A well-hugged lot, by Virgílio Viana - Amazônia

A well-hugged lot

A lesson for others

Sep 23rd 2010

Sustainable Development in Practice: Lessons Learned From Amazonas. By Virgilio Viana. International Institute for Environment and Development; 60 pages; $20 and £13.50 or free online. By from Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk

DEEP in the Amazon rainforest, a strong bid is being made to save the trees. Between 2003 and 2009, the deforestation rate of Amazonas, Brazil’s most forested state, which has more rainforest than any country save Brazil itself, dropped by 70%.

This success was partly for reasons that have little to do with Amazonas. Over the same period, the federal government improved its enforcement of forest laws. Global demand for Brazil’s agricultural commodities, rivals for forestland, also dipped. Thus the country’s overall deforestation rate also slumped. But few have championed this change as effectively as Amazonas’s rulers, led by the state’s former governor, Eduardo Braga, and his environment secretary, Virgilio Viana.

According to Mr Viana, their ambition was to change the way the rainforest was viewed: to make it an economic opportunity, not an impediment to progress. To encourage this shift, they issued a raft of incentives for forest conservation, such as tax breaks for non-timber forest products like rubber, palm hearts and nuts.

Their most ambitious tree-hugging scheme, the Bolsa Floresta, or forest bursary, is a cash transfer—of around $6,500 a month for communities and $30 for families—for forest-dwellers who swear not to cut trees. Partially paid for by Bradesco, one of Brazil’s biggest private banks, this is a useful pilot project for REDD, the burgeoning international effort to reduce deforestation and the greenhouse-gas emissions it causes. REDD is now being launched with $4.5 billion, given by a few rich countries, including Norway and Britain, and could eventually involve transfers of tens of billions of dollars to developing countries that are similarly forsworn.

Whether Amazonas’s progress points to similar success by REDD is not clear. Amazonas is unusual. Most of its forests are far from farmland, which makes the costs of leaving them standing relatively low. And its government is well-off, getting revenue from an industrial free-trade zone sited in the middle of the rainforest.

Mr Viana, who is no shrinking violet, rather downplays these particularities. Yet his message is an important one. Forests and other eco-systems provide valuable services; and if they are to be conserved, people must pay for them.