Testing temporal benchmarks effects on the implementation of the new Brazilian Forest Act

Tavares, Paulo André; Brites, Alice Dantas; Guidotti, Vinícius; Molin, Paulo Guilherme; Mello, Kaline de; Santos, Zenilda Ledo dos; Pinto, Luís Fernando Guedes; Metzger, Jean Paul; Rodrigues, Ricardo Ribeiro; Joly, Carlos Alfredo; Sparovek, Gerd

doi:10.1016/j.envsci.2021.09.024

Cited by 5 publications

(7 citation statements)

References 16 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…size of rural properties) for each municipality to model the Forest Act requirements in the rural properties (requirements depend on the size of rural properties). The estimated native vegetation deficit in the properties was calculated based on the requirements of the New Forest Act, as specified in Articles 12, 13, 15, and 67 (Tavares et al 2021). We also modeled article 68, which was one of the greatest challenges in this project and is specificized below.…”

Section: Native Vegetation Deficit and Surplus Modelingmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…1934 and 1965) in applying the Legal Reserve reduction mechanism. For this, we developed a methodology to assess the past native vegetation cover in 1934 (when no aero-photogrammetric data was available) through a probabilistic approach (Tavares et al 2021).…”

Section: Past Native Vegetation Cover To Estimate Legal Reserve Defic...mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The conflicts between environmental and agricultural sectors continued even after the revision made in 2012 of the former Forest Act from 1965. Ten years after the New Forest Act publication, there is still plenty of uncertainty, especially regarding the specific requirements of Legal Reserves (Tavares et al 2021, Mello et al 2021a). To resolve these disputes between sectors and solve uncertainties regarding the law implementation, it is essential to find balanced solutions based on scientific evidence.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 2 more Smart Citations

Science and environmental policy establishment: the case of the Forest Act in the State of São Paulo, Brazil

et al. 2022

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Natural ecosystems are under severe threat worldwide and environmental policies are essential to minimize present and future impacts on biodiversity, ecosystem services and climate change. The New Forest Act in Brazil is the main policy to protect native vegetation in private lands, which comprise 54% of the remaining Brazilian native vegetation. However, conflicts between environmental and agricultural concerns in its implementation demand for balanced solutions based on scientific evidence. To face the challenge of applying science in environmental policy establishment, we developed a scientific project funded by the São Paulo State Research Foundation (FAPESP) to support the implementation of the New Forest Act in São Paulo State, as part of the Biota/FAPESP Program. The project was conducted differently from a regular research project: the broad objective was to provide scientific support to the State’s implementation of the New Forest Act, based on a participatory interaction among stakeholders to build specific objectives, methods, and discussion of results, within an interdisciplinary and intersectoral research team. Here, we present the lessons learned during and after the four years of the research project development to evaluate how scientific knowledge can be produced and adopted in the implementation of a specific environmental policy. We present the main outcomes and the challenges faced in trying to include scientific data in the decision-making process. We also present current and future challenges in the New Forest Act implementation that could be solved with scientific evidence. The lessons learned showed that even designing the project in order to meet the needs to support the implementation of the environmental policy, avoiding difficulties normally pointed out by similar projects, there was a great difficulty for scientific contributions to be adopted in the decision-making process. Most of the scientific information and advice, even after discussion and common understanding among a diverse stakeholder group, were ignored or over-ruled in the final decision-making phases.

show abstract

Section: Native Vegetation Deficit and Surplus Modelingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Past Native Vegetation Cover To Estimate Legal Reserve Defic...mentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

Science and environmental policy establishment: the case of the Forest Act in the State of São Paulo, Brazil

et al. 2022

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Increasing the demand for restoration due to ecological equivalence had the advantage of bringing additionality to the Legal Reserve compensation scheme. When considering merely the biome as the ecological requirement for compensation, simply exchanging deficits by surplus would be allowed, a measure that brings no additionality to the Atlantic Forest (Mello et al, 2021b;Tavares et al, 2021). Also, including ecological equivalence tended to restrict compensation within the state where the deficit is, which is good because it guarantees the environmental benefits generated by the compensation will not be "exported" to other places that do not suffer the consequences of the deficits.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The mandatory Legal Reserve in the Atlantic Forest biome is 20% of the property. To extract values of Legal Reserve surplus, Legal Reserves in small properties, and deficit area per hexagon, we used a database containing this information on each property of São Paulo state (Tavares et al, 2021). To aggregate this propertylevel data in the hexagons, we filtered the data for the Atlantic Forest and assumed the surplus, the small properties" Legal Reserves, and the deficit were equally distributed in each property.…”

Section: Legal Reserve Deficit and Compensation Datamentioning

confidence: 99%

Compensação ambiental como mecanismo de conservação: dos métodos ao teste de cenários baseados no Novo Código Florestal

Matos¹

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Given the importance of environmental compensations and biodiversity offsets (i.e. compensations with no net loss of biodiversity) for conservation and their increasing use worldwide, it is critical to understand and improve these mechanisms. In this work, we sought to broaden our understanding and make suggestions for improvement, focusing on ways to measure and achieve ecological equivalence in compensation trades. First, we reviewed the academic literature on the condition metrics used in offsets. We unraveled and understood the main limitations of the metrics: the frequent lack of incorporation of the three dimensions of equivalence (biodiversity, landscape and ecosystem services), the inclusion of many ecological attributes highly aggregated in a single formula, generating a single value as a final result, and the fact they were developed in few countries, primarily from the Global North -yet, they are commonly applied in other countries, inclusive from the Global South. Thus, our next step was trying to overcome these limitations by developing a new metric. We created the Disaggregated Condition Metric, which presents flexibility in the number and identity of the attributes included, always in a disaggregated way. To make the metric simpler, we tested the synergy and trade-off relationships of the attributes and identified those most redundant that could be dismissed, always including the three dimensions of equivalence. Compensation trades are only allowed within spatial units (hexagons from 5 to 10 thousand hectares) of the same value for the three attributes selected at the end of the tests. Using the tropical biome Atlantic Forest within the state of São Paulo as our study system, these attributes were: bird richness, landscape connectivity, and potential pollination service. The Disaggregated Condition Metric has a high potential to be successfully transposed to other regions, especially those from the Global South. Our final step was to test the metric application in a real situation. For this, we used the Legal Reserve compensation scheme proposed in the Brazilian New Forest Code. Considering the same study area in São Paulo, we calculated for each hexagon values of deficit and surplus of Legal Reserve, areas possibly available for restoration of native vegetation, private areas in an irregular situation within public protected areas, where the compensation could be carried out, and the costs for employing these compensation strategies. We created six scenarios to test the performance of these strategies, always using the Disaggregated Environmental Condition Metric and including ecological equivalence in the trades. We showed that practically the entire deficit of the Atlantic Forest of São Paulo can be compensated by a combination of protection of Legal Reserve surplus with restoration, which is the scenario with the best cost-efficiency, considering the costs, deficit resolution and increase in forest cover (considered here as "additionality"). Therefore, we not only contributed to a better unders...

show abstract

The role of forest plantations for the native vegetation conservation in the protected areas surroundings

Aparecida Rosa de Queiroz,

Pannunzio Ribeiro,

André Tavares

et al. 2024

Journal for Nature Conservation

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Testing temporal benchmarks effects on the implementation of the new Brazilian Forest Act

Cited by 5 publications

References 16 publications

Science and environmental policy establishment: the case of the Forest Act in the State of São Paulo, Brazil

Science and environmental policy establishment: the case of the Forest Act in the State of São Paulo, Brazil

Compensação ambiental como mecanismo de conservação: dos métodos ao teste de cenários baseados no Novo Código Florestal

The role of forest plantations for the native vegetation conservation in the protected areas surroundings

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About