On National Cerrado Day (September 11th), the Climate Observatory (OC), of which ISPN is a part, brings a matter which investigates the problem of permits for the suppression of native vegetation being issued indiscriminately, the "mobile" legal reserve, and the lack of monitoring that have legalized what is irregular and create a scenario of uncontrolled deforestation.
FROM OC – The deforestation authorization processes conducted by states and municipalities in the Cerrado, the country's second largest biome, are out of control. Studies by experts and reports from inspectors in the field show that authorizations have been issued hastily, in volumes and speeds that make monitoring by environmental agencies impossible, without transparency or social control.
In some states, such as Bahia, the "outsourcing" process that transfers the prerogative of authorizing deforestation to municipalities has been occurring without registration in public systems, such as the National System for Controlling the Origin of Forest Products (Sinaflor), generating an information blackout and hindering command and control actions. Furthermore, the unprecedented validity of vegetation suppression authorizations (which can be up to four years) has been used as a means of speculation, with landowners "saving" deforestation permits for use during more economically favorable times.
The result is that, while government actions throughout this year have managed to produce a 7% inflection point in the area of deforestation alerts in the Amazon in 2023, the Cerrado remains uncontrolled.
Considered the “water tower of Brazil”, the Cerrado – whose National Day is celebrated this Monday (September 11th) – concentrates springs and water recharge areas that are fundamental for the irrigation of river basins in South America. Among the so-called “ecosystem services” provided by the biome is the provision of water that is the basis for the operation of the country's main hydroelectric plants.
“The biomes are integrated: there is a flow of water, an atmospheric flow of moisture, carbon, and biodiversity, which needs to be observed. The Cerrado plays such an important role in infiltrating and channeling these waters to all other parts of the country,” summarizes Isabel Figueiredo, a researcher at the Institute for Society, Population and Nature (ISPN) and a specialist in the biome.
Less legal protection
Unlike the Amazon, where 80% of the area of protected native vegetation on rural properties is protected, the Cerrado has only 20% of its area designated as a legal reserve (in the Cerrado located in states within the Legal Amazon, the percentage is 35%). This means that, according to the Forest Code, 80% of the area of rural properties in the biome is "deforestable".
It is up to the states to authorize and oversee legal deforestation – and that is precisely where the main difficulty in controlling deforestation currently lies. The states have not only authorized a great deal of deforestation, but have also made it difficult to access information and monitor these authorizations.
“The protected area defined by the Forest Code is smaller than what has been shown to be necessary to maintain the ecosystem functions of the Cerrado, especially that of water replenishment. The cutoff line to avoid the point of no return in the biome [the point at which degradation and loss of functions become irreversible] would be 40%,” explains Guilherme Eidt, also a researcher at ISPN.
“This perspective of maintaining ecosystem services is not addressed by the Forest Code, which signals an open field for the expansion of agribusiness. This has been happening since the 1980s, but it has gained much more momentum from the late 1990s and early 2000s, when policies were directed towards expansion in regions of native Cerrado vegetation,” he adds.
The situation is aggravated because, even though insufficient, the Forest Code has not been fully complied with in the granting of deforestation permits, which are marked by irregularities.
This is explained by Margareth Maia, professor at the Federal University of Bahia and director of the Instituto Mãos da Terra (Imaterra). The institute has been conducting projects since 2021. A study on the fire suppression permits (known by the acronym ASV) issued in Bahia. The first part of the research, published last year, analyzed 5.126 ordinances authorizing the suppression of native vegetation. Published in the state's Official Gazette between September 2007 and June 2021, these decrees authorized the clearing of 1 million hectares across all biomes in Bahia, an area equivalent to 32 cities the size of Salvador.
Of the total authorized area, 80% is concentrated in the western part of the state, the most active agricultural frontier of the so-called Matopiba (a region formed by the states of Maranhão, Tocantins, Piauí, and Bahia). Among the irregularities found are conflicts with traditional communities, the use of techniques that can be fatal for capturing wildlife (such as using dogs to scare animals away), and reports signed by officials without the established technical qualifications.
Furthermore, the study analyzed 26 ASV (Authorization for Sustainable Use) processes more closely in light of environmental legislation, producing technical opinions. “Márcia Telles’ [director of the Institute of Environment and Water Resources, Inema, for more than ten years and dismissed from her position last Saturday, September 9th], when questioned, always argued that the entire process was legal. But when we zoomed in on these processes, we saw that this was not the case. It was a supposed legality. All the processes had irregularities, which we contested through representations to the Public Prosecutor's Office,” says Maia.
The second part of Imaterra's research and the consolidated data, which are still unpublished, will be published in a book this month.
"Chaotic scenario"
Between August 2022 and July 2023, The Cerrado region recorded a 16,5% increase in deforestation alerts. The data from INPE's DETER system, compared to the previous year. The period corresponds to the cutoff used by INPE to measure deforestation in the biomes (August of one year to July of the following year). The area under deforestation alerts during this period, 6.359 km2, is the largest ever recorded in INPE's historical series, which began in 2017.
In July of this year, the increase in DETER alerts in the Cerrado was 26%, compared to July 2022. In August, the increase was only 2% compared to the same month last year, which, according to Minister Marina Silva, may indicate the beginning of a reversal in the upward curve of deforestation in the biome, something that has already been seen in the Amazon.
Command and control actions, including remote embargoes, have been resumed by Ibama and ICMBio, but are still hampered by the local dynamics of legal deforestation authorization. From January to July, the area authorized for deforestation in the Cerrado was 482.381,4 hectares. During the same period, Deter recorded 491.045 hectares under deforestation alerts.
“Virtually all deforestation during this period was based on permits issued by state environmental agencies. Of course, this data cannot be viewed solely in this way, because in some cases, within the area under deforestation alerts, there may indeed have been illegal deforestation, which is being verified by Ibama in great detail. But the fact is that the Cerrado allows for greater authorization, which has been granted in a manner that is, at the very least, questionable,” stated João Paulo Capobianco, executive secretary of the Ministry of Environment and Climate Change, in August.
Reports gathered by the news team describe a "scenario of chaos," especially in Bahia. As the latest [report] showed... Mapbiomas Annual Deforestation ReportThe Matopiba region accounted for 26,3% of all deforestation in Brazil.
In Bahia, in addition to the massive issuance of permits for vegetation suppression and the uncontrolled decentralization of this responsibility to municipalities – where political and economic pressures exert a much stronger influence on environmental agencies – reports indicate the establishment of "mobile legal reserves," that is, the relocation of legal reserves within farms. This occurs because permits have been issued without the properties having their Rural Environmental Registry (called Cefir in the state) validated, contrary to what is stipulated in the Forest Code.
“Theoretically, it wouldn’t be possible to grant Vegetation Suppression Authorization for a property that doesn’t have a validated CAR (Rural Environmental Registry), since it’s the registry that verifies if the legal reserve area is correct. Because there are delays in validation, states have been issuing authorizations independently, which creates a precarious situation: while the CAR isn’t validated, farms have been shifting the location of their legal reserves,” explains Isabel Figueiredo.
In practice, without registration and control, landowners can modify the area designated as a legal reserve in their records as many times as they want when requesting deforestation permits. Thus, an area previously identified in the registry as part of the mandatory legal reserve can be subject to a request for vegetation suppression, while the reserve is "pushed" to another area – which will also not be monitored. Until it is validated, the registry is modified and the reserves "float" to wherever is most convenient, facilitating the encroachment of vegetation suppression into protected areas.
For Isabel Figueiredo, the demands for a public policy to control deforestation in the Cerrado necessarily involve effective coordination between the federal government and the states.
“Beyond coordinating with the states, it’s necessary to go beyond the discourse that ‘we can deforest 80%’. It’s necessary to observe other issues, such as land tenure, cases of land grabbing, and violations of the human rights of traditional populations who occupied this region. It’s also necessary to monitor the processes of granting water use permits and aquifer recharge – important for agribusiness itself. Our expectation is that the federal government will look at the Cerrado with the importance it deserves, that it will be more innovative and bolder in the conservation of the biome. We need a preservation goal that goes beyond the Forest Code, or we will see the environmental collapse of the entire country,” he states.
The federal government is expected to announce the PPCerrado, a deforestation control plan inspired by the successful PPCDAm in the Amazon, this month. The Bahia State Environment Secretariat and Inema (Bahia's environmental agency) were contacted but did not comment.
By Leila Salim from the Climate Observatory.