At issue is the impact of homologation — the final step in designating land as Indigenous property in a process laid out in Brazil’s Constitution — on destruction of Earth’s largest tropical forest. After homologation, economic activity can’t be carried out in designated lands without consent from both the tribe and the federal government. And the study by researchers at the University of California, San Diego, and Columbia University found that between 1982 and 2016, deforestation inside homologated territories declined from an average of about 3% a year to 1% a year.
“Indigenous tribes are really linked to biodiversity management and reductions in deforestation, and it’s because they live on the land and I think they have kind of a very keen sense of what it would mean to upset the ecosystem around them,” said Kathryn Baragwanath, a UCSD researcher and one of the study’s co-authors. “The granting of the property rights gives them the legal basis to actually ensure that these ecosystems are preserved in the lands where they live.”
Not all of those efforts have been successful, but the study, published yesterday in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, estimates that the Bolsonaro and Temer presidencies’ refusal to grant Indigenous communities control of new territories may have resulted in an extra 1.5 million hectares of deforestation per year.
He said his foreign critics “called into question that which we hold as the most sacred value: our own sovereignty.”
Fire cycle
But Taveira, who is from the same political party as Bolsonaro, called it a local issue.
This year, Bolsonaro’s government has introduced some new measures to stop illegal burning, but early indications are that the fire season could be worse than last year’s.
Reprinted from Climatewire with permission from E&E News. E&E provides daily coverage of essential energy and environmental news at www.eenews.net.
