Brazil is well aware of the Amazon rainforest deforestation process. The nation understands its causes, dynamics and monitors its progress. Lula’s 1st government term proposed the Action Plan for the Prevention and Control of Deforestation in the Legal Amazon (PPCDAM), an excellent program to combat deforestation, which managed to reduce the annual rate from 27,000 to 4,000 km2 per year in less than ten years.
Now, besides an accelerated and criminal growth of deforestation, which reaches 13,000 km2 per year, we also face another problem as serious as that – the degradation of the standing forest – a very complex matter that associates different vectors whose dynamics evolve in different intensities and scales – most of them directly resulting from human action. That is, more than 3 million km2 of native vegetation that have not yet been deforested in the Amazon are not intact. Deforestation results in forest fragments and edge effects, which along with predatory logging and fires, result in forest degradation.
It follows that, that forest degradation is not the same as deforestation. Degradation is the progressive impoverishment of the forest caused by one or more disturbances or vectors (e.g. fires), generating a long-term destructive process and events whose negative impacts may not be fully and immediately observable or perceived. Forest degradation is a silent danger, with potential damaging consequences on local, regional, national and intercontinental scales and, therefore, demanding a broader discussion so as to adapt actions and policies to tackle this socio-environmental threat.
Brazil has already demonstrated leadership role in combating deforestation. The same level of prominence is now needed in order to protect the "health" of the remaining forests in the Amazon. Thus, it is necessary to include forest degradation in the public policy agenda, with specific strategies to combat the main vectors of degradation.
The interest of experts in this topic led to an important diligence around the holding of a Seminar in March 2023, in Belém, where issues such as: the context of forest degradation, how degradation affects the Amazon forests and possible solutions were discussed. We produced a policy brief, available here, which was delivered on May 25 to the Ministry of the Environment. Some of the recommendations are: the creation of an emergency fund to prevent and combat fire in years of extreme drought; definition of territories to combat degradation; annual disclosure of degradation figures and deforestation, by means of Amazon Deforestation Calculation Program / National Institute for Space Research (PRODES/INPE), and the formation of a technical-scientific work team on the subject. Finally, we propose to take a leap: transform the PPCDAm into PPCDDAm – Plano de Prevenção e Combate ao Desmatamento e à Degradação da Amazônia [Plan to Prevent and Combat Deforestation and Degradation of the Amazon].
The commitment to the resumption of deforestation control needs to be strengthened by the fight against forest degradation, thus, building a comprehensive public policy, where scientific and environmental management institutions are also empowered. It is, therefore, necessary to create the mechanisms that allow us to understand, with scientific accuracy, what is happening to the largest tropical forest in the world, but also to combat this silent process that affects the quality of forests in the region and its consequent provision of ecosystem services.
