What Comes after Deforestation Control? Learning from Three Attempts of Land-use Planning in Southern Amazonia

Abstract

According to recent reports on deforestation control, Brazil’s efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions (GHG) are successful. This is attributed to a combination of command-and-control style of public regulation and civil society pressure. Looking beyond decreasing deforestation rates reveals a different picture for the future of GHG optimized land use in Brazil. Command-andcontrol regulation seems to work as long as prohibitive measures against deforestation are concerned. However, as soon as tailormade policies for complex issues such as land-use planning are required, the outcomes are ambiguous. Comparing the origins, the actors and the perspectives of three different cases of resource governance in Southern Amazonia, we show that the major challenges of regulation attempts are the lack of transparency and the appropriation of state agencies by powerful groups. Due to institutional weakness, the various regulation efforts fail to consider the system links needed for effective implementation. To conclude, we provide suggestions to possibly overcome the problems through innovative forms of governance.

Land-use and climate change risks in the Amazon and the need of a novel sustainable development paradigm

“…This sharp decline of deforestation was enabled by several factors, including purpose-built satellite monitoring capabilities, effective law enforcement and compliance, industry value chain initiatives like the soy moratorium, restrictions on access to credit for farms located in deforested areas, and expansion of protected areas and indigenous territory encompassing 47% of the entire Brazilian Amazon region (37). Long-term-demand growth for agricultural commodities in the emerging markets, weak institutions, and large energy infrastructure projects may potentially contribute as underlying and proximate drivers to the return of high deforestation rates in the absence of alternative development pathways (27,30,(38)(39)(40).…”

Carbon-optimised land management strategies for southern Amazonia

“…This drastically illustrates that Bthe battle for the Amazon is far from won^ (Fearnside 2015) and that monitoring (Detection of Deforestation in Real Time-DETER) and effective inspection via Brazilian governmental institutions (e.g. IBAMA) must be accompanied by an increased understanding of the socio-economic driving forces and political aspects in the global, national and regional agro-economic development (Nepstad et al 2014;Schönenberg et al 2015). In fact, property rights in the Amazon region are still not well regulated and the lack of law enforcement gives rise to wariness of smallholder farmers and a very volatile colonisation pattern (Benatti and Fischer 2018).…”

“…The art of finding the crucial deciders and actors for such an approach is a research on its own. Schönenberg et al (2015) investigated in depth the network of decision-makers, looking back to more than 30 years' experience of on-site research (Coy and Klingler 2011) in the study region and evaluating recent changes in the local society and the reasons given for the observed fluctuations of people and their objects of work. Much of the insecurity which drives the local people to change continuously is the lack of land regularisation and juridical certainty.…”

Inter- and transdisciplinary scenario construction to explore future land-use options in southern Amazonia

“…Referring to this general pattern, the history of occupation of the Amazonian lands around Highway-163, based on our own biographical research (Schumann et al 2015), can be subdivided into three phases: Highway-163 has been under construction since 1973 and currently, has been undergoing paving for almost 10 years. The primary structure of the occupation of Highway-163 (1973Highway-163 ( -1983 followed the same 100-km pattern (explained above), and those 100-km pieces of land were supposedly "liberated by the military" and thus are under federal jurisdiction.…”

“…After 1992, with the UNEP-conference in Rio de Janeiro, the ECO92, Amazonia finally entered into globalized channels being shaped by international conventions (CBD, Climate, Forests) and programs shaped by the ideas of sustainable development (e.g., Pilot Program to Conserve the Tropical Rainforests in Brazil -G7, active 1992Brazil -G7, active -2012. In this third phase, the Plan for a Sustainable-BR-163 (Schönenberg et al 2015) tried to reconcile between the growing agroindustry (soy in Mato Grosso, cattle in Pará) and the decreed sustainability strategies. All this had an enormous practical impact on Highway-163: while production of soy, cotton, and cattle grew fast, the federal environmental agency, IBAMA intensified massively its environmental monitoring and sanctioning.…”