A Renewed Mandate to Do Better

On 4 November 2026, ten days after Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva won a fourth presidential term, the Brazilian COP30 Presidency published two roadmaps: one on transitioning away from fossil fuels and one on halting and reversing deforestation by 2030. Brazil had promised them at the close of COP30 in Belém, after efforts to include a reference to a fossil fuel roadmap in the negotiated outcome failed. Both documents are voluntary and sit outside the formal UN process. Yet they also set a benchmark against which Brazil’s own record can be read.

These two roadmaps correspond to two very different domestic stories with legal angles that we highlight here. On forests, Brazil can point to a sharp fall in deforestation, sustained in part by litigation before the Supreme Federal Court (STF) that kept enforcement policies alive and supervised their implementation. On fossil fuels, there is no equivalent record, and courts are poorly placed to produce one: the choice to keep expanding oil production rests with the executive. Lula’s new mandate is therefore an opportunity to preserve what has worked on forests and to bring Brazil’s domestic energy policy closer to its international climate diplomacy.

Two Roadmaps and a Domestic Test

The fossil fuel roadmap creates no new commitments and is not a negotiated outcome. Its core is the “Belém Readiness Approach”, which asks how exposed each country is to the transition and how much capacity it has to manage it, across three pillars: energy demand, energy supply and the wider economy. Countries are grouped into archetypes, each with suggested levers and sequencing. On supply, the document warns that expanding fossil fuel production as demand declines deepens lock-in and stranded-asset risks, but also that premature supply cuts can cause price shocks that fall hardest on vulnerable households. It invites governments to carry out a readiness self-assessment “as soon as possible”.

The roadmap arrives at a time of visible retreat. A new study by the TPI Global Climate Transition Centre at LSE finds that only five of 71 assessed countries still have an active pledge to phase out fossil fuel subsidies, and that just seven of 75 countries with a quantified 2030 target are on an emissions trend consistent with 1.5°C.

The forest roadmap identifies five complementary areas of action, from conservation to restoration, and asks countries to diagnose the drivers of forest loss, align policies and finance, set targets, deliver, and then evaluate and adjust. It names finance as one of the largest gaps: annual forest finance would need to rise from US$84.5 billion in 2023 to more than US$300 billion by 2030. It draws on Brazil’s own experience, citing estimates that the policies introduced under the Action Plan for the Prevention and Control of Deforestation in the Legal Amazon (PPCDAm) avoided around 73,000 km² of deforestation between 2005 and 2009, and that satellite monitoring combined with targeted enforcement prevented the clearing of more than 59,500 km² between 2007 and 2011.

The two roadmaps also contrast in their level of specificity, revealing different degrees of domestic credibility. On forests, the roadmap builds on policies and institutions that already exist and whose implementation courts have helped to sustain. On fossil fuels, it asks governments to consider a transition that Brazil itself has yet to translate into a clear domestic policy.

Forests and the Courts

That record has not been linear. According to Brazil’s official monitoring system (PRODES/INPE), Amazon deforestation reached 13,038 km² in 2021, the highest figure since 2006. During President Jair Bolsonaro’s government (2019-2022), the Amazon lost 45,586 km² of forest, 55% more than in the previous four years. From 2023, with the start of President Lula’s third administration, deforestation fell year on year, and in 2026 it reached its lowest level in 41 years. The 2026 Presidential election made the stakes explicit. Flávio Bolsonaro’s programme promised that the environment would no longer be “an obstacle to development”, while Lula’s programme committed to “zero net deforestation”.

A change of government explains much of this turnaround, but not all of it. A less visible factor is litigation. During the Bolsonaro years, political parties and civil society organisations brought a series of constitutional actions before the STF challenging the dismantling of environmental policy. Seven of them were listed for joint judgment in 2022 as the so-called Green Package. The most relevant here, ADPF 760, challenged the federal government’s abandonment of the PPCDAm – the same policy that the forest roadmap now presents as a model. When the judgment began in 2022, the rapporteur, Justice Cármen Lúcia, described the government’s approach as a “termite-like” destruction of environmental governance. The Court concluded the case only in 2024. It acknowledged the progress made under the new government but still required substantial commitments from it. Later implementation decisions required a plan to rebuild the workforce of environmental and Indigenous affairs agencies, authorised extraordinary budget appropriations and barred spending freezes on environmental budget lines.

While litigation alone did not produce the observed decline in deforestation, it helped preserve the legal and institutional infrastructure through which a more committed executive could act, and it made the rebuilding of that infrastructure subject to continuing judicial oversight.

Forests: Closing the Implementation Gap

ADPF 743, on fires in the Pantanal and the Amazon, shows why the design of implementation matters. After the 2024 judgment, the Court issued 55 implementation orders, bringing the federal government and the states of both regions together in joint action against forest fires. Two specialised STF units support this work, one assessing compliance in structural cases (NUPEC) and one facilitating consensual solutions (NUSOL). In public, televised hearings, the parties and amici curiae work through outstanding issues with Justice Flávio Dino, who oversees implementation, from the integration of land registry databases to an inter-federative plan for fire prevention and response.

The fossil fuel roadmap could contribute to this picture of more effective implementation. It distinguishes a policy gap, where a measure has yet to be adopted, from an implementation gap, where a measure exists but fails to deliver because capacity, financing, enforcement or coordination fall short. Structural litigation in Brazil has worked mainly on the second. The STF did not design deforestation policy; it required the government to apply the policies it had and monitored whether it did so.

The STF’s expansive role in Brazilian politics and continuous judicial supervision of public policy may raise questions about the separation of powers and institutional capacity. But the Court has relied largely on dialogue and coordination, giving effect to the duty to protect the environment that Article 225 of the Constitution imposes on public authorities. By recognising rights and monitoring compliance, it can support government action as much as constrain it.

However, the implementation of climate policies and decisions will remain challenging. More than half of the newly elected members of Congress have previously acted against Indigenous rights or Amazon conservation, and governors aligned with Bolsonaro will lead seven of the nine Amazonian states. Courts can contain some setbacks, and structural cases offer a forum for coordinating federal and state action, but neither substitutes for political commitment and engagement.

Fossil Fuel: Confronting the Policy Gap

On fossil fuels, Brazil’s record is perhaps even more complex. Lula’s government has combined lower deforestation with support for oil expansion and exploration. Shortly before the roadmaps were published, the state-controlled company Petrobras announced its third oil discovery in Block FZA-M-59, offshore near the mouth of the Amazon. If Brazil applied the Belém Readiness Approach to itself, as the Presidency invites all countries to do, it would find that the roadmap points large producers with substantial transition capacity towards diversifying their supply mix and redirecting infrastructure and industrial capabilities – priorities that sit uneasily with opening new oil frontiers. Brazil’s own NDC, which commits to cutting net emissions by 59–67% by 2035 relative to 2005, and its Climate Plan 2024–2035 set the domestic benchmark.

This is where the limits of litigation become clear. Courts can protect institutions, budgets and procedures, and they can hold governments to the commitments they have made. They can review licensing, environmental impact assessments, and consistency with climate targets, but they cannot design a country’s energy pathway. International law adds pressure: the International Court of Justice has observed that fossil fuel production, the granting of exploration licences and fossil fuel subsidies may constitute internationally wrongful acts, and the Inter-American Court of Human Rights requires heightened due diligence in the face of the climate emergency. Translating these standards into decisions about particular licences can be a legal task, but deciding whether and how Brazil should open new oil frontiers remains, first and foremost, a political choice.

The roadmaps’ own advice is to “start now, from where you are”. On forests, Brazil starts from a stronger position, with rebuilt institutions, courts that supervise implementation and new finance initiatives such as the Tropical Forests Forever Facility, to which the Netherlands pledged a further US$500 million after the election. On fossil fuels, it starts from a government that is still expanding production. Lula’s fourth term offers a renewed opportunity to continue the first trajectory and to change the second, beginning with the readiness assessment that Brazil is now asking other countries to undertake.

The election also gave that task a renewed democratic mandate.  An army of 11 million citizens mobilized in an extremely close contest, in which environmental protection was explicitly at stake. Many, including older voters and Indigenous communities, are among those most exposed to environmental degradation and climate change. Responding to them requires Brazil not only to lead through international proposals, but also to confront the contradictions in its own development model.