Cobertura da terra em propriedades privadas na Amazônia: dinâmica de desmatamento e remanescente florestal

Abstract

The Amazon Rainforest, the largest remnant of tropical rainforest in the world, was deforested at a rate of 25,000 km² per year in the 1990’s. However, environmental policies and supply chain interventions strongly reduced deforestation rates on the following decade. At COP 21, Brazil committed itself to end illegal deforestation by 2030. Despite the advances made, deforestation is still significant and there is a need to enhance knowledge about the interaction between different actor groups and deforestation patterns to help identify improvements in current policies. Thus, the objective of the present work is to analyze the relative contribution of private property categories to deforestation during the 2002-2014 period, also exploring deforestation structure by polygon size. Deforestation was calculated using a property grid and forest change data by PRODES and GFC. Most of the accumulated deforestation was the responsibility of large properties, which also retained most of the remaining forest. However, there has been an increase in the relative contribution of settlements. In addition, there was a change in deforestation structure, where large polygons contributed less to annual deforestation, parallel to an increase in deforestation in small areas, showing a behavior change by the actors.