Let digital public infrastructure help meet climate aims

When you spend so much of your time working on India's digital public infrastructure, it is easy to overlook all the other countries that are building population-scale infrastructure.

- RAHUL MATTHAN

Sometimes to your detriment.

Last week, I was in Brazil, and I had the opportunity to spend time with a wide variety of stakeholders who are building digital government services in the country. I came away from those discussions with the impression that, if anything, Brazil might be fast outstripping us in terms of the innovative digital services being provided.

Of particular interest to me was Brazil's rural environmental registry (Cadastro Ambiental Rural or CAR), a national digital infrastructure initiative that has been designed to promote sustainable land use and encourage environmental preservation.

Thanks to increasingly aggressive agricultural expansion, Brazil faces a significant deforestation challenge. It has already lost as much as 97% of all its native vegetation.

With more and more countries introducing regulations that restrict the sale of unsustainably cultivated produce (such as, for instance, the EU Deforestation Regulation), Brazil's agricultural exports are at risk unless it can demonstrate compliance with these environmental obligations through some credible verification mechanism.

This is where the CAR registry comes in. Established under Brazil's Forestry Code, it is a digital framework designed to map, monitor and regulate rural properties around the country to establish a baseline of agricultural activity that can then be used to demonstrate compliance with applicable environmental regulations.