Leandro Valle Ferreira; Eduardo Venticinque; Samuel Almeida
ABSTRACT
DEMOGRAPHIC occupation of the Brazilian Legal Amazon within the past 50 years has lead to significant levels of deforestation as the result of several factors such as new road construction, urban growth, expansion of extensive cattle ranching, increasing timber extraction, and rising intensive agriculture of monocultures. The cumulative deforested area in Brazil's Legal Amazonia was approximately 653,000 km2 in 2003, correspondingto 16,3% of the region. This study sought to assess deforestation within or near to protected areas (conservation units) and indigenous reserves in Legal Amazonia in the states of Mato Grosso, Rondônia, and Pará that jointly were responsible for more than 90% of regional deforestation from 2001 to 2003. Results show that deforestation was about 10 to 20 times less within the protected areas and indigenous lands than in adjoining areas. This demonstrates the importance of protected areas to hold back deforestation in these three states, refuting the widely held hypothesis that protected areas do not fulfill their main function in the conservation and sustainable use of resources in Amazonia.
Key words: Amazon, Deforestation, Protected Areas.
BackgroundThe Amazon Biome stretches from the Atlantic Ocean to the eastern slopes of the Andes, up to about 600 m, containing parts of nine countries of South America, 69% of this area belongs to Brazil (expert, 1977). This biome covers the states of Para, Amazonas, Maranhao, Goias, Mato Grosso, Acre, Amapá, Rondônia and Roraima, a total of 4,871,000 km2 and a population of about twenty million inhabitants, 60% of them living in urban areas (INPE , 2004).
The traditional occupation of the Amazon has led to a significant increase in deforestation in the Amazon region, which is a phenomenon of a complex nature, which can not be attributed to a single factor (Alencar et al., 2004).
The most pressing issues in terms of conservation and sustainable use of natural resources in the Amazon refer to large-scale loss of critical functions in the Amazon due to the expansion of deforestation linked to development policies in the region, such as land speculation along the roads, growth of cities, dramatic increase in cattle, logging and farming (most recently, mechanized agriculture), mainly linked to the cultivation of soybeans and cotton (Fearnside, 2003, Alencar et al., 2004 and Laurance et al., 2004) .
This increase in economic activity largely on the resources of the Brazilian Legal Amazon has dramatically increased the rate of deforestation in the period 2002 to 2003, was of 23,750 km2, the second highest rate ever recorded in this region, surpassed only by the milestone of 29,059 km2 deforested in 1995 (INPE, 2004).
The situation is so critical that, recently, the Brazilian government created an Inter-Ministerial Group to combat deforestation and to propose solutions on how to minimize its impact in Amazonia (MMA, 2004).
This study therefore aims to show how it is spatially distributed deforestation in Amazonia, what are their environmental consequences and discusses some proposed solutions for reducing deforestation.
ResultsThe deforestation process usually begins with the official opening of roads or illegal that allow human expansion and the unlawful occupation of land to the predatory exploitation of hardwoods. Later, it becomes a logged forest in family farming and grazing for extensive livestock farming, especially on large properties, factor responsible for about 80% of forest clearing in Amazonia. More recently, the pastures are giving way to mechanized agriculture, especially those linked to soybean and cotton (Figure 1).
As a result of these activities, deforestation in Amazonia in Brazil has been a growing relationship in the past ten years, with a significant increase between the years 2001-2002 and 2002-2003 (Figure 2).
There is a direct relationship between the economy, the advancing frontier in Amazonia and the rate of deforestation increased since 1990, influenced by the state's economy. However, in recent years, this relationship began to change, because the rate of deforestation was increasing, despite the lack of economic growth (Figure 2).
This suggests that a new dynamic is influencing deforestation in the region, such as a dynamic linked to the export market driven by the high profitability of the main economic activities such as logging and livestock, more recently, the industry (Fearnside, 2003 and Alencar et al., 2004)
The cumulative deforested area in Amazonia Brazil reached about 653 thousand km2, in 2003, accounting for 16.3%. However, this deforestation is not uniformly distributed but concentrated along the so-called "arc of deforestation", whose boundaries stretch from the southeastern state of Maranhao, in northern Ontario, south of Pará, northern Mato Grosso, Rondônia, south the Amazon and southeast of the state of Acre (Figure 3).
The states that deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon between 2001 and 2003 were of Pará, Rondônia, Mato Grosso and Maranhao, which together have corresponding for more than 90% of deforestation observed in this period (Table 1).
Roads and deforestation in the AmazonThe proportion of deforestation as a function of distance from roads in Amazonia is usually exponential patterns, ie, a large proportion of deforestation next to roads (Figure 4)..
These patterns have been observed by several studies in this region. Ferreira (2001) found exponential curves of deforestation on the distance from roads. Nepstad et al. (2001) showed that three quarters of deforestation between 1978 and 1994 occurred within a range of 100 km wide along the highway BR 010 (Belém-Brasília), BR 364 (Cuiabá-Porto Velho) and PA 150.
These results are extremely important in terms of public policy for the Amazon, because these areas are under the auspices of the Advance Brazil Program, which the government planned to invest about forty billion dollars in construction and rehabilitation of about 7,500 km of roads , dramatically increasing the accessibility to many remote areas (Laurance et al., 2004).
Protected areas and deforestation in AmazoniaBrazil has various categories of protected areas, at the federal, state and municipal. According to the National System of Conservation of Nature (SNUC), Federal Law No. 9.985/00 (IBAMA, 2004).
The sustainable use units aimed at reconciling nature conservation with sustainable use of natural resources, ie, it allows the exploitation and use direct economic in a planned and regulated. In this group are included in the categories of management Environmental Protection Area, Area of Ecological Interest, National Forest, Extractive Reserve, Wildlife Reserve and Sustainable Development Reserve (IBAMA, 2004).
The group of units of integral protection aims to conserve biodiversity, and includes the categories Ecological Station, Biological Reserve, National Park, Natural Monuments and Wildlife Refuge. These management categories are available for full preservation of the biota and other natural attributes existing within its limits, reconciled to carry out scientific research, which must be authorized by IBAMA and are subject to "the standards which it establishes. Some of them admit to public visitation for educational purposes broad or narrow, but are always subject to the standards set by its board and responsible for those specified in Regulation (IBAMA, 2004).
Other categories of institutional areas in Amazonia are the indigenous lands under the jurisdiction of the federal government, through the National Indian Foundation (FUNAI). Several authors have argued that these areas can be considered "protected areas", since they do not meet the criteria established by SNUC. However, this discussion is not the purpose of this text. In this study, the Conservation Units of Integral Protection, Sustainable Use and Indigenous Lands in Amazonia will be called "protected areas".
In addition to determine how it is spatially distributed deforestation in the Brazilian Legal Amazon, an important question is how is distributed the proportion of deforestation inside and outside the current set of protected areas and indigenous lands in the Amazon. In other words, this set of protected areas can be an instrument of public policy used for the reduction of deforestation in the Amazon? Or due to its low implementation this set fails to fulfill its function of reducing the advance of deforestation in the Brazilian legal? (Aaron et al., 2001).
Conservation Units of Integral Protection and Sustainable Use (State and Federal), indigenous lands and deforestation in Amazonia currently occupy 4.9%, 9.1%, 20.4% and 16.5%, respectively (Figure 5) .
Currently, the proportion of total deforestation in Mato Grosso, Para and Rondonia is 28.4%, 20.4% and 29.2%, respectively. However, there is a big difference in the proportion of deforestation within or outside protected areas in these states (Figure 6).
The proportion of deforested area within protected areas ranged from 1.5 to 4.7%, while the proportion of deforestation out of them ranged from 29.2% to 48.1% in the three states analyzed (Figure 6).
The difference of deforestation within or outside protected areas ranged from about ten times in the states of Mato Grosso and Rondonia about twenty times in the state of Pará (Figure 6).
These results clearly demonstrate the importance of protected areas (conservation units and indigenous reserves) as a tool to contain or reduce deforestation in three states that most contributed to deforestation in Amazonia and partially contradicts the widely held hypothesis that protected areas in the Amazon are not fulfilling their primary function in the conservation and rational use of resources in the region, the fact that many are not yet implemented and have varying degrees of vulnerability (Sá and Ferreira, 2000).
Land use in AmazoniaRecently, The Economist magazine published a report on the environmental consequences of paving the Cuiabá-Santarém (BR-163), since the roads are known to be one of the most responsible for deforestation in Amazonia. One of the conclusions of the report was a question: "Is it possible to reconcile development and conservation of the Amazon?".
The answer to this question is not simple, but that possibility exists, and this is possible through the process of planning the Amazon region, using a tool to implement the ecological-economic zoning.
In a simplified way, the occupation of the Amazon in order to reduce the conversion of environments for deforestation can be summarized in the following formula: "10-20-30-40" which could combine the issues of preservation and use of resources in the Brazilian Amazon (Table 2).
This proposed land use includes all activities that can be developed in Amazonia. There is, for example, increase the space for the expansion of traditional economic activities such as livestock and agriculture, which currently has felled some 17% of the region, which may expand as much as 20%. However, further actions should be implemented, such as increased conservation in Conservation Units of Integral Protection, respect for indigenous lands and especially the economic use of the Amazon forest, in public and private lands (Table 2).
We must break with the traditional model of occupation of the Amazon, you can not face the Amazon region as an area to be exploited irrationally territorial planning through the Ecological-Economic Zoning (EEZ) is a solution to support the decisions of environmental planning and economic development on a sustainable basis.
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