He used his speech at the start of the U.N. But Bolsonaro has pushed back fiercely against all suggestions that the world has a stake in Brazil's land-use policies because of climate change. That translates to carbon dioxide leaked into the global atmosphere that would otherwise remain sequestered in the Amazon. Not all of those efforts have been successful, but the study, published yesterday in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, estimates that the Bolsonaro and Temer presidencies' refusal to grant Indigenous communities control of new territories may have resulted in an extra 1.5 million hectares of deforestation per year. He has tried to shift more authority, including over Indigenous land demarcation, away from agencies whose mission is to protect Indigenous rights and toward the Ministry of Agriculture, which has a vested interest in expanding development. And Bolsonaro has taken steps to erode protections for Indigenous land and to make it easier for non-Indigenous Brazilians to carry out economic activity in the Amazon. "The granting of the property rights gives them the legal basis to actually ensure that these ecosystems are preserved in the lands where they live."īut no new land has been demarcated for Indigenous use under Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro or Michel Temer, his immediate predecessor. "Indigenous tribes are really linked to biodiversity management and reductions in deforestation, and it's because they live on the land and I think they have kind of a very keen sense of what it would mean to upset the ecosystem around them," said Kathryn Baragwanath, a UCSD researcher and one of the study's co-authors. And the study by researchers at the University of California, San Diego, and Columbia University found that between 19, deforestation inside homologated territories declined from an average of about 3% a year to 1% a year.
After homologation, economic activity can't be carried out in designated lands without consent from both the tribe and the federal government.
Indigenous people in the Brazilian Amazon with full ownership rights over their land saw a two-thirds decrease in the rate of deforestation on their land in the world's most important rainforest, a new study finds.Īt issue is the impact of homologation - the final step in designating land as Indigenous property in a process laid out in Brazil's Constitution - on destruction of Earth's largest tropical forest.