A Cost-Benefit Analysis of Securing Indigenous Environmental Management in Brazil

The crucial role of indigenous people in managing and preserving forests and, thus, contributing to combat climate change and biodiversity loss, has been receiving attention recently. Many studies showed a positive relation between tenure-secured indigenous forestlands and low deforestation rates in the Amazon region. Nowadays, there are near 1,133,000 km2 (113 million hectares) of indigenous lands established in Brazil, equivalent to 14% of the national territory. Most of them are in the Brazilian Amazon region, comprising 24% of this region. After near a decade of decline in annual deforestation rates in the Brazilian Amazon, those rates are rising again. This trend reveals higher pressure on land-use and natural resources exploitation. Such pressures are especially noted by indigenous people in the South of the Amazon State, which seems to become a new frontier for expansion of economic activities in the Amazon region. This paper aims to show that improving indigenous people capacity on forest management and promoting sustainable economic activities in indigenous lands in Brazil are fundamental to the sustainable development of the country. Our investigation in this paper is based on review of current environmental and territorial management plans (named PGTAs) implemented by indigenous people after the launching of the National Policy of Territorial and Environmental Management of Brazilian Indigenous Land (PNGATI), in June 2012. A financial and economic cost-benefit analysis for the implementation of the PNGATI is presented to show that costs of forest protection are much lower than costs of forest recovering and benefits derived from sustainable land use are potentially much higher than benefits derived from exploitation of natural resources in a “business-as-usual” scenario.