Native vegetation per capita revealing Brazil's socioeconomic-environmental scenario

Abstract

Brazil stands out among the countries with the largest area under native vegetation (NV) in the world, as well as a country with a growing population. Despite this fact, the country still does not have an indicator to compile both vegetation and population aspects at national and regional scales. Thus, through this study is proposed to use NV per capita as an indicator of occupation and development processes for the Brazilian territory. This socio-environmental metric can fill the knowledge gap about the aforementioned processes, it is easily calculated and applied throughout Brazil. The indicator is the quotient between native vegetation area and the number of inhabitants of a given municipality. Data were obtained biennially (from 2010 to 2020) in more than 5000 Brazilian municipalities. We found that NV per capita reflects the Brazil's occupation and development processes, although it does not always show changes in land use. In this sense, there are still 5.3 billion hectares of NV among which 91% of this vegetation per inhabitant occurs in Brazilian center-north. Overall, NV ranged from 2.9 to 2.5 ha per capita in the last decade. In addition, NV per capita shows up as an indicator useful to understand both regional and municipal economic traits. On a regional scale, the North showed a negative relationship between NV per inhabitant and Gross Domestic Product (GDP) per capita. Similar pattern was observed for the Southeastern region (ρ = −0.27*). The results demonstrated the importance of indicators able to frame environmental and socioeconomic aspects of a wide dimension country, such as Brazil. The indicator proposed herein (i.e., NV per capita) also can be used to compare with others from countries elsewhere, once the parameters are easily obtained. This comparison may increase Brazil's competitive opportunities in the socio-environmental field.