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New trends in land tenure and environmental regularisation laws in the Brazilian Amazon

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Abstract

The main challenge on Brazil’s environmental agenda today is illegal deforestation in the Amazon, which to a large extent is a result of the state being unable to fully control the use of its natural resources. To improve the situation, new pieces of legislation have been enacted, but not as part of an integrated policy for the region. This article analyses the legal evolution of land tenure laws and environmental regularisation laws enacted to reduce illegal deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon. The study of the legislation discussed here uses the legal interpretative method. The primary sources used in the analysis are legal documents, combined with state and non-governmental organisations’ reports on land regularisation and environmental implementation programmes in the region. It concludes that although land tenure and environmental regularisation were designed to be applied independently, agrarian activities have always been subject to environmental regulations. Recent deforestation monitoring indicates that deforestation rates are lower in areas that were subject to land tenure regularisation. For this reason, the strategy of the Brazilian Government since 2016 has been to formally integrate both regularisation activities through legal and policy modifications.

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Acknowledgements

This study was carried out with CNPQ and CAPES funding, in association with the CarBioCial project, funded by the German Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF). We thank our German scientific colleagues and Brazilian officials at the federal and state levels for their support and are grateful to the manuscript’s reviewers for their helpful suggestions.

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  1. Instituto de Ciências Jurídicas, Universidade Federal do Pará - ICJ/UFPA, Rua Augusto Corrêa 01, Guamá, CEP 66075-110, Brazil

    Jose Heder Benatti & Luly Rodrigues da Cunha Fischer

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  1. Jose Heder Benatti
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  2. Luly Rodrigues da Cunha Fischer
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Correspondence to Jose Heder Benatti.

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Benatti, J.H., da Cunha Fischer, L.R. New trends in land tenure and environmental regularisation laws in the Brazilian Amazon. Reg Environ Change 18, 11–19 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10113-017-1162-0

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