Como a perda de unidades de conservação de proteção integral e terras indígenas influenciam a provisão de serviços ecossistêmicos

Abstract

Remnants of native vegetation stand out for having high biological diversity and for carrying out ecological processes, through which various benefits to man are produced. These benefits refer to ecosystem services provided by natural environments. However, over the years, human activities have been increasingly recurrent to supply demands for goods and services to the human population, causing pressure in areas of remnants of native vegetation. In this context, among the alternatives to preserve the remnants of vegetation, conservation units fit as a category of protected areas, through which it is possible to prevent or mitigate anthropic pressures at their limits, as well as impacts on biodiversity. Even though these areas have a protection character established by law, preserve natural resources, and produce benefits for human well-being, the world experiences several losses of conservation units. The event named by researchers by the acronym PADDD (Protected Areas Downgrading, Downsizing and Degazettement), refers to legal changes that ease restrictions on use, lower limits or completely eliminates the legal protection imposed in these areas. In addition to the conservation units, indigenous lands also play an essential role in maintaining natural resources, given that indigenous peoples have rights related to the areas they inhabit and, as such, they use them for valuing and contacting nature. Despite this, these areas suffer anthropic pressures, mainly related to mining activity. The effects of environmental impacts are even greater when they occur in megadiverse countries, such as Brazil, which has areas of extreme biological diversity, in addition to endemic species. In this context, the objective of the work is to simulate the impacts of loss of conservation units and indigenous lands in terms of biodiversity loss and environmental impacts. This is done using Monte Carlo Modeling. Thus, the methodological procedures comprise three stages. Initially, input variables were defined, which were based on ecosystem services. With the definition of the variables, the second stage consisted of searching for databases or parameters that enable the quantification of these variables, developing models to measure each one of these. The third step is the simulation of scenarios using the Monte Carlo Model. The method was developed through the platform for modeling environmental systems DYNAMIC EGO, from which scenarios with different amounts of loss of protected areas were simulated to have an average result for each scenario. This average result was obtained by repeating the procedure several times, in order to reduce the effects of each draw of the loss. As a result, we obtained the values of losses of areas of native vegetation and areas with priorities for conservation, average values of silting, loss of soil and biomass. These data indicated the importance of keeping forests intact for the conservation of natural resources and mitigating the effects of climate change. We found that there is a lack of studies related to the knowledge of biodiversity within the limits of the protected areas analyzed, in addition to the need to protect areas with priority for conservation, in which there is knowledge of the geographical distribution of biodiversity, but which do not have special protection.