Achieving zero deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon: What is missing?

Abstract

Amazon deforestation causes severe climatic and ecological disruptions, with negative consequences for the livelihood of forest-dependent peoples. To avoid further disruptions, Brazil will need to take bold steps to eliminate both illegal and legal Amazon deforestation over the short term. Amazon deforestation declined by 70% between 2005 and 2014 due to drops in commodity prices and interventions by federal and state governments, such as law enforcement campaigns and credit restrictions for landowners who deforest illegally. Despite these impressive achievements, Brazil still deforests 5,000 km2 of Amazonian forests each year. How then will Brazil eliminate Amazon deforestation altogether if the country is only committed to cut illegal deforestation by 2030—as stated in its Intended Nationally Determined Contributions (iNDC) to the 2015 climate change treaty meeting in Paris? Here we provide an analysis of the major socio-economic-political threats that could constrain Brazil from achieving its current goals. We then propose six fundamental strategies to help Brazil achieve a more ambitious goal to eliminate all major legal and illegal Amazon deforestation. These strategies involve bringing social and environmental safeguards to the infrastructure plans in the region, consolidating and expanding positive incentives for the production of sustainable commodities, establishing a new policy to guarantee the social and environmental sustainability of rural settlements, fully implementing the national legislation protecting forests (the Forest Code), protecting the land rights of indigenous people and traditional communities, and expanding the existing network of protected areas, allocating the 80 million hectares of not designated public forests as protected areas or areas for sustainable use of timber and non-timber forest products. The implementation of these strategies however depends on the formulation of a new development paradigm that promotes economic growth, social justice and productive agriculture, while protecting the fundamentally important ecological services of tropical forests. Introduction Tropical deforestation and land-use change are responsible for around 10% of global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions (Le Quéré et al., 2015). It is widely accepted that tropical deforestation should be greatly reduced in order to avoid “dangerous interferences” in the global climate system, the primary objective of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), stated in Article 2 (Goodman and Herold, 2014). Conversion of forests to pasture and agricultural land in the Brazilian Amazon has reached extremely high levels during the past two decades (an average of 18,165 km2 from 1990 to 2000 and 19,289 km2 from 2001 to 2010), releasing an average of 1.3 Gt CO2 per year, according to the Greenhouse Gas Emission Estimate System (SEEG, 2015). This historical pattern of deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon, however, has been reversed. Deforestation in the region has declined 70% from 2005 (19,014 km2 ) to 2014 (5,012 km2 ) (INPE/PRODES, 2016) in response to different strategies including law enforcement campaigns, establishment of new protected areas, and credit restrictions on land owners involved in illegal deforestation (Soares-Filho et al., 2008; 2010; Assunção et al., 2012, 2013a, 2013b; Nepstad et al., 2014; Pfaff et al., 2015). Despite this great achievement, the annual rate of deforestation since 2012 appears to be stuck at around 5,000 km2 (4,571 km2 in 2012,