Sérgio Rivero

The End of Deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon

Government commitments and market transitions lay the foundation for an effort to save the forest and reduce carbon emission. Brazil has two major opportunities to end the clearing of its Amazon forest and to reduce global greenhouse gas emissions substantially. The first is its formal announcement within United Nations climate treaty negotiations in 2008 of an Amazon deforestation reduction target, which prompted Norway to commit

Pecuária e desmatamento: uma análise das principais causas diretas do desmatamento na Amazônia

1 billion if it sustains progress toward this target (1). The second is a widespread marketplace transition within the beef and soy industries, the main drivers of deforestation, to exclude Amazon deforesters from their supply chains (2) [supplementary online material (SOM), section (§) 4]. According to our analysis, these recent developments finally make feasible the end of deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon, which could result in a 2 to 5% reduction in global carbon emissions. The

Forest Transitions in Mosaic Landscapes: Smallholder's Flexibility in Land-Resource Use Decisions and Livelihood Strategies From World War II to the Present in the Amazon Estuary

7 to

The Amazon as a Frontier of Capital Accumulation: Looking Beyond the Trees

18 billion beyond Brazils current budget outlays that may be needed to stop the clearing [a range intermediate to previous cost estimates (3, 4)] could be provided by the REDD (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation) mechanism for compensating deforestation reduction that is under negotiation within the UN climate treaty (5), or by payments for tropical forest carbon credits under a U.S. cap-and-trade system (6).

Social Vulnerability to Climatic Shocks Is Shaped by Urban Accessibility

Na Amazonia Brasileira a principal atividade responsavel pelo desmatamento e a pecuaria. Esse trabalho analisa a evolucao das causas imediatas do desmatamento da Amazonia, utilizando-se de regressoes lineares com dados em painel. O modelo avalia a contribuicao dos principais usos do solo na regiao ao desmatamento, de 2000 a 2006. Dados do PRODES de desmatamento, o numero de cabecas bovinas de 782 municipios da Amazonia e area plantada de culturas perenes e temporarias foram utilizados para essa analise. O resultado mostrou que o desmatamento e fortemente correlacionado com a pecuaria. A soja tambem aparece positivamente correlacionada com o desmatamento. Esta tendencia e reforcada pelo crescimento nacional e internacional da demanda de carne. Politicas publicas eficazes para a reducao do desmatamento devem, portanto, agir nas causas subjacentes da expansao da pecuaria reduzindo a forca dos processos que produzem a sua expansao na fronteira do desmatamento.

Impacts of the Comanagement of Subsistence and Commercial Fishing on Amazon Fisheries

The question of how smallholders of the Amazon estuary, locally known as cabolcos, have adapted their land use systems to produce resources during booms and busts is analyzed in this article. We draw upon more than 50 years of census data and more than 30 years of remotely sensed land-cover data to reconstruct these dynamics from World War II to the present. We found that smallholders are highly flexible in their land use decisions and livelihood strategies and that such flexibility has helped them to adapt their land-use systems to produce resources in demand during market booms and conserve forests. Smallholder mosaic landscapes contain forest fragments that enhance socioecological resilience to floods and other events produced by changes in the local hydro-climatic regimes due to sea-level rise and other climate-related changes. We argue that flexibility is a tool to reduce livelihood vulnerability by facilitating adaptation to global market and climate driven changes over the long term.

Simulating the response of land‐cover changes to road paving and governance along a major Amazon highway: the Santarém–Cuiabá corridor

There are few geographical references across the globe as universally recognized as the Amazon Rainforest. Despite this fact, neither much of its history nor its present is well known or understood. Thus, the image of the Amazon ranges from a pristine paradise with the greatest biodiversity on the planet to an area under attack by ruthless lumber companies burning and clearing vast expanses of forests, contributing to global warming, which threatens the survival of the planet. In this paper we present a brief history of the Amazon and how recent developments have turned it into a capitalist frontier in the current era of globalization. Whether one considers the Portuguese colonization and extraction of spices, the famous rubber boom and bust around the turn of the 20 century, or major development projects related to mining, cattle, and lumber, which began during the Brazilian military dictatorship in the 1960s, there is a general sense that the Amazon is an ‘‘underpopulated’’ region available for the exploitation of its natural resources.

O comportamento das exportações brasileiras de produtos florestais e sua posição competitiva no mercado internacional no período de 1997 a 2011.

Despite growing interest in urban vulnerability to climatic change, there is no systematic understanding of why some urban centers have greater social vulnerability than others. In this article, we ask whether the social vulnerability of Amazonian cities to floods and droughts is linked to differences in their spatial accessibility. To assess the accessibility of 310 urban centers, we developed a travel network and derived measures of connectivity and geographical remoteness. We found that 914,654 people live in roadless urban centers (n = 68) located up to 2,820 km from their state capital. We then tested whether accessibility measures explained interurban differences in quantitative measures of social sensitivity, adaptive capacity, and an overlooked risk area, food system sensitivity. Accessibility explained marked variation in indicators of each of these dimensions and, hence, for the first time, we show an underlying spatial basis for social vulnerability. For instance, floods pose a greater disease risk in less accessible urban centers because inadequate sanitation in these places exposes inhabitants to environmental pollution and contaminated water, exacerbated by poverty and governance failures. Exploring the root causes of these spatial inequalities, we show how remote and roadless cities in Amazonia have been historically marginalized and their citizens exposed to structural violence and economic disadvantage. Paradoxically, we found that places with the highest social vulnerability have the greatest natural and cultural assets (rainforest, indigenous peoples, and protected areas). We conclude that increasing accessibility through road building would be maladaptive, exposing marginalized people to further harm and exacerbating climatic change by driving deforestation.

CARACTERIZAÇÃO DO PESCADOR E DA FROTA PESQUEIRA COMERCIAL DE MANOEL URBANO E SENA MADUREIRA (AC) E BOCA DO ACRE (AM)

This paper characterizes two types of fisheries in the Lower Amazon and their interactions: small-scale (subsistence-oriented) and commercial fisheries. Small-scale fishing is carried out by floodplain residents who practice fishing as part of a diversified, subsistence-oriented, livelihood strategy that also includes activities such as farming and cattle raising. Small-scale fishers operate locally, with small boats. Commercial fishers, on the other hand, practice fishing as a primary occupation and are highly mobile, operating with motorized boats of up to 70 t storage capacity. Smaller commercial boats (with storage capacity less than 4 t) focus on the capture of scale fish that are sold at the local fish market. Larger boats specialize in catching migratory catfish that are sold mostly to fish processing plants. Small-scale fishers account for about 75% of the total catch in the Lower Amazon, while commercial fishers account for 25%. The average annual catch per area in the region is 34 kg/ha/year. This is approximately 37% of the maximum production potential estimated from an empirical catch-effort model for Amazon floodplain lakes. At present therefore, the fishery is only moderately exploited overall, but some species of great commercial interest are overexploited. There have been no appreciable trends in fishing effort or catches in the Lower Amazon over the past decade. Bioeconomic models suggest that the commercial fleet operates at the open access equilibrium (where profit is equal to costs), so that expansion can occur only should there be an increase in demand. Many floodplain lakes are now subject to fishing regulations set by local communities under legally supported comanagement schemes known as ‘fishing agreements.’ The agreements primarily restrict fishing methods favored by commercial fishers, and have been associated with moderate average increases in catch rates in the lakes (mostly for the benefit of subsistence-oriented fishers). At the regional level, the conservation benefits of effort reductions in comanaged lakes may have been approximately offset by effort increases in other lakes and the main river. Greater attention to regional-level management may be required in the future, particularly if demand for fisheries products should increase.