Brazil’s forests protected by indigenous land rights

There has been noticeably less deforestation in areas of Brazil's fragmented Atlantic Forest where indigenous peoples have secure land rights than in comparable regions where land tenure is weak or nonexistent.

PNAS Nexus published a paper revealing the benefits of indigenous stewardship and is the first to quantify the advantages of improved indigenous land rights for Brazil's tropical rainforests. This paper demonstrates how legal recognition of indigenous peoples' land rights can lessen land grabs, human rights abuses, climate change, and biodiversity loss.

The Atlantic Forest, which covers 3,000 kilometers (1,860 miles) of coastline and is the second-largest rainforest in Brazil after the Amazon, has been devastated by centuries of urbanization, agriculture, logging, and mining. Seventy percent of the population in the country resides there, including in Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo. Compared to the Amazon, where around 80% of the original forest area is still intact, only 12% is left, France 24 reported. 

The study demonstrates that indigenous communities who had successfully completed a legal process to receive formal recognition of their ancestral lands—known as land tenure—were more successful than those who had not in reducing deforestation and increasing reforestation in Brazil's Atlantic Forest between 1985 and 2019, according to the University of Colorado Boulder. 

According to the written law, Brazil has strong protections for indigenous rights. However, in practice, enforcement and corruption have fueled illicit expropriation and deforestation. The authors of the paper highlighted that encroachment by land speculators, squatters, and extractive enterprises in the Atlantic Forest “remains an ongoing challenge for land defenders.” Those pressures increased during the presidency of the far-right Jair Bolsonaro, who left office on January 1, France 24 reported. 

Using publicly accessible government data for 129 indigenous groups in the Atlantic Forest that have finished or begun the land tenure process between 1985 and 2019, the authors conducted a number of studies. The researchers dubbed 52 of those localities as having “incomplete tenure” because the land tenure process in 77 of those communities was still ongoing, according to the University of Colorado Boulder.

They also used information from high-quality satellite pictures taken between 1985 and 2019 to show both reforestation and deforestation. Although changes in forest cover by themselves do not necessarily reflect levels of biodiversity or forest health, they are a useful indicator for assessing land use dynamics over broad spatial scales. On sites where indigenous peoples have finished the four-part land tenure process, the researchers discovered less deforestation and/or more reforestation.

It is worth mentioning that the world's largest tropical ecosystem, the Amazon basin, is under risk, and local and international interests are at stake. The Amazon basin is being pushed toward a “tipping point” where it will transition from a tropical forest to a savannah-like state as a result of climate change and forest destruction, France 24 reported. 

According to Global Forest Watch, Brazil lost more than 20 million hectares of forest, or nearly 6% of its entire tree cover, between 2000 and 2020.