New park system in Brazil

The Brazilian State of Pará created nine new units of conservation in its densely forested and lightly populated north. Together, the new state and federal parks and “sustainable use” areas cover 16.4 million hectares, or an area larger than the State of Alabama or the United Kingdom. The Brazilian press notes that two of the motivating factors for the creation of the new parks are the hopes that they will prevent land invasions and frontier violence.

The new areas form the largest connected system of protected tropical forest in the world. The biological connectivity is augmented by the adjacent legally distinct indigenous areas, shown in light brown.

Imazon, the NGO I worked at last fall in Belém, does a lot of satellite mapping of the Amazon and assisted in the delineation of the new parks.

The brunt of deforestation takes place in the southern Amazon, so unfortunately this development does little to address the problems of land invasions, cattle ranching, and soybean cultivation other than send a signal that conservation is important, too.

While I’m not naïve enough to think that paper protection = real protected area + happy people living there, this is definitely a start. You can’t work to save something that doesn’t exist.

Cachoeira Santo Antonio, on the border of Amapá and Pará

and likely just outside one of the new state parks

Flying over the Guyana Shield at dawn