Thaís Brianezi
Reporter - Agência Brasil
Pinhais (PR) - Nearly 80 million hectares in the Brazilian Amazon region as it is administratively defined (the "Amazônia Legal") are already included in federal and state conservation units. This represents 15.92% of the area's total expanse.
These figures are part of the "Brazilian Amazon 2006" map, published by the non-governmental organization, WWF-Brazil, and the Socio-Environmental Institute (ISA). With these units, Brazil surpásses the goal of protecting 12% of the Amazonian biome (50 million hectares) by 2012.
The challenge was launched in 2002, at the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development (Rio+10), in Johannesburg, South Africa.
To meet the goal, Brazil established the Protected Areas of the Amazon program (ARPA), coordinated by the Ministry of Environment and executed by the Brazilian Institute of Environment and Renewable Natural Resources (IBAMA), in conjunction with seven state governments (Amazonas, Amapá, Acre, Pará, Rondônia, Roraima, and Tocantins).
Funds for the program come from the Brazilian Biodiversity Fund, which gets contributions from the World Bank, the German cooperation bank (KfW), the German technical cooperation agency (GTZ), and the WWF-Brazil, through the Global Environmental Fund (GEF).
In addition to donating funds to the ARPA, the WWF-Brazil also established a program to help manage it. "We ordered this map from the ISA. The most recent edition, from 2004, was already out of print," informed the communications coordinator of the WWF-Brazil's ARPA support program in Brazil, Ana Cíntia Guazzelli.
The data that appear on the map are current as of March 15 of this year. They were based on the ISA's Socio-Environmental Information System, a project which began in the decade of the '80's.
The survey demonstrates that the Amazon region has 268 federal and state conservation units, totaling 90.9 million hectares. After eliminating overlapping between conservation units and with indigenous lands, the total comes to 79.7 million hectares.
58.6% of this total represents federally protected areas: 28.4% constituting wholly protected areas where residents are prohibited and 30.2%, sustainable use areas. The 41.4% that corresponds to state conservation units is split between 7.8% of wholly protected areas and 33.6% of sustainable use areas.
The map also shows that around 170 nations (approximately 250 thousand people) live in the Amazon region's 389 indigenous territories, which cover nearly 105.3 million hectares (21% of the region). According to the ISA, at least 73% have already completed the final stage of legal recognition.
The Amazon World Group (GTA) has pressed the federal and state governments to ensure the implementation of the conservation units that have already been created, with participation by civil society. "This has now become the principal challenge facing the ARPA," Guazzelli judges.
Translation: David Silberstein
