock and agricultural systems are among the country’s largest sources of climate-warming super pollutants, with methane from enteric fermentation and manure management driving the majority of agricultural emissions and nitrous oxide from soils adding further pressure. As cattle herds expand and production intensifies across beef, dairy, swine, and poultry supply chains, these emissions have continued to rise—making the sector both an economic pillar and a central challenge for achieving Brazil’s national climate goals. Addressing these sources is therefore essential to meeting the targets in Brazil’s mitigation strategy.

The ABC+ Plan, Brazil’s flagship low-emission agriculture program, anchors this effort with a suite of targeted measures designed to reduce methane and nitrous oxide at scale. The Plan commits to expanding treated animal waste by 208.4 million m³ by 2030 and 228 million m³ by 2035; increasing the area of rice cultivation under methane-reducing irrigation techniques by 20% by 2030 and 30% by 2035; and scaling up low-emission intensive termination systems to raise the number of cattle slaughtered within 36 months of age by 5 million per year by 2030 and by 29.1 million per year by 2035. These measures not only curb super pollutants but also enhance soil productivity, strengthen rural incomes, and expand Brazil’s renewable biogas market—demonstrating how mitigation actions can reinforce broader sustainable-development priorities.

To support and accelerate these outcomes, Brazil has partnered with the Climate and Clean Air Coalition to build the technical and institutional foundations needed for sustained emissions reductions in livestock systems. CCAC assistance has helped harmonize national metrics with international methodologies under the ABC+ Plan, improved guidance on low-emission manure management and biogas deployment, and strengthened state-level capacity to conduct robust mitigation assessments. This work ensures that agricultural and climate agencies can evaluate mitigation potential with far greater precision and design policies that reflect the realities of Brazil’s rapidly evolving production systems.

A major milestone of this collaboration is the creation of ABC+ Calc, Brazil’s first standardized tool for quantifying avoided methane and nitrous oxide emissions from animal-production waste management. Developed jointly by MAPA, Embrapa, Instituto 17, and CCAC, the calculator provides straightforward, scientifically aligned methods for estimating emissions across swine, poultry, beef, and dairy value chains. Now embedded in official MRV procedures for the ABC+ Plan, ABC+ Calc enables federal and state agencies to model policy scenarios, track progress, and guide investments in technologies such as biodigesters, composting systems, and improved manure storage. By offering a transparent, consistent system for measuring mitigation outcomes, the tool has become a cornerstone of Brazil’s strategy to drive rapid, verifiable reductions in super pollutants across its livestock sector.

 

The National SLCP Plan: An Integrated Strategy for Super-Pollutant Reductions

Brazil’s forthcoming SLCP Action Plan—developed with SEI and supported by CCAC—is a cornerstone of the country’s integrated climate and air-quality agenda. The plan prioritizes reductions in methane, black carbon, HFCs, and tropospheric ozone, focusing on agriculture, waste, transport, energy, and industry. It also embeds governance, monitoring, communication, and training strategies to sustain long-term, cross-sectoral coordination.

Crucially, the SLCP Action Plan is explicitly recognized within the National Mitigation Strategy (ENM). An annex on non-CO₂ pollutants at Plano Clima identifies the SLPC Action Plan as a central instrument for guiding national SLCP mitigation, aligning trajectory monitoring, and ensuring coherent implementation across all mitigation sectors—including waste, agriculture, nature conservation, cities, energy, industry, and transport. This formal integration is one of the clearest demonstrations worldwide of a government weaving SLCP mitigation directly into its national climate policy architecture.

 

Local Leadership Through LOW-M: Four Cities Driving Methane Reductions

At the municipal level, Brazil’s progress under CCAC’s Low-Emissions Waste Management (LOW-M) initiative shows how national ambition translates into local action. Four cities—Curitiba, Florianópolis, Fortaleza, and Rio de Janeiro—represent a cross-section of Brazil’s regional diversity and are advancing methane mitigation through tailored, innovative approaches.

Curitiba, a city of 1.7 million in the south, has mapped a detailed LOW-M portfolio that blends community-scale composting with industrial-scale treatment facilities, demonstrating how distributed systems can complement centralized infrastructure. Nearby Florianópolis is expanding composting capacity and separate organic-waste collection while designing financing tools to boost household participation and support circular-economy enterprises.

In the northeast, Fortaleza is scaling up segregated collection from markets, deploying biodigesters, and constructing a new composting plant, paired with improved landfill-gas capture systems. Rio de Janeiro, the country’s second-largest city, is strengthening source-separation programs to feed its established composting facilities and aims to significantly expand biogas recovery from landfills for energy use.

All four cities are working through a comprehensive costing exercise to identify investment needs and clarify the financial pathways required for implementation—an approach that mirrors the broader cross-ministerial coherence of Brazil’s national climate architecture.

 

Advancing national standards for composting

To complement Brazil’s work on livestock methane, the Ministry of Environment and Climate Change has launched a CCAC-supported Targeted Expert Assistance project to harmonize composting regulations nationwide. While composting is recognized as a major opportunity for reducing methane emissions from municipal waste, states and municipalities currently operate under a patchwork of regulations that makes implementation inconsistent, costly, and difficult to scale. This TEA responds directly to that challenge by creating standardized subnational guidelines for small-scale composting facilities, aligning subnational frameworks, and equipping local governments with the regulatory clarity needed to expand organic waste recycling ahead of COP-30.

The project—which will run through June 2026—focuses on strengthening the technical, environmental, and institutional foundations necessary for widespread adoption of composting across Brazil. It aims to divert organic waste from landfills by providing municipalities with clear operational and monitoring parameters for facilities processing up to 10 tons of waste per day, a scale relevant to 80% of Brazilian municipalities. By consolidating state-level regulations, offering practical guidance for licensing, and building stakeholder capacity, the initiative positions composting as a scalable climate solution that reduces methane emissions while supporting soil health, food security, and a more circular economy. 

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