Brazil contains the largest tracts of native tropical vegetation, including over half the remaining tropical forests (FAO, 2013) but during the last 3 decades these have been rapidly converted to other uses (Gibbs et al., Reference Gibbs, Ruesch, Achard, Clayton, Holmgren, Ramankutty and Foley2010). To counteract this continuing conversion of land into farmland, forestry and mining enterprises, a large and complex system of protected areas has been gradually established. The complete protected area network in Brazil includes indigenous lands, quilombola territories (Afro-Brazilian communal lands), and various categories of parks and reserves, called conservation units, managed by the state or federal government. Law 9,985/2000 established the National System of Conservation Units and consolidated the regulations for creating and managing protected areas. The total area of conservation units in Brazil increased three-fold from 785,536 km² in 1990 to 2,284,235 km² in 2010 (IUCN & UNEP–WCMC, 2011). Although this is a remarkable achievement there is a strong bias towards sustainable-use reserves rather than strictly-protected areas (Peres, 2011). These figures, however, mask the often insufficient implementation (lack of management or no de facto establishment) of these units and the growing political backlash by lobbyists and policy makers promoting the erosion of formal management restrictions against anthropogenic activities within protected areas, reductions in size, and in extreme cases the complete legal annulment of existing reserves.

The Brazilian Constitution requires that any change in a conservation unit that reduces its degree of protection or redefines boundaries must be sanctioned formally by law, following the appropriate legislative process; i.e. it must pass the two-tiered system of the Brazilian National Congress (the Chamber of Deputies and the Senate). Here we examine the bills that have been passed or that are under consideration by the Congress to revoke currently existing protected areas or to reduce their area and/or relax formal restrictions against extractive activities and patterns of land use. We identify the main political drivers of such proposals and recent trends in public policy related to contradictions between nature conservation and economic development. Definitions largely follow those proposed by Mascia & Pailler (Reference Mascia and Pailler2011): downgrading is a reduction in the legal constraints to human activities, downsizing involves redrawing boundaries and resulting in a net decrease in protected area size, and degazettement is the formal revocation of the original legal act that created any given protected area.

We retrieved all 132 federal bills that were formally proposed from 1949 up to July 2014 regarding the creation, extirpation, resizing and reclassification of conservation units. Most of these, however, failed to pass through the National Congress, mainly because bills expire at the end of the legislature's 4-year term. We found 31 cases of federal protected areas affected by 21 bills in the current legislative proceedings, 27 of which argued for downgrading, downsizing or degazettement, and four for either upgrading the status or expanding the size of a protected area. All affected areas are listed in Table 1 and their locations indicated in Fig. 1, with site-specific information about attempts to downgrade or downsize established protected areas and the legislator's rationale to justify such changes. Most of the cases involve downsizing (17); downgrading and degazzettement were proposed in only six and four cases, respectively.

Fig. 1

Locations of Brazilian protected areas affected by bills (see Table 1 for bill numbers) enacted or under consideration by the Brazilian National Congress (PL, Projeto de Lei (ordinary law bill); MPV, Medida Provisória (executive order requiring congressional approval).

Table 1

Protected areas (Fig. 1) affected by bills enacted or still under consideration by the Brazilian National Congress (data from the Senate, 2014, and Chamber of Deputies, 2014); causes follow definitions used in WWF (Reference Peres2014).

¹ PDC, Projeto de Decreto Legislativo (legislative decree bill); PL, Projeto de Lei (ordinary law bill); MPV, Medida Provisória (executive order requiring congressional approval)

² NA, not applicable as not a proximate cause of downgrading, downsizing or degazettement of a protected area as listed in WWF (2014)

Our assessment uncovered three main reasons for the proposed alterations: planned development of infrastructure projects, such as hydroelectric dams and roads, local demands to relax restrictions on land use and/or natural resource use (including agriculture), and conflicting interests with the wider private sector. In some cases these sources of attrition result from de facto circumstances, such as environmental degradation and the resulting loss of the management objectives governing the protected area. Such proposals are usually sponsored by members of Congress on behalf of regional developers and local communities. The Executive branch is the author of bills paving the way for proposed infrastructure development. Ten events have passed both legislative houses and been formally sanctioned by the President, thereby rendering any changes undermining the integrity of a given protected area irreversible.

The rapid increase in the number of protected areas worldwide is frequently extolled in the conservation literature as a success story, yet the countercurrent impact of legal attempts to downgrade, downsize or delist protected areas is less discussed. Few comprehensive assessments exist (Mascia & Pailler, Reference Mascia and Pailler2011; Mascia et al., Reference Mascia, Pailler, Krithivasan, Roshchanka, Burns and Mlotha2014) although an open database is now available (WWF, Reference Peres2014). In addition, an assessment for Brazilian Amazonia identified cases of downgrading, downsizing or degazettement in seven indigenous territories, and 25 state and 16 federal conservation units that are threatened by legislative proposals or pending a judicial process (Araújo & Barreto, Reference Araújo and Barreto2010), and Bernard et al. (Reference Bernard, Penna and Araújo2014) listed 93 events of this nature across the country.

Our assessment does not consider cases outside the federal government arena because to do so would involve retrieving data from the legislative chambers of 27 Brazilian states and 5,570 municipal counties. Nevertheless, federal reserves comprise 48.5% of all Brazilian conservation units and 49.5% of their total area (Ministério do Meio Ambiente, 2014). The extent, patterns and causes of legal threats to the network of protected areas in Brazil are still poorly understood. Bills can affect protected areas throughout the country and are strongly motivated by both private and public pressures to satisfy the growing economic demands of local communities in both legally and illegally occupied protected areas or to implement large infrastructure projects. Development of infrastructure as a driver of downgrading, downsizing and degazettement in Amazonia has been highlighted in two recent reports (Araújo et al., Reference Araújo, Martins, Barreto, Vedoveto, Souza and Veríssimo2012; Martins et al., Reference Martins, Vedoveto, Araújo, Barreto, Baima, Souza and Veríssimo2012).

Although modifying the boundaries of protected areas is arguably one way of achieving better conservation outcomes (Fuller et al., Reference Fuller, McDonald-Madden, Wilson, Carwardine, Grantham and Watson2010), we found only two of 27 cases in Brazil in which a reduction in area was offset by expansion elsewhere. Downsizing and downgrading are the most common outcomes of bills passed by the Congress and sanctioned by the President. Meanwhile, there is an alarming legislative countercurrent to the conservation movement: in the last decade three proposals to amend the constitution have aimed to prevent high-ranking government officials creating new protected areas by executive decree. These amendments proposed that any new conservation unit would have to be established by law, thereby requiring a legal proposal to pass the appropriate legislative branch, which significantly reduces the chances of legal approval.

The rate of creation of conservation units in Brazil increased from c. 2 million ha per year in the 1980s to c. 7 million ha per year in the last decade, but with a marked prevalence of human-occupied sustainable-use reserves rather than strictly-protected areas that legally exclude local communities (Peres, 2011). Sustainable use and strictly -protected conservation units now represent 65.8 and 34.2% of the total area of conservation units, respectively (Ministério do Meio Ambiente, 2014). Competition between conservation and economic interests is uneven in the policy arena, as can be observed in the case of the recent changes to the Brazilian Forest Law (Law 12651/2012), the expected boost to the mining industry in the new Mining Code (Bill 5807/2013), the opening up of conservation units for mining activities (Bill 3582/2012), and several new legal instruments from the Ministry of Environment to facilitate the fast-tracking of infrastructure projects through a simplified environmental licensing process. Mounting political pressure over protected areas, the well-intentioned but feeble responses from conservation organizations and academia, and severe budget constraints in the National Parks administration are serious drawbacks to conservation. Added to this is the tendency to downgrade existing reserves to accommodate intensive land-use options or downsizing to juxtapose otherwise overlapping energy, mining and infrastructure development. Moreover, the national and state forests, two major types of sustainable-use reserve that encompass c. 30 million hectares in 104 protected areas, are threatened by industrial, reduced impact logging concessions, with several long-term leases (up to 4 decades).

Bills cannot be sanctioned by members of parliament alone, as the executive branch can use presidential veto to reject a proposal. Failure to veto such proposals, however, indicates special interests with government support, bringing the long-term political stability and legal immunity of hitherto sacrosanct reserves into question. We believe that recent downgrading, downsizing and degazettement proposals initiated by members of Congress or the President are only the beginning of forthcoming policy and legal shifts regarding protected areas, and we are further concerned that lobbying has sometimes influenced changes to the conservation status of federal and state conservation units (Araújo et al., Reference Araújo, Martins, Barreto, Vedoveto, Souza and Veríssimo2012; Martins et al., Reference Martins, Vedoveto, Araújo, Barreto, Baima, Souza and Veríssimo2012; Bernard et al., Reference Bernard, Penna and Araújo2014). Brazilian civil society, including conservationists, need to be alert in the interest of nature conservation, ready to lobby in favour of protected areas and prepared to counteract the notion that Brazil has already set aside too much protected land.