O BRICS e o enfrentamento à mudança climática: um estudo da atuação do Novo Banco de Densenvolvimento

Abstract

The BRICS and its institutions are an unavoidable pole for debate and the resolution of global challenges due to its economic strength, the size of its populations, its material resources, its territories, and the biodiversity under its responsibility. The climate change is inserted in this context in an acute and urgent way, demanding from the group an assertive attitude that can integrate the legitimate demands of the Global South for prosperity with the pressing needs for climate change mitigation and adaptation. The New Development Bank (NDB), created by the BRICS but now with a membership not fully coinciding with its founding group, plays a relevant role in one of the main bottlenecks for the promotion of a just transition towards a low-carbon economy: climate finance. Linked since its foundation to the financing of infrastructure and sustainable development, the NDB can become a key institution for funding climate projects in the Global South while not reproducing practices that undermine the sovereignty and the politic and economic autonomy of its client countries. However, a question arises and is the reason of this research: How have the NDB’s actions actually been conducted in the global effort towards mitigation and adaptation to climate change, and what have its results been so far? In order to answer this question, this investigation conducts a dual analysis — documentary and bibliographical — which aims to: (1) analyze the bank’s strategy and methodology on climate matters and their adequacy for achieving the global goals established for climate mitigation and adaptation; (2) examine the effectiveness of the NDB’s actions in relation to its self-declared strategy of financing projects that contribute to combating climate change; and (3) discuss the potentialities and limitations of the bank’s role as an instrument of climate action within the ecosocialist theoretical framework. To achieve these goals, the present work is structured in three steps: the first focuses on data presented by UN climate reports and other relevant institutions, providing an overview of the global climatic situation and problematizing its causes and solutions from an ecosocialist point of view; the second analyzes the trajectory of international climate governance and the role of the Global South, BRICS, and Multilateral Development Banks (MDBs) in this construction; the third examines the NDB’s performance as a source of climate finance, its innovations, contradictions, challenges, and possibilities. This research concludes that, despite the institution’s considerable potential, the NDB’s climate initiatives and results are timid and insufficient to meet the bank’s own strategic objectives, reproducing a liberal pattern of financing projects with climatically ambiguous and poorly transparent impacts, without breaking with the capitalist paradigm of anti-ecological exploitation of natural resources and environments. Finally, comments and suggestions are made on how to confront these contradictions and how BRICS and the NDB can act in line with their potential as instruments to overcome the ways of life, production, and consumption that have been leading humanity into an era of polycrisis and the planet Earth to the brink of its sixth mass extinction.