The latest paper in our Environmental Conservation Perspectives Collection is Do Data Support Claims That Brazil Leads the World in Environmental Preservation?

Brazil is one of the most important global players in agribusiness and one of the main exporters of commodities such as soybean and animal protein. Today, Brazil has c. 5,500,000 rural properties in six different biomes, namely Amazon, Pantanal, Pampa, Caatinga, Atlantic Forest and Cerrado; the last two are global biodiversity hotspots. Together, these rural properties comprise c. 605 million hectares, or 71% of the Brazilian territory, besides hosting 53% of Brazilian native vegetation. The native forests in these properties store 105 ± 21 GtCO2e (billions of tonnes of CO2 equivalent) and play a vital role in maintaining a wide range of ecosystem services. Thus, these private forests must be properly managed to ensure that global efforts focused on mitigating climate changes can be successful.

The current Brazilian Forest Code (FC) limits the deforestation and economic exploitation of native vegetation located in rural properties. These forest fragments, the so-called Legal Reserves (LRs; FIGURE 1), should occupy 20–80% of these properties, depending on where they are located. LRs provide relevant ecosystem services and play a significant role in biodiversity conservation. Permanent Preservation Areas (PPAs), which comprise riparian forests and hillsides, are another spatial category to be preserved in these properties, since they are primarily focused on protecting water resources and maintaining geological stability.

The FC launched the Cadastro Ambiental Rural (CAR; Rural Environmental Registry) in order to enable the environmental regulation of rural properties. It is managed by the Ministry of the Environment and by state and local environmental agencies. The CAR is a digital database, the data resulting from the interpretation of satellite images that indicate areas of agricultural use, PPAs and LRs inside properties. It is focused on the georeferenced identification of rural properties, as well as on the location and quantification of environmentally protected areas. In addition, landowners in these areas must report whether there are degraded environments, such as riverbanks and springs lacking riparian vegetation. The CAR provides the first transparent mechanism capable of assessing land-use compliance with the FC in the history of Brazilian environmental legislation, since it links property owners to responsible land use in rural properties.

However, CAR has a significant Achilles’ heel; namely, it is ‘self-declaring’ (i.e., rural property owners are exempt from validating the information they record in the CAR). Thus, they only need to declare what area allocated in the property they believe fulfils their socio-environmental function. Competent environmental bodies are in charge of checking and validating the information provided by rural landowners. However, data validation is a very slow process; for example,  Mato Grosso State  only 952 (0.73%) out of the 128,663 properties registered in the SIMCAR Database had their CAR data validated by the State Department of the Environment up to August 2018.

Our paper Do Data Support Claims That Brazil Leads The World in Environmental Preservation? highlighted the low level of effectiveness of the CAR and pointed out the need to validate data declared by farmers in order to allow the use of these data as indicators of real compliance with Brazilian Forest Code in rural properties. The lack of validated CAR information makes biodiversity in Brazilian biomes quite vulnerable.

The article Do Data Support Claims That Brazil Leads The World in Environmental Preservation? by Marcelo C Vacchiano, Jeater WMC Santos, Fabio Angeoletto and Normandes M Silva, is available Open Access.