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This page outlines different research projects in which I have examined key drivers and forces underlying land use and land cover dynamics in the Brazilian Amazon.
Tackling deforestation through collective arrangements at the municipal scale in the Brazilian Amazon
Tackling deforestation through collective arrangements at the municipal scale in the Brazilian Amazon
At the peak of Amazonian deforestation in the mid-2000s, a suite of initiatives to curb deforestation was implemented, narrowing their scopes to particular agents, critical municipalities, and economic activities and supply chains. The List of Priority Municipalities (LPM) launched in 2008 became a central tenet of these efforts. It required local agents in listed municipalities to individually and collectively reduce deforestation and implement a comprehensive farm-geocoding registry across the municipality.
While existing studies have highlighted the emblematic responses and successes of that policy, we broaden such analyses to show the List of Priority Municipality limitations in inducing effective responses across different municipal realities, the reason many of the achievements observed at the local level have not been replicated regionally.
My work in the World Development journal is the most extensive analysis of the LPM policy since its implementation in 2008. It combines spatial and temporal analysis, census data, and fieldwork to examine the LPM policy at the regional and local levels.
At the regional level, the analysis rendered a new map clustering 530 Amazonia municipalities based on deforestation patterns, agricultural activities, demographic and agrarian structures, emancipation history, and socioenvironmental protection, revealing the intra-regional diversity of Amazonian municipalities. At the local level, extensive fieldwork and +100 interviews in four municipal case studies revealed how particular colonization and development pathways defined conditions equipping municipalities with specific capacities to sustain individual and collective responses to crises engendered by external forces such as the LPM policy.
A new map clustering Amazonian municipalities
On the one hand, a diversity of agents faces the challenge of devising novel development strategies according to sustainable paradigms while buffering an aggressive frontier expansion prompted by external forces of commodity markets and contradictory national development goals and incentives in the fringes of the frontier. On the other hand, stakeholders and established agricultural elites in older and consolidated areas of the frontier face the task of adapting long-established production strategies to new external demands but, in many cases, under more favorable conditions.
While highlighting the importance of integrating public policies, market-driven incentives, and law enforcement mechanisms to engage a broader spectrum of stakeholders in fostering bottom-up strategies and cooperation to halt deforestation, the study calls attention to four key lessons relevant to municipalities across the Brazilian Amazon:
Law enforcement is critical. The government's ability to effectively enforce the law and sanction rule-breakers was critical in triggering local agents' responses to the LPM policy.
Establish clear but revisable criteria and rules. Facing the challenge of tackling deforestation across diverse and complex municipal contexts, policy instruments require clear criteria and flexibility to remain relevant over time in a region in rapid transformation.
Intergovernmental and interinstitutional cooperation is fundamental. The collaboration among government agencies and organizations enables additional policy measures to align, which leverages the incentives already in place for local agents and municipalities to react.
Recognize bottom-up initiatives and responses. Institutional arrangements devised by local agents on the ground must be valued and recognized by governments. Recognizing initiatives emerging from the bottom-up tailored to context-specific conditions allows the distribution of power across multiple decision-making centers that can design solutions to the appropriate scale.
Society's values on trees and forests and the environment legislation development in Brazil
Society's values on trees and forests and the environment legislation development in Brazil
My study in the Estudos Avançados journal examined the Brazilian forest legislation and official reports since the XVI century to discuss the longstanding tension opposing forests (and their peoples) and alternative land uses (and their agents and forces). The work unveils how societal values and discourses surrounding notions of modernity, development, and productivity have marginalized traditional and Indigenous peoples and livelihoods, degraded native ecosystems, and pushed the Amazon biome to a dangerous tipping point with local to global ramifications.
The study highlights the following lessons:
Official narratives and dominant values that society ascribes to forests have shaped the design and implementation of legislation since the 16th century, through the colonial and monarchic periods, and from the first republic in the late 19th century to the present day.
Conflicting and opposing narratives and values associated with forests and their peoples have underpinned advances and setbacks in the implementation of Brazilian forest legislation over time.
History shows the appreciation of the human-nature relationship has expanded, paving the way for the emergence of more comprehensive forest laws that evolved to encapsulate a broader assemblage of narratives and values ascribed to forests in Brazil.
To a large extent, a broader understanding of the multiple values and importance of forests has emerged from vivid perceptions and repetitive experiences arising from the disastrous consequences of predatory and irrational use of natural resources, both in rural areas and urban settings.
Yet, official narratives that embrace outdated but persistent discourses and narrow forest values contribute to eroding environmental governance at times, with a direct impact on deforestation, fires, and rural violence in Brazil.
Overcoming false dichotomies that oppose nature conservation and socioeconomic development is critical for strategies that conciliate pressing social-environmental demands.
The intertemporal governance challenges of managing soybean expansion, deforestation rates, and urban floods in Amazonia
The intertemporal governance challenges of managing soybean expansion, deforestation rates, and urban floods in Amazonia
In this study, my colleagues and I joined efforts to integrate extensive fieldwork from our research across the Brazilian Amazon. Our work examined how local governments' ability to manage urban floods is hindered by past and present governance decisions related to agricultural expansion and deforestation control in the Brazilian Amazon.
In a context where flows and spillovers between distant places and ecosystems have intensified, the ability of agents to make management decisions in many landscapes is increasingly challenged by external factors that have surpassed their importance. As a result, the governance of one place can no longer be thought of in isolation from others, because each socio-ecological system is part of a complex network of ecosystems and activities. The root causes of environmental problems may not only be traced back to the way activities in one place are managed, but also to decisions made in another place, at an earlier time, just as sea-level rise causing floods in deltas today stems from global warming effects exacerbated by decisions made by industrial economies during their development.
In the Brazilian Amazon, three challenges have become tightly interlinked over time: agricultural expansion, deforestation control, and flooding mitigation. Many cities in the region experience floods, and their occurrence and severity have intensified. Agricultural expansion over forests has indeed perturbed regional water regimes and pushed the Amazon to an imminent tipping point. Along with the increased water runoff from agricultural fields, the multiplication of dams has also intensified the frequency of floods.
Land-use changes in the watershed embedding the city of Paragominas, state of Pará, Brazil (bottom-right rectangle). The figure shows the replacement of pasturelands by soybean plantations between 2000 and 2019. Land-use changes occurred predominantly along the rivers, whereas forest cover remained in the interfluves.
How can cities like Paragominas and their residents address local flooding issues without connecting to the broader “soybean-beef-flood” governance systems?
Using mixed-methods research, including detailed fieldwork, interviews with a variety of stakeholders, official census data, and geospatial analysis of land-use and cover change across three case studies, we illustrate how managing multiple social-ecological systems presents an intertemporal governance challenge. Our study explains how urban floods are influenced by various factors, including engineering challenges, land-use decisions, and distant governance choices that aim to control soybean expansion over forestlands.
We argue that solving a single problem isn't just about fixing resource use or local management, but also involves rethinking the regional governance of activities that can mitigate negative impacts caused by governance decisions elsewhere.
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