Déficit estimado de reserva legal : reconhecimento, disposição e alternativas de regularização

Abstract

The conservation of native vegetation is key to maintaining the provision of ecosystem services in the biosphere and is the responsibility of both public and private actors. However, the Brazilian society has failed implement its forest legislation and avoid the loss of critical ecosystems. While Brazil has a substantial area protected by Conservation Units (UC), these are mostly concentrated in a single region (Amazon), while the other types of vegetation in Brazil are underrepresented. In private areas, the Native Vegetation Protection Law (Law 12,651/2012) regulates the use and management of land and institutes two important mandatory conservation instruments, the Legal Reserve (LR) and Permanent Preservation Areas (PPAs). However, the level of noncompliance of many rural properties is large throughout the country, especially in the Amazon, whose area required is greater and a significant portion of private properties have little or no LR area left with native vegetation. To regularize the environmental liabilities, the Rural Environmental Registry (CAR) and the Environmental Regularization Program (PRA) were created which, although they have already advanced in most states, important steps are still to come, such as the analysis and validation of the CAR and the implementation of the PRA. In order to understand the current and future challenges of the next stages of environmental regularization, this thesis analyzed in the states of Pará and Mato Grosso: (i) the situation of the CAR in relation to overlap among the registered properties; (ii) the profile of the PRA adopters and the options that landowners would choose; and (iii) the intentions of using the LR surplus. It was possible to identify that the greatest effort to validate the CAR will be concentrated in 36% (66 thousand) of the rural properties that have high rates of overlap. A significant proportion of the landowners declared intention to join the regularization, choosing to compensate in other farms rather than restore locally their missing LRs. Finally, farmers have declared that they are more likely to deforest their LR surplus rather than conserve the forest, generating the emission more than 60 MtC. Understanding the challenges of the CAR validation and acceptance of the PRA and, the intentions of use of native vegetation is indispensable to develop and improve the applicability of legal instruments (command and control, economic, etc.), to obtain environmental gains and, consequently, improvement of the quality of life. This thesis shed some light on the dimensions of environmental regularization of rural properties in Brazil and aimed to provide a valuable step in understanding the efforts that will be required.