With extreme climate events becoming increasingly frequent and international climate debates turning their attention to Brazil as COP30 takes place this month in Belém, Pará, understanding the structure of Brazilian climate governance has become essential. To support this effort, the digital platform GovernaClima was launched at the end of October. Developed by the group Technology, Environment, and Society (TEMAS), a research unit within INCT Participa, GovernaClima was created to analyze, systematize, and more clearly visualize climate policies in Brazil.
The platform is the result of the research project “Science, expertise, and climate governance: uses of science in shaping Brazilian climate policy,” coordinated by Professor Lorena Cândido Fleury, with contributions from research fellow André Trevisol Trindade. GovernaClima emerged from a practical challenge faced by researchers. Fleury, who has studied climate policy in Brazil for years, noticed how dispersed the data and regulatory instruments were.
According to the researcher, before the platform existed, initiating any study on the topic was extremely time-consuming because identifying the relevant instruments required starting from scratch each time. “I realized everything was scattered and difficult to find — normative acts, decrees, governance bodies such as the Brazilian Forum on Climate Change, parts of websites offline,” explains Fleury, emphasizing that any study on climate policy must begin with these basic identifications.
Thus, the platform was built to offer a “reliable, consistent, and useful public database” that serves as a common foundation for research. The project's scope is broad, covering the period from the creation of the National Policy on Climate Change (PNMC) in 2009 to the most recent updates.
The database brings together a systematic mapping of federal-level instruments, including organizations, normative acts, initiatives, individuals involved, and records of consultations and public hearings. The team’s intention is for the database to be continuously updated.
Future plans include expanding the platform to incorporate data from other research groups, information on state-level climate governance, civil society activities, and internationally relevant climate governance frameworks.
Based on current data systematization, the project is already identifying key trends and patterns in the institutional architecture. Preliminary findings discussed by the group highlight the central role of federal government agencies and a notable frequency of financial and economic mechanisms among the initiatives.
Researchers also observed the discontinuity of participatory spaces in recent years, with a visible drop in mechanisms such as public hearings after 2020. Additionally, there is a regional concentration of experts and institutions in Brasília, Rio de Janeiro, and São Paulo, as well as a strong presence of researchers from the exact sciences, especially engineering.
The urgency of the climate crisis amplifies the relevance of GovernaClima. Researcher Lorena Fleury stresses that climate discussions are no longer about the future; they have become part of Brazilians’ everyday experience.
“Until very recently, the discussion was about the future — climate change was connected to scenarios and projections. Today, it is part of contemporary lived experience: droughts in northern Brazil, the traumatic flooding in Rio Grande do Sul. There is a material reality that imposes itself,” she notes. This materiality, combined with intersecting environmental debates around climate, demands critical analyses and tools capable of tracking how policy is being formulated and implemented.
Building the database and platform was a complex process that took about two years because of the dispersion and limited availability of official data. Scientific initiation fellow André Trevisol Trindade played an essential technical role, applying his knowledge in data science and programming.
André developed Python scripts to automate data scraping from sources such as the Diário Oficial and the Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation (MCTI), and also extracted information from the Lattes CVs of people mentioned in documents. After collecting data — guided by the framework established by Law nº 12.187/2009 (PNMC) — he focused on standardization to ensure consistency and coherence, as well as building the digital structure. The interactive platform was developed using Streamlit (Python), and the dynamic data visualizations, which resulted in a relational database, were built in Looker Studio.
Explore the GovernaClima platform.
