- Protected areas and Indigenous territories in the Amazon Rainforest experienced just one-third the loss of primary forest compared to non-protected areas, according to a new report by the Monitoring of the Andean Amazon Project (MAAP).
- Over the five-year study period, between 2017 and 2021, protected areas lost slightly less forest than Indigenous territories, but deforestation was lower in Indigenous territories.
- The MAAP study estimated that 11 million hectares (27 million acres) of primary forest were lost over the five years of the study, of which 71% were lost to deforestation and 29% to fire.
- The study highlights the effectiveness of Indigenous territories in protecting forests and the need for more protective designations, particularly for Indigenous territories.
Protected areas and Indigenous territories in the Amazon Rainforest experienced just one-third the amount of primary forest loss as non-protected areas, according to a new report.
The Monitoring of the Andean Amazon Project (MAAP), a U.S.-based nonprofit, examined primary forest loss across the entire Amazon biome between 2017 and 2021.
Over the five-year study period, protected areas lost slightly less forest (0.12%), than Indigenous territories (0.14%), but deforestation (intentional tree felling) was lower in Indigenous territories.
The MAAP study estimated forest loss by analyzing satellite images from the University of Maryland’s Global Land Analysis and Discovery (GLAD) laboratory. They also looked for major forest fires that completely removed tree cover at a 30-meter (100-foot) scale.
They found that 11 million hectares (27 million acres) of primary forest were lost over the five years of the study, an area equivalent to one-fourth of California. Of this, 71% were lost to deforestation (intentional cutting) and natural causes such as landslides, while 29% was lost due to fire.
“For the first time, the data allowed us to tease apart the role of fires from other sources of forest loss, an important advance,” Matt Finer, senior research specialist and director of MAAP, told Mongabay.
In the Amazon, fires aren’t naturally occurring, but rather are set after deforestation to clear the land for cattle ranching and soy farming, in a method known as slash-and-burn agriculture. An estimated 70% of deforestation in the Amazon is linked to clearing land for cattle pastures.
In recent years as the forests have become drier and more degraded, fires have escaped from agricultural patches into standing forests. The MAAP report showed that these fires in standing forests were mostly concentrated in southeastern Brazil and southeastern Bolivia, while major fires elsewhere were burning recently deforested areas, and not the cause of forest loss.
“The lands outside of Indigenous territories in the Amazon are actually a source [of carbon emission] now, and that includes the non-Indigenous protected areas,” Peter Veit, director of the World Resources Insitute’s Land and Resource Rights Initiative, told Mongabay.
Overall, the fire loss rate was higher in Indigenous territories (0.7%) than in protected areas (0.04%).
“The differences in percentages partially reflect the denominator (that is, the total area in each of these categories) — and specifically the relative coverage of these categories in the areas of the southern Amazon most heavily impacted by fire activity,” Douglas Morton, a global fire expert and chief of the Biospheric Sciences Laboratory at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, who was not involved in this research, told Mongabay in an email. “My sense is that the percent/year number is perhaps less informative than the spatial concentration of forest fires shown in the map.”
Fires in Indigenous areas can be caused by a few things, including Indigenous use of fires for land management and hunting, or as an unexpected consequences when intentional burning escapes into the surroundings.
Fires were particularly large and damaging over the study period in the Bolivian Amazon, both in Indigenous and protected areas, and in the Pantanal biome in the Brazilian state of Mato Grosso.
“Fires in these regions also indicate intentional burning that spreads into Indigenous or protected areas from adjacent land-use activity,” Morton said. “One of the challenges for managing fires in these protected areas is that their size and remote nature make fire suppression difficult, allowing fires to spread (often for weeks or months) until they are eventually extinguished by the start of the rainy season.”
This study is one of many that have found Indigenous territories to be effective in protecting forests. A 2020 study found that providing property rights to Indigenous communities could significantly reduce deforestation levels in the Amazon, and another in 2022 found that the world’s healthiest tropical forests are located in protected Indigenous areas.
“I think [the] main thing to highlight,” Finer said, “is given this demonstrated effectiveness … how many more can be filled in with some type of protective designation, particularly Indigenous territories.”
Citations:
Finer M, Mamani N (2023) Protected Areas & Indigenous Territories Effective Against Deforestation Across Amazon. MAAP: 183.
Baragwanath, K., & Bayi, E. (2020). Collective property rights reduce deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 117(34), 20495-20502. doi:10.1073/pnas.1917874117
Sze, J. S., Childs, D. Z., Carrasco, L. R., & Edwards, D. P. (2022). Indigenous lands in protected areas have high forest integrity across the tropics. Current Biology, 32(22), 4949-4956. doi:10.1016/j.cub.2022.09.040
Banner image In the photo, Kanamari Indigenous people carry out their work in the Massape village, in the Javari Valley Indigenous territory in Brazil. Photo by Bruno Kelly / Amazon Watch.
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