Protected Areas in Brazil: Evolution, Land Use and Cover, and Impact on Emissions Inventory

Abstract

Faced with population growth and intensification of the use of natural resources, Protected Areas (PA) and Indigenous Lands (IL) play a fundamental role in environmental conservation. The carbon increment of preserved vegetation within these areas is accounted for as CO2 removal in the Land Use, Land-Use Change, and Forestry (LULUCF) sector of the National Emissions Inventory. A topological evaluation of overlaps was made of the databases of PAs (full protection and sustainable use) and ILs, showing that they represent 6% of the protected areas. Of the total of PAs and ILs areas, 43% were established by 1994, 26% by 2002, 26% by 2010, and 4% between 2011 and 2016. This evaluation showed that 30% of the territory is within PAs and ILs. In terms of area, 84% is distributed in the Amazon, 9% in the Cerrado, 4% in the Atlantic Forest, 3% in the Caatinga, 0,2% in the Pantanal, and 0,3% in the Pampa. In assessing the use and cover of 2010 of the PAs and ILs created up to this year, it was possible to notice that 68% of the areas within the PAs have preserved vegetation, whereas in ILs, this percentage increases to 89%. Under the Third Emissions Inventory, the removal of vegetation protected in PAs and ILs decreased by 16% of the national net emissions of the LULUCF sector between 2002 and 2010, showing the importance of preserving forests and grasslands.

Current policies are insufficient to protect or restore Brazil’s cost-effective conservation priority zones

“…Based on the Convention on Biological Diversity's Aichi targets, Brazil set in 2013 its national biodiversity goals [24] for significantly reducing the risk of extinction of threatened species. In particular, Goal 11 foresaw the expansion of the country's network of protected areas (PAs), which includes both conservation units and indigenous lands [8], to cover at least 30% of the Amazon and 17% of each of its remaining terrestrial biomes (Cerrado, Caatinga, Atlantic Forest, Pantanal and Pampa). With the exception of the Amazon, this goal was still not attained in other biomes [46], and is now being challenged by more ambitious post-2020 targets, which include recent proposals for protecting 30% of the planet (land and oceans) by 2030 [12], half the terrestrial biosphere by 2050 [11,21,49].…”