The Amazon is the most concentrated expression of life on Earth and it is clearly threatened.
A new threat now confronts the Amazon in the form of a massive infrastructure program, the Initiative for the Integration of the Regional Infrastructure of South America, or IIRSA. This article presents results of a projection analysis showing that IIRSA could push the Amazonian forest past a “tipping point,” replacing it with tropical savanna. Such an event would degrade biodiversity, reduce carbon storage, and harm continental agriculture, dependent on moisture transport from forest-based rainfall recycling.
While the sale of non-timber forest products (NTFPs) is nearly invisible in and marginal to official economic statistics, it is an important source of income for many rural populations in Amazonia. This paper discuss a NTFPs production and marketing chain (Mauritia flexuosa fruits) in Abaetetuba County, Northern Brazil. Research was carried out using the following methods: participant observation, application of semi-structured questionnaires, and by accompanying production during harvest months in 2015.
The Brazilian Amazon is being affected by the new worldwide geopolitical transformation that is tending towards an integrated global economy. In the region environmental considerations have not been adequately incorporated into long-term land use planning and this failure has partly been due to the complexities of the country's existing inter-sectorial institutional arrangements. In this paper, we briefly explore two distinct economic development phases that have been reshaping Amazonian landscapes since the 1990s.
Reducing large-scale deforestation in commodity frontiers remains a key challenge for climate change mitigation and the conservation of biodiversity. Public and private anti-deforestation policies have been shown to effectively reduce forest loss, but the conditions under which such policies get adopted are rarely examined. Here we propose a set of conditions that we expect to be associated with the adoption of effective anti-deforestation policies in commodity frontiers.
