A flock of birds soars past a meteorological watchtower overlooking the Amazon rainforest outside of … [+]
Lula da Silva has swept back into the Brazilian presidency on a wave of cautious optimism for environmental protection. Since reassuming office on January 1, he’s bolstered the Rural Environmental Registry (a database of rural property, abbreviated as CAR) and reinstated the Amazon Fund (a $1.2 billion pot of finance for environmental projects).
But the single most consequential action he could take would be to enforce Brazil’s Forest Code. This unique law, mandating that private landowners in ecologically sensitive areas keep chunks of that land undeveloped, is Brazil’s best chance at beating back deforestation. It may also be the most controversial.
Some version of the Forest Code has existed since 1934, when private landowners were limiting to deforesting only 75% of their land. Since then, the percentage of land required to be kept as forest changed from 25% to 50%, and then to 80% for landowners in the Amazon rainforest region. This legal reserve requirement is lower in Brazil’s other biomes, for instance at 20% in the Pantanal wetlands and 35% in the Cerrado savanna.
There are also loopholes through which landowners can bring down the threshold. Because the state of Pará meets certain other conservation conditions, the usual 80% requirement is effectively 50% for farms.
Overall, though, the law covers a huge swath of territory – nearly a third of Brazil’s native vegetation. Business and political interests have long itched to despoil more of these protected areas, attempting to depict the law as a barrier to Brazil’s modernization. A number of social movements and Indigenous groups, which are important rainforest protectors, have resisted these attempts.
Amidst this tension, the Forest Code was controversially revised in 2012. The new version forgave illegal deforestation before 2008, a paltry four years earlier, and expanded the amount of privately owned land that could be deforested.
Agribusiness-favoring politicians have made further attempts to erode the legal reserve requirement. In 2019 a group of senators tried to completely get rid of it, but an outcry from civil society and scientists scuppered that plan. Some politicians keep trying though, for instance by proposing to redraw the borders of the Amazon region so that the requirement no longer applies to all Amazonian states.
A strip of land along the Rio Negro in the state of Amazonas
Unsurprisingly, many Amazonian landowners have balked at the requirement to keep most of their land as it is, unconverted to agriculture. It’s proven especially difficult for smaller landowners to stomach, although deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon is generally due to large landowners.
In the Cerrado as well, property size affects how landowners view the legal reserve requirement. One study of the state of Mato Grosso do Sul found that 51% of farms bigger than 1,000 hectares – the majority – followed the legal reserve law. Only 33% of smaller properties did.
Overall, clearly, compliance is poor. And indeed, enforcement of Brazil’s Forest Code, as with other conservation laws, has been feeble. It’s generally been left to landowners to police themselves, amidst limited resources for monitoring, especially during the pro-deforestation Bolsonaro presidency. Some farmers say that they’re not even aware of the requirement.
Enforcement was always going to be challenging. One major barrier has been missing information about just who owns what, and thus where the responsibility lies. This is why strengthening the CAR property database is so important. In 2010 the Brazilian government required that all rural properties be mapped in the CAR, but the work isn’t complete. Traditional communities and small landowners may especially need help with registration.
It’s also been important to guard against land grabbers using the CAR to legitimate their illegal seizures of land. One study of southern Amazonas State found that 21% of land in conservation units was declared, falsely, to be private between 2014 and 2020.
One way to make sure that the Forest Code is worth the paper it’s written on is essentially to pay farmers to obey the law. Lula has proposed providing cheap credit to incentivize farmers to use more sustainable practices.
Luiza Bruscato, the executive manager of the Brazilian Roundtable on Sustainable Livestock (GTPS), says that complying with the Forest Code is a big challenge for landowners because they have to pay for maintenance, protect the land from fire, and guard against would-be land invaders. But there’s a combined environmental and economic opportunity if landowners can receive payments for the environmental services they provide.
The mechanics need to be worked out. The upshot is that the Forest Code is a world-beating environmental regulation. Making sure it’s actually respected is the hard part. As Thelma Krug, a former researcher at the National Institute for Space Research in Brazil, says, “Brazil has all the tools to really preserve, probably it’s one of the countries that’s exemplary in this respect.”
Plugging that enforcement gap is critical for the future of the planet.
This reporting was made possible with support from the United Nations Foundation.
