In Brazil’s wild west, a state government is trying to prove that it is possible to safeguard the Amazon – and improve the lives of rural people at the same time.
Acre is one of the country’s most remote jurisdictions: the state capital Rio Branco sits on a tributary of a tributary of the Amazon River, nearly 4,000 km by road from Rio de Janeiro. Nearly 90 percent of the state is still blanketed in rainforest – and a progressive series of state governments have decided there are huge advantages for their people in keeping it that way.
They’ve established an innovative, comprehensive, and statewide legal framework that attempts to change the state’s entire model of development to one rooted in forests.
Acre is not a wealthy state (although GDP has been steadily growing since the 90s) so the government is hoping that flows of money from governments or private investors will help to fund the scheme, for example through the mechanism of REDD+: a UN-backed scheme that aims to combat climate change by reducing carbon emissions from deforestation and forest degradation. When forests are cut down – or degraded by fires or mismanaged selective logging – they release tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.
REDD+ aims to tackle climate change by paying developing countries to keep their forests standing. But although international negotiations on how this scheme will be financed have stalled, Acre has pushed ahead.
“Acre state has always been in a hurry,” says Rodrigo Neves, the state’s Attorney General, who has been instrumental in setting up the scheme.
“We can’t wait for the ideal conditions of international negotiations or national discussions on REDD+. This sense of urgency has led us to take action—we didn’t sit and wait for a big international treaty or a national law to do our job.”
Neves and a handful of public officials, including Eufran Amaral and Monica de los Rios of Acre’s Institute for Climate Change and Regulation of Environmental Services, have spent the past few years trying to prove what can be done in a sub-national jurisdiction if the political will is there, so that once the money starts flowing, Acre will be set up to receive it.
“The world needs action today, not in the future,” says de los Rios. “If we don’t take action here in our state, the deforestation and degradation will continue.”
Innovative strategy
In 2010, Acre’s state Assembly approved a new law called the State System of Incentives for Environmental Services (SISA). SISA is the culmination of more than a decade of pro-environmental policies initiated by Acre’s self-proclaimed “Government of the Forest” and its successors since 1998, when it announced the goal of halting deforestation at 18 per cent of the state’s surface area and placing 25 percent of the state’s forests (approximately 4 million hectares) under sustainable forest management.
The new law establishes the foundation for creating incentives to maintain and restore “environmental services” – forest carbon stocks, water, soil, biodiversity, traditional knowledge – and includes a framework enabling the state to establish links with the markets for these services that have started emerging internationally.
In contrast to some other jurisdictions worldwide, where incipient REDD+ programs operate in isolation, Acre developed the legal framework of its state-wide program before encouraging forest carbon projects. This involved setting up a range of institutions to regulate the system, trade carbon credits, give scientific advice, and negotiate with civil society, says Neves.
“We wanted to set out a system that was as complete as possible. Of course, we were pioneers, and as such we had lessons to learn—we had to invent a lot during the process and are still doing so,” he said.
SISA incorporates Acre’s existing Certification of Smallholder Properties Program. This program provides incentives to small producers to engage in more sustainable land use activities, including strategies to make already-deforested land more productive.
Incentives for sustainable development
Sebastião Lima da Silva and his family live on a small property just off Acre’s newly paved BR-364 highway, identified by the government as a “Priority Assistance Zone”. The road – cutting northwest across the state to Brazil’s border with Peru – passes through a vast, intact forest.
Until recently, it was a dirt track, impassable in the wet season. The improved access since it was paved in 2010 hugely benefits local people like Lima da Silva, allowing them to sell their products and making it easier for their children to get to school or to see a doctor – but it also means the area is now at risk of accelerated deforestation.
Ronei Santana is from the Secretariat of Agroforestry Extension and Family Production (SEAPROF), which is implementing the Certification Program. He’s visiting Lima da Silva’s farm and other properties along the highway to check on the progress of the scheme.
“We don’t want to see here what you find so often in the Amazon: careless forms of development, like the unplanned expansion of livestock production, increased burning, and difficulties in helping producers raise their incomes while ensuring food sovereignty,” Santana says.
“So the State Government is aware of the importance of changing this tradition – but at the same time it must find alternatives for producers.”
So, like the other small farmers along the highway, Lima da Silva receives assistance from Santana’s team to adopt more sustainable practices. He and his family were given assistance to develop chicken and fish farming and to enrich his forest with acai seedlings (a native forest fruit that is widely eaten in Brazil.)
They were also trained in techniques to produce food without the use of fire. Soil-enriching legumes are being used to fix nitrogen and fertilize soils, as an alternative to swidden agriculture.
Until recently, every year around August or September, Lima da Silva cleared new agricultural fields with fire – an important component of small farmers’ land management systems for millennia.
Like countless other smallholders across the Amazon, it was the only way he could get new land to grow the staples of life: rice, beans and cassava. After a few years, the nutrients in those fields were exhausted – and he would have to cut and burn again.
“Before, in the burning season, there was fire everywhere, you saw smoke rising everywhere,” he says. Despite social and biodiversity benefits associated with swidden agriculture, conservation policies – like REDD+ – often restrict swidden practices, since in dry years, fires risk spreading into wildfires that can degrade huge areas of forest.
2005 was a particularly bad year in the southwestern Amazon – in Acre alone, 300,000 hectares of forest burned. While most large-scale deforestation and fires in the Amazon are associated with cattle ranching and conventionally logged forests that are more susceptible to burning, small farmers are part of the picture.
In Acre, they’re estimated to be responsible for 36 percent of the state’s deforestation. Without support for more sustainable agriculture, Lima da Silva says, he would still be clear cutting and burning the forest.
“We had to find a way to subsist. We need cassava, we need beans, we need corn, we need rice, and if we didn’t burn or deforest, we had no way to live,” he said.
“We would even risk paying a fine from IBAMA [the federal environmental enforcement agency] because there was no other way out. We would deforest to plant something to eat.”
He says when the SEAPROF team first came to the area, farmers were sceptical about producing food without the use of fire. “We were used to cutting, clearing and burning to produce, and we thought it would take more work,” says Lima da Silva.
“But then…people stopped using fire. When you go along the road now, you don’t see fire anymore.”
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