What Amazon do we want?

Vitor Vieira Vasconcelos

PhD in Natural Sciences
Stockholm Environment Institute Asia Centre
July 2015

The Amazon is one of the large remaining natural areas of the world, with many ecosystems that
are shelter of a very rich biodiversity and play a significant role in global environmental processes.
However, deforestation may bring irreversible damage to its ecosystems, to its traditional inhabitants and
to the whole world. This essay aims at exploring alternative futures for the sustainable development of
Amazon.
One of the first images that may come to our minds when we think of Amazon is the magnanimous
Amazon forest. However, a closer look will unveil many different kinds of forests, such as flooded forests,
dry land (Terra Firme) forests, cloud forests, mountain forests, mangrove swamps, palm forests (Mata de
Cocais), among other possible classifications. Besides the forests, there are areas of Savannah, divided
between Cerrado (South American grassland savannah) and Campinarana (swampy savannahs on
seasonal waterlogged sandy soils). The water environment, including the largest river system in the world,
can also be considered as a proper ecosystem. All these ecosystems comprise the biggest pool of species
biodiversity in the world, corresponding to approximately 10 % of the worlds known biodiversity
(Lewinsohn & Prado, 2005), while many (or most) of it remains yet to be discovered and studied properly.
Moreover, the Amazon is not completely unpopulated. Along centuries, Native South Americans
and immigrants colonized small tribes and villages and learned to live sustainably with the natural
ecosystems. During that time, they learned how to use native plants and animals to produce their food,
traditional medicine, shelters and tools. This knowledge has been used as an entrance door for
pharmaceutics research, in order to develop new modern medicines. Typical examples are the plants
Curare Vine (Curare sp.) and the Quinine (Chinchona sp.), which were initially used by Native South
Americans, and later allowed the development of muscle relaxants and anti-malarial medicine,
respectively. Notwithstanding, despites the enormous profit of the pharmaceutics industry with these
medicines, the Native South Americans have not received any share of it. In order to change this injustices
and to help in the conservation of the traditional knowledge, the Convention on Biological Diversity of
1992, signed by 196 countries, includes rules for equitable sharing of the benefits provided by the
traditional knowledge of the use of biodiversity.
Another interesting aspect of the traditional communities is their function in storing a wide variety
of traditional agricultural plants. One example is the high genetic diversity of cassava cultivated by
traditional people in Amazon, that may reach more than 75 varieties (Elias et al., 2001; Emperaire &
Peroni, 2007). These crop varieties were selected during centuries and are adapted to the local climate,
soils, and diseases.
Nevertheless, the increasing global demand for natural resources, especially for food and wood,
is leading to deforestation of Amazon. In the deforesting cycle, the logging companies sell cleared land to
cattle ranchers, who overuse the land for cattle and, after the soil lost its fertility, then move to new
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deforested lands. The expansion of agriculture also displaces the cattle ranchers to new areas in the
border of the forests, aggravating this trend. Since 1970, almost 20% of Amazon has been deforested
(Butler, 2014). Not only the plants and animals lose their habitats, but also the traditional inhabitants lose
the ecosystems that provides their sustenance.
One of main impacts of deforestation is that it may cause the extinction of many endemic Amazon
species. These species, besides of their intrinsic value as living beings, could also contribute to the
development of new pharmaceutics products. Furthermore, the deforestation may hamper many
environmental services provided by native ecosystems, such as river flow regulation, fire protection,
pollination, ecotourism, and provision of non-timber products. In a global scale, when an Amazon forest
is deforested and then burned to prepare the soil for cattle raising, a large amount of stored carbon is
released in the atmosphere, aggravating the problems of global warming.
To evaluate the impacts of deforestation, research institutes are using remote sensing techniques
to monitor closely the changes in vegetation cover in Amazon. The Brazilian Government is using these
monitoring systems to detect recent deforestation and send the environmental police to deal with illegal
deforesters. This public policy helped to decrease the rate of deforesting in Brazil since 2004, as shown in
Figure 1.

Figure 1 Deforestation in Brazilian Amazon, 1988-2014 (Nepsted at al., 2015).

Although surveillance is an important aspect for Amazon conservation, another interesting
complementary approach is the sustainable management of woodland ecosystems. The core idea is to
divide an area in many blocks. Then some trees in a selected block of the forest could be cut, and
afterwards that area would be resting without logging for many years, until the wood stock could recover
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again. The rotation among the blocks would allow a sustainable yield of wood. One interesting result of
the rotation system is that, with constant plant colonization of the new open areas inside the forest, the
overall biodiversity of the ecosystems tends to increase (Gillman, 2009, p. 90-95). The area under
sustainable management can also be used to produce Not Timber Forest Products NTFP -, such as honey,
building poles, medicinal plants, and material for weaving, basketry and thatch handcraft.
Even so, the comparison between the short term profits of deforesting versus sustainable
management options may still tempt many entrepreneurs to continue their large scale deforesting and
associated cattle raising activities. One way to counterbalance that scenario is to direct money for
sustainable management of the Amazon ecosystems in retribution to their environmental services.
National and local governments may provide some of these funds, based in the local and regional benefits
from Amazon ecosystems, but international organizations may also help, due to the global benefits of
conserving Amazon.
In conclusion, the benefits of conserving the Amazon ecosystems, in virtue of its intrinsic value
and the potential benefits for local people and for the global society, justify the efforts for its sustainable
management. In order to cope with the deforestation, policies for environmental surveillance and
payment for environmental services may help to reduce the pressure for new logging areas. These policies
would help turning the balance in favor of projects for sustainable management of the ecosystems,
including rotation of blocks for wood extraction and complimentary production of NTFP.

References
Butler,
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(2014)
Calculating
Deforestation
Figures
for
the
Amazon.
http://rainforests.mongabay.com/amazon/deforestation_calculations.html Acessed 21 June 2015
Elias, M.; Penet, L.; Vindry, P.; McKey, D.; Panaud, O. and Robert, T. (2001) Unmanaged sexual
reproduction and the dynamics of genetic diversity of a vegetatively propagated crop plant, cassava (
Manihot esculenta Crantz), in a traditional farming system, Molecular Ecology , 10:18951907
Emperaire, L.; Peroni, N. (2007) Traditional management of agrobiodiversity in Brazil: a case study of
manioc, Human Ecology , 35:76168
Gillman, M. (2009) Life in Amazon. In: The Open University. Environment: journeys through a changing
world. Book and DVD. UK, The Open University
Lewinsohn, T. M.; Prado, P. I. (2005) How Many Species Are There in Brazil? Conservation Biology 19,
2005, pp. 619-24
Nepstad, D.; McGrath, D.; Shimada, J.; Stickler, C. (2015) Why is Amazon Deforestation Climbing?
http://news.mongabay.com/2013/1116-nepstad-why-is-deforestation-climbing.html Accessed 21 June
2015