Public land grabbing in the Amazon follows a pattern. First, invaders[41] take over the land and convert it to pastures and plantations by extracting selective trees and burning and/or cutting the remaining vegetation cover. Then they try to legalize land ownership. To do this, they request forged title deeds in consultation with registrars and officials. [42] Finally, they sell the land in plots for agricultural use or cattle breeding. In short, illegal appropriation of public lands usually triggers a vicious cycle that leads to deforestation and other crimes such as illegal logging, burning and falsification of public documents. [43] One of the main incentives for deforestation and illegal appropriation of public lands in the Amazon comes from the government itself. [55] Under pressure from politically well-connected land grabbers, the federal government forgives the criminal acts of intruders from time to time and allows the regularization of the appropriation of public lands with the transfer of its assets. Examples of this practice are Laws No. 11.952/2009 under the presidency of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and No. 13.465/2017 under the presidency of Michel Temer, as well as Provisional Measure No.
910, issued on December 11, 2019 by the current President Jair Bolsonaro. [56] Brazil`s 1965 forest law requires private landowners, depending on the state in which they lived, to deposit between 20 and 80 percent of indigenous forests and savannahs on their rural properties as “legal reserves.” The law has been praised for its strict conservation of Amazonian forests; As a legal mechanism, it is still considered the greatest protector of private forests that a nation on the planet needs. Article 12(5) of the New Forest Code reduced the legal reserve requirement in the legal Amazon from 80 percent to 50 percent, provided that at least 65 percent of a state`s territory is allocated as nature reserves called conservation units or indigenous reserves. [84] With regard to the latter group, specific public policies need to be developed in cases of agrarian reforms in favour of low-income groups (“reforma agrária”), which are not covered by this document. These are groups whose families have been encouraged by the government to migrate to the region in the past and/or who are in an irregular situation, in part due to poverty and lack of government support. See Section II, Section C, on low-income institutions. Any meaningful effort to mitigate climate change must start with the Amazon rainforest. The Amazon accounts for 67% of the world`s rainforest.
[1] It is the largest and most biodiverse reserve in the world and is home to a remarkable concentration of plants, animals, fungi, bacteria and algae. [2] Its role in carbon capture, its impact on rainfall patterns, and its relevance as a source of freshwater all play a crucial role in ensuring climate stability in the region and globally. It is precisely this last point that is the purpose of this essay. It will show that ineffective legislative initiatives and outdated legislation encourage illegal behaviour. It will also propose changes to the legal framework to address these issues. The essay attempts to fill an important gap in the literature. It attempts to establish a complete diagnosis of the various legal problems affecting the fight against deforestation and proposes an original proposal (constitutional amendment), in addition to other relevant measures already studied in the literature[22], to prevent land grabbing in the Amazon. The evolution of forest loss sites from the traditional deforestation region to the inland regions of the BLA and the Cerrado biome, combined with the reduction in the size of forest loss areas, explains the widespread and significant reduction in the average size of forest cover areas and the increase in fragmentation in these regions. This trend can increase carbon emissions because, according to Malhi et al.55 and Aragão et al.56, the western forest of the BLA has a higher net primary production than the eastern forest and can therefore absorb more atmospheric carbon than biomass.
In addition, the increase in marginal density due to increasing fragmentation is accompanied by a loss of biomass at the forest edge9. Some 80 million hectares (308,882 square miles) of land in Brazil are currently undesignated, without clear land rights, and some conservationists fear that this unclaimed land could be converted into conservation units and indigenous reserves, freeing up previously protected legal reserves on rural land.