Brazil a leading world polluter, report says

BRASILIA -- Burning of the Amazon and other forests accounts for three quarters of Brazil's greenhouse gas emissions and has made the country one of the leading polluters in the world, a long-delayed government report said yesterday.

The report is the first official recognition by Brazil of the vast scale of burning of the Amazon, the world's largest tropical forest and home to as much as 30 percent of the planet's animal and plant species.

Environmentalists said the findings in the report probably would label Brazil the world's sixth-largest polluter. They said it could give impetus to rich countries' calls for leading developing nations to share in the burden of cutting greenhouse gas emissions, which are believed to cause global warming.

The report showed Brazil produced 1.03 billion tons of carbon-dioxide equivalent in 1994, up from 979 million tons in 1990.

''That figure represents about 3 percent of total global emissions," Science and Technology Minister Eduardo Campos said, adding that the responsibility of slowing global warming ''substantially" falls on rich countries.

''It is now clear that Brazil's quickest way to reduce its contribution to global warming is fundamentally to change the process of occupation and land use in the Amazon," Greenpeace said in a statement.

Brazil had to produce the inventory as a signatory of the Kyoto Protocol to curb greenhouse gases, but as a developing country it does not need to cut emissions under the treaty.

Still, the report is likely to increase the pressure on Brazilian authorities to find ways to curb destruction of the Amazon that has reached alarming new levels in the past few years. Initial data show that this year alone, an area the size of state of New Jersey was destroyed.

Environment Minister Marina Silva said Brazil would not ''escape from its responsibilities" to protect the environment. ''The effort by the government to fight deforestation has to be significant to hit illegal activities," she said.

Still, environmentalists have criticized the government for doing little to enact a plan to fight deforestation. Greenpeace said the latest deforestation figures confirmed ''the historic inability by government to stop deforestation."

''This is the most serious ever," said David Cleary, head of the Amazon program of the Nature Conservancy in Brazil.

The United States has not signed the Kyoto Protocol, saying big, developing countries like China, India, and Brazil need to assume commitments to cut pollution as well.