Deforestation in Brazilian Amazonia

Abstract

Tropical deforestation represents one of the world’s great environmental problems, and Brazilian Amazonia has particular importance owing to the current rate of forest loss and the vast area of remaining forest at risk of future deforestation. Approximately two-thirds of the Amazon Basin is in Brazil. Brazil’s “Legal Amazonia” region refers to a 5 million km2 administrative area covering all or part of nine states; about three-fourths of this area was originally covered by Amazonian forest and one-fourth by cerrado (central-Brazilian savanna) or other non-forest vegetation. The “Amazonia Biome” is the area where the predominant original vegetation was Amazon forest; with the exception of a minuscule area in the state of Maranhão, the Amazonia Biome is entirely contained within Legal Amazonia. When the distinction between these two official Amazon areas is not important, the term “Brazilian Amazonia” is used. Deforestation threatens environmental services in maintaining biodiversity, avoiding greenhouse gas emissions, and recycling water that is essential to maintaining rainfall in Amazonia and in other locations that water vapor is transported to (including São Paulo). Understanding the diverse causes of deforestation in the region is essential to effective efforts to slow and contain the process. This article begins with general compendia, followed by sections covering deforestation monitoring, deforestation causes, deforestation actors, infrastructure, agriculture and ranching, forest loss through extreme degradation, deforestation impacts, deforestation control, protected areas, environmental services, and REDD (reducing emissions from deforestation and degradation). The causes of deforestation in Brazilian Amazonia vary considerably among different parts of this vast region, among landholdings within any given part of the region, and over time at any particular location. Both cumulative and annual statistics for Amazonia represent sums of these diverse actions. A major decline in deforestation rates occurred from 2004 to 2012, followed by oscillation around a lower plateau through 2015. Official statements invariably claim that government control programs can be credited with all of the decline, and they often imply that the decline continues. However, most of the decline occurred in the 2004–2008 period, when virtually all of the change can be explained by falling international prices of soy and beef together with a worsening exchange rate for Brazilian currency from the point-of-view of commodity exporters. After 2008, however, prices recovered while deforestation declined further. The key event in 2008 that appears to explain this change is a resolution of Brazil’s Central Bank barring agricultural credit from government banks for properties with pending environmental fines. The fines themselves can be postponed almost indefinitely through repeated appeals, but the Central Bank decision has no appeal and has an immediate effect on larger landholders who have enjoyed generously subsidized loans for expanding their operations. The loan restriction gives real “teeth” to the Ministry of the Environment’s efforts to control deforestation, greatly increasing the effect of the same investment in inspection and repression. However, the restriction on loans is a fragile protection, as it could be reversed at the stroke of a pen. This is one of the priorities of the powerful “ruralist block” representing large landholders in the National Congress. Another change in 2008 was the government’s publication of “blacklists” of municipalities (counties) with high deforestation rates, thus restricting credit in these municipalities and making them the focus of command-and-control efforts. Events in other years include agreements with major purchasers of soy (in 2006) and beef (in 2009) to bar sales by properties with recent deforestation; these agreements had some effect, despite problems of “laundering” and “leakage.” Although the government’s deforestation-control program is essential, most of the government’s actions are on the other side of the equation: vast plans for more roads, dams, and other infrastructure in Amazonia lead to more rather than less deforestation. The notion that deforestation is under control and that roads and dams can therefore be built without consequences is a dangerous illusion. Since the presidential administration of Jair Bolsonaro began in January 2019, Brazil’s deforestation has accelerated sharply. This has largely resulted from dismantling the country’s environmental agencies, relaxing regulations in myriad ways, and constant rhetoric from the president and his minister of the environment suggesting that environmental regulations need not be obeyed and that any violations will be pardoned. Some of these setbacks can be reversed at a future time, but many, such as building roads that open vast areas of Amazon forest to the entry of deforesters, represent permanent changes that will affect deforestation for as long as there is forest left to clear.