The natural and social history of the indigenous lands and protected areas corridor of the Xingu River basin

Abstract

The 280 000 km² Xingu indigenous lands and protected areas (ILPAs) corridor, inhabited by 24 indigenous peoples and about 215 riverine (ribeirinho) families, lies across active agriculture frontiers in some of the historically highest-deforestation regions of the Amazon. Much of the Xingu is anthropogenic landscape, densely inhabited and managed by indigenous populations over the past millennium. Indigenous and riverine peoples' historical management and use of these landscapes have enabled their long-term occupation and ultimately their protection. The corridor vividly demonstrates how ILPAs halt deforestation and why they may account for a large part of the 70 per cent reduction in Amazon deforestation below the 1996–2005 average since 2005. However, ongoing and planned dams, road paving, logging and mining, together with increasing demand for agricultural commodities, continued degradation of upper headwaters outside ILPA borders and climate change impacts may render these gains ephemeral. Local peoples will need new, bottom-up, forms of governance to gain recognition for the high social and biological diversity of these territories in development policy and planning, and finance commensurate with the value of their ecosystem services. Indigenous groups' reports of changing fire and rainfall regimes may themselves evidence climate change impacts, a new and serious threat.

Abrupt increases in Amazonian tree mortality due to drought–fire interactions

“…Both of these changes in regional land management seem feasible (3,35), and several promising initiatives to reduce the probability of forest fires are already underway. Examples of recent efforts include (i) development of an early warning system to forecast the locations and intensities of fires (3); (ii) implementation of Brazilian federal and state policies to prevent and control forest fires (40); and (iii) creation of volunteer fire brigades to fight fires within private farms and indigenous reserves (14,35,40). Over a longer time horizon, the future of many forests in the region will require successful mitigation of greenhouse gas emissions to reduce the likelihood of extreme weather events.…”

“…In nondrought years, primary forests typically do not catch fire during the dry season because the fine fuel layer is too humid to carry a fire (12). This characteristic of primary forests helps explain why forest fires were less frequent in pre-Colombian times than today (13), although indigenous peoples of the Amazon have used fire as a management tool for hundreds or thousands of years (14). Current anthropogenic disturbances in moist tropical forests (e.g., logging, forest conversion for crops and livestock, and the resulting fragmentation of forests) tend to thin forest canopies (5,11) and expose forest interiors to warm air flowing horizontally from neighboring clearings, allowing the forest floor to dry more rapidly during rainless periods.…”

Ecology, economy and management of an agroindustrial frontier landscape in the southeast Amazon

“…Durigan et al [23] Macedo et al [24] Neill et al [27] Gardner et al [42] Le Tourneau et al [41] VanWey et al [29] Schwartzman et al [34] Riskin et al [28] Stickler et al [18] Nepstad et al [47] Galford et al [30] Schiesari et al [31] Morton et al [32] Silvério et al [36] Stickler et al [18] DeFries et al [49] Schwartzman et al [34] infrastructure Nepstad et al [47] Macedo et al [24] Neill et al [27] [35] Figure 1. Schematic diagram showing the interconnections among the processes that affect land cover and land-use change (LCLUC) and the social and biophysical outcomes of LCLUC in the Brazilian Amazon.…”

Ecological restoration of Xingu Basin headwaters: motivations, engagement, challenges and perspectives

“…This watershed is symbolic of environmental degradation triggered by the deforestation of headwaters, which reaches about 35 per cent of the entire basin. About 6000 indigenous people living in the Xingu Park and other communities inhabiting the heart of the basin in downstream extractive reserves of the Terra do Meio have been negatively affected by changes in the quantity and quality of water that enters their lands [10].…”