The U.S. and Brazil have put climate change at the top of their priority list, as presidents Barack Obama and Dilma Rousseff have announced their new commitment to increase renewable power usage and conduct widescale reforestation in an effort to reduce carbon pollution.
The announcement was made at the two countries' bilateral meeting on Tuesday, ahead of the 2015 United Nations Climate Change Conference happening in Paris on December, according to The Guardian.
The two countries committed to getting 20 percent of their energy from wind, solar and other renewable sources by 2030, which is three times more than the renewable energy presently produced by the U.S. and two times more than that produced by Brazil, TIME reported.
The U.S. provided a plan to bring down the emission of greenhouse gases by 26 to 28 percent by the year 2025, according to The Wall Street Journal.
"Climate change is one of the central challenges of the 21st century," Rousseff said in a press conference, The Guardian reported. "And we have one important objective - to ensure that the energy mix in our two countries will have a substantial share of renewable sources of energy."
Brazil also pledged to eliminate illegal deforestation and conduct reforestation on 12 million hectares of forest land by 2030.
U.S. officials hailed the announcement as a significant milestone toward the December conference. Brian Deese, White House senior climate change adviser, told reporters that Tuesday's announcement was "ambitious," but if the goals are achieved, it can give a significant boost to the "overall effort to constrain carbon emissions," WSJ reported.
"It reflects the commitment that both countries have to driving renewables at the center of a clean-energy economy transformation," Deese said. "It also reflects the progress that we've made on bringing down the cost of renewables."
