The importance of recovery

The Permanent Preservation Areas are belts of forest that are found on the edges of rivers, lakes and lagoons, hill-tops and slopes, as well as in other environmentally sensitive areas which are essential to the preservation of water resources, scenery, animals and plants health, biodiversity, soil, and the health of human populations in the area. The judicial basis giving protected status on APPs has existed in Brazilian law since the Forest Code of 1934, which was reaffirmed in the “new” Forest Code (Federal Law number 4771/65) as preexisting areas in the interior of public and private lands that should be protected in order to preserve native vegetation.

In spite of their importance, as well as being protected by law for more than 70 years, the APPs are still being deforested and degraded throughout the country. In nearly all regions of the country, and more notably in the south and southeast where the majority of the country’s population lives, and where most of the medium to large cities are located and the rural areas are more densely populated, the APPs are in a critical situation.

In practice, the vegetation in the APPs is constantly being removed due to urbanization or for cattle ranching, giving way to streets, roads, residential or industrial settlements, favelas, agriculture, and pasture, amongst many other land uses that compete with the maintenance of native vegetation. This situation of true “civil disobedience” in relation to the environmental preservation laws has various causes: the ignorance of land owners of the existence of the law, lack of environmental consciousness, the absence of monitoring and inspection by public powers, as well as irregular actions in which deforestation occurred directly or with the help of municipal, state, and federal governing bodies.

Regarding urban areas, for many years the bodies conceding credit for agriculture conditioned loans on the availability of proof that the property owner had deforested the land. Many governing bodies incentivized the occupations of the areas to be cultivated, meaning that a good portion of areas formerly occupied by forest were turned into cropland. The same can be said of many municipal prefectures which, in addition to not monitoring the situation of the APPS in their territory, still contributed significantly to the degradation of these areas, whether building public paths in the cultivated areas – or over the water resources – or approving the construction of settlements on areas theoretically protected by law such as hilltops, slopes, and river margins.

Therefore, there is no public policy which is both serious and unified for the preservation and recuperation of APPs in Brazil. What there are isolated initiatives of municipal or state governments that act in limited territories, as well as diverse NGOs spread throughout the country, which also have limited capacities and work at the local level.

The investment in the monitoring of APPs would depend on an improved physical, human, and financial structuring of the environmental governing bodies, in building an environmental police force, in making periodic physical diagnostics of the state of conservation in these areas, and in public consciousness campaigns on the importance of their