Deforestation in Brazil’s Amazon-Based Settlements: A Socio-Ecological Approach

Global change is substantially led by greenhouse gases (GHG) emissions (Ruddiman, 2013). In Brazil, the largest emission rates come from the forestry & land-use change sector, which historically accounts for more than half of Brazil’s emissions (SEEG, 2016a). Within the Legal Amazon, deforestation is the main driver of land-use change (TerraClass, 2014). Furthermore, Amazon-based settlements, established by Brazil’s Land Reform, play an important role in this process, as 28.6% of all Amazon deforestation stemmed from this type of land property in 2016 alone (Azevedo et al, 2016). Even though public policies aim at curbing this source of land-clearing, they often fail to achieve this goal. Hence, this thesis will analyse why policies do not efficiently prevent clear-cutting in Amazon-based settlements. This analysis is done through a multilevel comparison between political priorities and local perceptions on deforestation. The inquiry relies on text analysis to assess the Land Reform as a land-use policy and the Forest Code as a deforestation policy. It further summarizes the impressions of local family farmers collected in the fieldwork. Then it compares both results to understand why policies fail to fully curb deforestation. The main conclusion is that policies fail because they are erratic, they do not sufficiently take into account the social aspects of deforestation and they do not promote resilience in local communities. The geographical scope of the case-study is western Pará state, in which 30.8% of all deforestation occur in Amazon-based settlements (Ibidem). It is in Pará where the case-study takes place, namely the PAS Project carried out by the Amazon Environmental Research Institute. The main contribution of this thesis is to adopt a socio-ecological systems approach to compare policy priorities to local case-study results and to emphasize the interlinkages between income-generation and land-clearing