Brazil to manage protected areas in fighting deforestation
Copyright 2001 WWF International
October 10, 2001
Brasília, Brazil - WWF, together with OSR (Rondonia rubber tappers organization) and CND/IBAMA (National Center for Sustainable Development of Traditional People), shall take charge of making the management plan for the two new sustainable use protected areas (PA) created last month by the federal government in the state of Rondonia (South West Amazon Ecoregion). These include the Rio Cautario Extractive Reserve (sustainable-use), with 73,234 hectares; and the Barreiro das Antas Extractive Reserve (sustainable-use), with 107,234 hectares. The same decree also created the Serra Cotia National Park (full protection), with 283,611 hectares.
All three protected areas are located in Guajará Mirim municipal district and were created as a result of the lobby made by OSR and WWF-Brazil. Those areas originally belonged to the Brazilian Army and were not being used. The properties were transferred to Incra, the Brazilian agency in charge of agricultural land use reform, and reallocated to Ibama , the Brazilian agency for the Environment. The presidential decree creating the PAs was signed on August 7.
The creation of these new PAs is an important step in fighting deforestation in the Amazon. Rondonia has already lost 30% of its forests. The state's participation in the biome's deforestation is great, having amounted to 13.6% of the total deforested area in the region between 1998 and 1999. The new PAs are also crucial for the consolidation of the Brazil-Bolivia ecological corridor, which connects the protected areas on both sides of the border. The corridor now includes 53 protected areas - 32 in Rondonia, Brazil and 21 in Bolivia.
A study has been conducted by Leandro V. Ferreira (WWF-Br), Eduardo M. Venticinque (PDBFF-IMPA), Rosa Lemos de Sá (WWF-Br) and Luiz Carlos Pinagé (WWF-Br), entitled Protected Areas or Paperparks: the importance of protected areas in reducing deforestation in Rondonia, Brazil . It demonstrates that legally protected areas (strict use and sustainable use) and Indian lands are an effective tool to protect against deforestation. The study refutes the common belief that protected areas and Indian lands show lower levels of deforestation only because they are situated far away from roads.
Other findings show that deforestation in Rondonia was significantly higher outside the PAs and Indian lands (47%) than within them (3%), and unprotected areas had 15% more deforestation than protected ones. In both cases, the proportion of deforested areas as a function of distance from roads showed exponential patterns, even though the proportion and extension of deforested areas inside the PAs were not as great as outside those areas.
For further information contact:
Regina Vasquez, Communications Officer, WWF-Brazil, email: REGINA@wwf.org.br