Valuing conservation and socio-environmental services on an Amazon frontier: the Extractive Reserves of the Terra do Meio

Abstract

In the Brazilian Amazon, forest conservation has relied on the presence of 'traditional communities' and Indigenous peoples to secure legally demarcated protected areas from deforestation and biodiversity degradation. Facing pressures for land-use change from a rapidly encroaching frontier of resource extraction and commodity production, there is no guarantee that Indigenous peoples or traditional communities will continue to occupy these forests or continue to fulfill the role of forest protectors except under certain conditions. In this article, we detail the case of the extractive reserves of the Terra do Meio and consider what conditions would be needed for traditional communities to continue to occupy and protect protected areas. Employing an agrarian political ecology approach, we draw on years of ethnographic research in this area to argue that forest peasant livelihoods, which revolve around the forest areas of use, produce both ecological and cultural diversity in the forest. We term this socio-ecological arrangement the productive system of the colocação, the system and geographies of forest peasant livelihoods that upholds and is upheld by diverse socio-ecological relationships. Contemporary forest conservation regimes, however, have largely failed to incentivize and value these forest peasant livelihoods in ways that would sustain them in the face of commoditizing frontier pressures. Any mechanisms that pay for forest conservation should remunerate communities for their entire socio-ecological relationships, those relationships that are upheld through forest peasant livelihoods, not simply their products. We propose an approach to valuing forest communities' socio-environmental services, and we argue that such valuation would be more effective for conservation and cultural/ecological diversity than existing proposals for payments for ecosystem services (PES).

Hydropolitical potentialities in a post-'Day Zero' Cape Town: "Sensemaking" and the Cape Flats Aquifer

“…While such an analysis has been used by various actors to characterize the contestations between stakeholders in the PHA, this article stresses the financialization of both nature and land as vehicles for profit generation, through a grounded analysis. As highlighted by Rezende et al (2024), the ever-encroaching reach of extractive capitalism can be located through various practices. Ranging from the financialization of land through infrastructure development, to the commodification of nature through commercial farming, biodiversity and "peasant" livelihoods are affected by both.…”

“…Ranging from the financialization of land through infrastructure development, to the commodification of nature through commercial farming, biodiversity and "peasant" livelihoods are affected by both. Therefore, while developing a political ecological critique of the development, which aimed to rezone 95.6 hectares of the 1,884 hectare PHA (Amos, 2016), it aimed to politicize the use and function of agriculturally valuable land and natural resources in a time when the drought was reaching mainstream political discourse (Rezende et al, 2024) Even though the development proposed in the Southeast of the PHA presents a more complicated and protracted case, the grounds on which the Uvest case was halted are noteworthy. The PHA Campaign's attempt to stop the development relied on the index of yield and production output of the PHA as a farming area as a whole.…”