Uneven conservation efforts compromise Brazil to meet the Target 11 of Convention on Biological Diversity

Abstract

Brazil is the most biodiverse country in the world. It performed an expansion of its Protected Areas system in order to better preserve nature and to accomplish international agreements, such as the Target 11 of the Convention on Biological Diversity, which establishes a minimum percentage of territorial coverage and adequate management of Protected Areas (PAs). We evaluated the achievement of those objectives by analyzing the distribution of Conservation Units (CUs), Indigenous Territories and other classes of PAs on Brazilian biomes, as well as their current management situation. The country is unlikely to meet the target due to the lack of PAs outside the Amazon biome and to poor CUs management conditions, whose main causes are the fragile financial situation of environmental agencies and the high costs of land tenure regularization. In addition to other environmental policies setbacks, the Brazilian environmental leadership is seriously threatened.