Property-level assessment of change in forest clearing patterns: The need for tailoring policy in the Amazon (original) (raw)
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Forest Ecology and Management, 2012
Understanding actor-specific responsibility for deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon is key in adjusting policy and resource allocation in the face of current forest destruction. However, previous research shows that there is great variability in such assessments. To contribute to the ongoing discussions on forest conservation and rural development policies in the Amazon, this paper studies actor-specific deforestation and its environmental effects in four municipalities situated along the Transamazon Highway. We used spatially explicit methods that integrate a database of 8281 georeferenced properties with a time series of remote-sensing data covering four periods between 1986 and 2007. We also included landscape ecology metrics as improved indicators of the complex environmental effects of forest fragmentation. The analysis demonstrates that smallholders (defined as colonists who own less than 100 ha of land) were responsible for 23% of total deforestation in the study region while accounting for 55% of the total properties. We also explored the relationship between property size and deforestation at the property level, finding that it closely follows a power distribution. Property deforestation increased with property size, while the percentage of property deforestation decreased. In spite of this, compliance with current legal requirements to maintain 50% of property forest cover was not statistically different between smallholders and largeholders. In comparison to municipalities dominated by medium-and large-scale ranchers, the smallholder-dominated municipality of Medicilândia showed better performance in all applied landscape metrics with well-established relationships with the provision of important environmental goods and services. Although all studied municipalities showed severe accumulated deforestation, Medicilândia experienced an abrupt decrease in municipal deforestation after 1999 to just 0.03% year À1 , while municipalities dominated by larger holders maintained or increased their previous deforestation rates to between 0.90% and 1.34% year À1 in the same period. This indicates that the smallholders' productions schemes in our study area might present potential for agricultural frontier stabilization based on improved land-use efficiency. The policy implications of our findings are discussed, especially with regard to the role of smallholders in productive forest conservation.
Deforestation dynamics in Brazil's Amazonian settlements: Effects of land-tenure concentration
Journal of Environmental Management, 2020
Brazil's Amazon deforestation is a major global and national environmental concern, and the ability to model and project both its course and the effect of different policy options depends on understanding how this process occurs at present and how it might change in the future. The present paper addresses one key factor in Amazon deforestation: land-tenure concentration in settlements. Brazil's policies for establishing and regulating settlement projects represent critical government decisions shaping the landscape in the 5 � 10 6 km 2 Legal Amazonia region. We used remote-sensing data and information provided by the National Institute for Colonization and Agrarian Reform (INCRA) to evaluate the effect of land-tenure concentration in a settlement project (Projeto de Assentamento) located in a frontier area where cattle-ranching is expanding. We identified the actors and their deforestation patterns in the Matupi settlement in the southern part of Brazil's state of Amazonas. We spatially identified actors who concentrated "lots" (the parcels of land distributed to individual settlers) in 2011 and assessed whether the concentration was done by individual landholders or by "families" (where members merged their lots and the clearing was done together). Deforestation rates (1995-2011) were estimated for each type of actor and the trajectory of deforestation in the settlement (cumulative deforestation to 1994 and annual deforestation 1995-2016) was also analyzed. Concentrators occupied 28% (9653 ha) of the settlement and 29% of the lots (152 lots) analyzed; the numbers of lots concentrated ranged from two to ten. Concentrators of two lots and non-concentrators were the predominant actor types in the settlement. The mean annual clearing per landholding for concentrators of two lots (families: 4.1 � 2.8 ha (mean � SD); individuals: 5.1 � 4.6 ha) was greater than for non-concentrators (1.7 � 1.2 ha), despite their having similar patterns of small clearings. Concentrators of three or more lots had mean annual clearing per landholding between 6.2 � 12.2 ha and 23.9 � 38.7 ha and, the pattern of patches cleared per year >34 ha in area was predominant. The deforestation rate per lot was higher among concentrators as compared to non-concentrators, showing that lot concentration speeds deforestation. Analysis of deforestation patterns helps to better understand the process of lot concentration by spatially identifying the predominant patterns of each type of actor. The approach used in our study could assist authorities in identifying and monitoring land-tenure concentration in settlements. Agrarian-reform policymakers need to monitor this process, since it speeds deforestation in Amazonian settlement projects, as well as undermining the social objectives of the agrarian-reform program.
Election-driven weakening of deforestation control in the Brazilian Amazon
Land Use Policy, 2015
Commodity prices, exchange rate, infrastructural projects and migration patterns are known and important drivers of Amazon deforestation, but cannot solely explain the high rates observed in 1995 and 2003-2004 in six Brazilian Amazon states. Deforestation predictions using those widely applied drivers can underestimate deforestation rates by as much as 50%. We show that years with the highest deforestation rates also correlate with large administrative shifts caused by presidential elections which results in periods of managerial instability associated with episodic inefficiency, leading to weak institutions unable to properly combat illegal deforestation. Although surveillance and regulatory action plans to combat deforestation have held back deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon since 2005, our results suggest that environmental management institutions should be aware such administration shifts set a burden on the policy targets associated with conservation policies. Institutional vulnerability immediately after major elections is an acknowledged fact in Brazil, though it has been mostly disregarded as an indicator of ecological threat.
Environmental Conservation
Summary The Brazilian Legal Amazon contains important reservoirs of forest that are threatened by stakeholders’ behaviour. The Cadastro Ambiental Rural (CAR; Rural Environmental Registry) database was used to define the limits and classes of landowner according to private property size. For each class, we identified the annual forest-cover/cover-loss profile at 2-year intervals from 2000 to 2020 based on Brazilian Annual Land Use and Land Cover Mapping Project (MapBiomas) and Program for Deforestation Monitoring (PRODES) data. The analysis revealed that very large landowners dominate the CAR-registered area and that deforestation is influenced by landowner type. The cumulative contributions to deforestation were 2 916 245.96, 1 234 216.79, 2 871 400.36, 2 805 058.62 and 2 637 485.60 ha for very large landowners, large landowners, medium landowners, small landowners and very small landowners, respectively. Very large landowners (1.7% of the total number of properties) had more forest...
Actor-specific contributions to the deforestation slowdown in the Brazilian Amazon
2014
Annual deforestation rates in the Brazilian Amazon fell by 77% between 2004 and 2011, yet have stabilized since 2009 at 5,000–7,000 km2. We provide the first submunicipality assessment, to our knowledge, of actor-specific contributions to the deforestation slowdown by linking agricultural census and remote-sensing data on deforestation and forest degradation. Almost half (36,158 km2) of the deforestation between 2004 and 2011 occurred in areas dominated by larger properties (>500 ha), whereas only 12% (9,720 km2) occurred in areas dominated by smallholder properties (<100 ha). In addition, forests in areas dominated by smallholders tend to be less fragmented and less degraded. However, although annual deforestation rates fell during this period by 68–85% for all actors, the contribution of the largest landholders (>2,500 ha) to annual deforestation decreased over time (63% decrease between 2005 and 2011), whereas that of smallholders went up by a similar amount (69%) during the same period. In addition, the deforestation share attributable to remote areas increased by 88% between 2009 and 2011. These observations are consistent across the Brazilian Amazon, regardless of geographical differences in actor dominance or socioenvironmental context. Our findings suggest that deforestation policies to date, which have been particularly focused on command and control measures on larger properties in deforestation hotspots, may be increasingly limited in their effectiveness and fail to address all actors equally. Further reductions in deforestation are likely to be increasingly costly and require actor-tailored approaches, including better monitoring to detect small-scale deforestation and a shift toward more incentive-based conservation policies.
Agronomic or contentious land change? A longitudinal analysis from the Eastern Brazilian Amazon
PLOS ONE, 2020
Since 1984, nearly 1,000 people have been killed in the Brazilian Amazon due to land conflicts stemming from unequal distribution of land, land tenure insecurity, and lawlessness. During this same period, the region experienced almost complete deforestation (< 8% forest cover by 2010). Land conflict exacts a human toll, but it also affects agents' decisions about land use, the subject of this article. Using a property-level panel dataset covering the period of redemocratization in Brazil (1984) until the privatization of long-term leases in the Eastern Amazon (2010), we show that deforestation is affected by land conflict, particularly in cases of expropriation of property for agrarian reform settlement formation and when that conflict involves fatalities. Deforestation on agrarian reform settlements is much greater when soils are poor for agriculture and when the land has been the object of past conflict. Deforestation and conflict are episodic, and both agronomic drivers and contentious drivers of land change are active in the region. Ultimately, the outcome of these processes of contentious and agronomic land change is substantial deforestation, regardless of who was in possession and control of the land.
In Brazil, the land reform involves redistribution of land plots from large landowners to squatters. It generates property rights insecurity which alters land uses and fosters forest depletion. In this paper, a non cooperative game model is developed where natural forests are considered as an open access resource and the strategic interactions between landowners and squatters lead to an over deforestation. The main theoretical implication is a positive impact of squatters on deforestation. It is successfully tested on a panel data set covering the municipalities of the Legal Amazonia controlling for the endogeneity of squatters in a deforestation equation. The result questions the modalities of the Brazilian state-led land reform.
Environmental Management, 2020
We examine deforestation processes in Apuí, a deforestation hotspot in Brazil’s state of Amazonas, and present processes of land-use change on this Amazonian development frontier. Settlement projects attract agents whose clearing reflects land accumulation and the economic importance of deforestation. We used a mixed-method approach in the Rio Juma Settlement to examine colonization and deforestation trajectories for 35 years at three scales of analysis: the entire landscape, cohorts of settlement lots divided by occupation periods, and lots grouped by landholding size per household. All sizes of landholdings are deforesting much more than before, and current political and economic forces favoring the agribusiness sector foreshadow increasing rates of forest clearing for pasture establishment in Apuí. The area cleared per year over the 2013-2018 period in Apuí grew by a percentage more than twice the corresponding percentage for the Brazilian Amazon as a whole. With the national congress and presidential administration signaling impunity for illegal deforestation, wealthy actors and groups are investing resources in land grabbing and land accumulation, with land speculation being a crucial deforestation factor. This paper is unique in providing causal explanations at the decision-maker's level on how deforestation trajectories are linked to economic and political events (period effects) at the larger scales, adding to the literature by showing that such effects were more important than aging and cohort effects as explanations for deforestation trajectories. Additional research is needed to deepen our understanding of relations between land speculation, illegal possession of public lands, and the expansion of agricultural frontiers in Amazonia.