Are capacity deficits in local government leaving the Amazon vulnerable to environmental change?

Highlights

• Large areas of the Brazilian Legal Amazon are at risk of climatically mediated environmental change.

• Implementation of environmental policy in Brazil has largely been devolved to municipal government.

• We show that municipal capacity to develop and implement environmental policy in the Amazon is low.

• There is no evidence that municipalities at most risk of catastrophic environmental change are proactively responding.

• Technical assistance should be focused on smaller, less developed municipalities.

Abstract

The last 20 years have seen remarkable progress in monitoring and modelling environmental change in the Amazon region. As a result, scientists and policy makers now have robust and spatially explicit knowledge and forecasts of critical phenomena such as deforestation and bioclimatic uncertainty. However, whether this knowledge is used to support the implementation of policies and initiatives to cope with environmental changes in the Amazon depends on the ability of the political institutions to proactively integrate the scientific evidence into land planning at multiple spatial scales. In Brazil, municipalities are constitutionally responsible for legislating on land planning and therefore have a power to significantly influence the future trajectory of environmental change. Here, we assess the environmental capacity of municipalities in the Brazilian legal Amazon based on data from a self-assessment survey and from the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics database. Municipalities generally have a low level of institutional capacity and there is no evidence that the municipalities most at threat from environmental change are taking proactive measures to reduce their vulnerability. We argue that structural reforms and capacity raising initiatives are urgently needed, especially in smaller, less economically developed municipalities located in areas at high risk of imminent environmental change.

Introduction

The Amazon region contains the largest remaining area of continuous rainforest in the world and is considered vital for maintaining regional ecosystem services such as hydrological and biogeochemical cycles (Foley et al., 2007, Malhi et al., 2008). The Amazon rainforest is also one of the regions with the highest levels of terrestrial biodiversity (Antonelli and Sanmartín, 2011, Malhado et al., 2013), and may still contain considerable numbers of undiscovered species (Funk et al., 2012, Scheffers et al., 2012). Notwithstanding its enormous size, the future of many Amazonian forests is uncertain due to the interlinked threats of deforestation, fires and climate change (Davidson et al., 2012, Malhado et al., 2013, Malhi et al., 2008). Indeed, the latest generation of land use models suggest that Amazonian land cover changes due to deforestation may be sufficient to cause ecological ‘tipping points’ in some regions, transforming tropical forests into deciduous forests or even savannahs (Nobre, 2014, Pires and Costa, 2013). These impacts are predicted to be strongest in transitional forests at the margins of Amazonia and within the highly threatened arc of deforestation region in southeast of the region (Costa and Pires, 2010, Pires and Costa, 2013).

Responding to these complex threats requires actions at multiple scales (Ladle and Malhado, 2007, Ladle et al., 2011). Specifically, it will be essential to effectively integrate policy with the results of land use models to pre-emptively respond to the coupled threats of climate change and deforestation (Ferreira et al., 2012, Ladle et al., 2011). Such actions are not only essential for conservation, but also to ensure regional food security which could also be threatened by wide-scale changes in precipitation regimes (Lapola et al., 2011). For example, one recent model indicated that, due to climate feedbacks, increased agricultural expansion in the Amazon will lead to lower agricultural productivity in both new and established areas (Oliveira et al., 2013).

Brazil contains the highest proportion of the Amazon (60%), and is relatively well placed to meet many of these complex conservation and development challenges. The country has some of the most robust and comprehensive environmental legislation in the developing world (McAllister, 2008), and has recently developed a suite of forward thinking policy initiatives such as the Low Carbon Agriculture Plan (Amaral et al., 2012) and various Payment for Ecosystem Services (PES) schemes (e.g. Figueiredo et al., 2013; Zanella et al., 2014). However, despite this impressive legislative framework, Brazil has been far less successful at implementing and enforcing its environmental laws with high levels of non-compliance, especially in the agricultural sector (Sparovek et al., 2010). Environmental policy implementation and the capacity to react to environmental threats is especially problematic over large, sparsely populated areas such as Amazonia, where responsible institutions may lack appropriate resources, infrastructure, personnel, etc.

Brazil has a three-tiered (Federal, State and Municipality) structure of government, with state and municipal administrations having a high degree of autonomy with regards to the development of environmental policies and actions. On-the-ground implementation of environmental policies was largely devolved to local (municipal) government in the 1988 constitution and subsequent legislation. Most importantly, municipalities are constitutionally responsible for legislating on land planning (Castro et al., 2009) and therefore have a critical role in regulating agricultural expansion, urban development, transport infrastructure and, by extension, deforestation. This has proved highly problematic due to low institutional capacity, further exacerbated in some Amazonian municipalities by familial or economic connections between politicians and those involved in the illegal extraction of natural resources (McAllister, 2008). Consequently, local land planning decisions are often in conflict with federal laws leading to protracted and often unresolved legal disputes (Castro et al., 2009). The Brazilian Amazon contains 797 municipalities of widely varying area, resources and infrastructure and which vary considerably in their capacity to deal with the complex environmental threats to both natural and agricultural areas (Dias et al., 2015).

In this viewpoint we evaluate various aspects of the capacity of municipalities in the Brazilian legal Amazon to respond to current and future environmental threats, with a focus on municipalities in areas that vary in risk of future environmental change. The latter on the basis of coupled biosphere-atmosphere models that predict the probability of ecosystem transition due to deforestation-induced climate change (Ladle et al., 2011, Pires and Costa, 2013).