After years of stalemate in negotiations for agriculture, the participant countries of the Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Convention on Climate Change (COP 23), in Bonn (Germany), reached an agreement last weekend. With this agreement, negotiations referring to implementation action and to technologies will be able to advance in next COP editions. The agreement made in Bonn defined the main issues to be addressed and that this subject will be analyzed both by the Subsidiary Body for Scientific and Technological Advice (SBSTA) and by the Subsidiary Body on Implementation (SBI). The Embrapa researcher and Brazil's negotiator in the commission Gustavo Mozzer explains that this will kickstart the scientific discussions related to the implementation of actions in countries and to ways of measuring and identifying the impacts of adaptation. “The Conference has now closed the first cycle of discussions on how to do that and opened this new pathway, creating a round of workshops and events. That is, there will now be a little bit more flexibility to discuss which will be the best ways to use instruments to reach such goals in upcoming years”, Mozzer explains. The text agreed on at COP 23 includes topics such as how to assess adaptation and adaptation co-benefits like mitigation; how to improve soil quality and soil carbon stocks and related water dynamics; how to improve production systems; studies on socioeconomy; and makes room for the inclusion of new topics that are presented in the following debates. The countries now have to send reports with suggestions to be analyzed by the negotiators and the expectation is that by COP 26, in 2020, there will be a consensus that will allow the implementation of national plans. The Brazilian negotiator underscored the inclusion of production systems in the text, upon his request. With such inclusion, the scope of discussion now comprises systems like the Integrated Crop-Livestock-Forestry Systems (ICLFS), which has already been adopted in 11.5 million hectares in Brazil and whose adoption has been increasing. Brazil According to Gustavo Mozzer, the agreement corroborates Brazil's preexisting policy of promoting a low carbon agriculture. “I would say that for Brazil there is an enormous opportunity. We are already at the forefront of the implementation of a robust climate change policy. Such policy is already moving from a implementation stage structured by the government to a disruptive stage. ICLFS is an example of that, there was only a small part of it stipulated in the Low Carbon Agriculture Plan, because it was perceived to be a technology with a little more complexity and a higher level of technification, but it has already started to be an adopted on a large scale. The Plan has made this disruptive change possible; society has started to understand the benefits and incorporate that”, he asserts. Mozzer mentions as an example the work developed by the ICLFS Network, a public-private partnership in which Embrapa participates that has been fostering technology transfer and the adoption of ICLFS. Representatives of the Network were also present at the COP to publicize their work and to raise funds to potencialize it. New opportunities The Brazilian negotiator believes that, as negotiations proceed, national agriculture will go through a new cycle of opportunities. Considering the new Forest Code and the advanced stages of implementation of the Rural Environmental Registry (Cadastro Ambiental Rural - CAR), he affirms that the country can now count on better conditions to implement and monitor sustainable practices. Moreover, this context could facilitate the funding of actions to mitigate emissions and on adaptation to climate change. That will be so as agriculture will be addressed in its specificities, and because it will be possible to have access to different sources of funds. “In agriculture, mitigation and adaptation fit in the same box. And that has created difficulties to access funds because if you propose a project in the adaptation box, the benefits that are related to mitigation are not counted in that box to value the project. You then undervalue the project in view of the way the funding was conceived, in a segmented way”, he explains. The researcher also stresses the role of Embrapa, as it has developed and perfected low carbon production techniques, and developed instruments and methodologies to measure the adoption and the mitigation of greenhouse gas emissions. “We will have more opportunities to keep investing in scientific development in such agendas that are central and absolutely strategic for Brazil. Agendas that will be the main umbrella for the definition of sustainable agricultural technologies. Which are the focus of the Low Carbon Agriculture Plan, the core of our policy and Brazil's greatest differential in agriculture today”, he asserts. Translation: Mariana Medeiros