Deforestation in the Amazon: PPCDAm enters public consultation – 04/11/2023 – Environment

The federal government opened, on Monday night (10), the public consultation for the Action Plan for the Prevention and Control of Deforestation in the Legal Amazon, the PPCDAm, a guideline that guides forest protection actions in the Amazon biome.

The PPCDAm was created in 2004 and had four updates until it was frozen by Jair Bolsonaro (PL). In January of this year, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (PT) and Marina Silva published a decree establishing the plan, which is now in its fifth version.

The public consultation will be open until April 26. Comments can be made through the federal government website, by any citizen registered on the portal.

The suggestions will be submitted to a commission coordinated by the MMA (Ministry of the Environment and Climate Change).

In the decree that reinstituted the Legal Amazon protection plan, the Lula government also determined the creation of similar plans for other Brazilian biomes, such as the Pantanal and the Cerrado. Texts for other biomes have yet to be released.

In January, Lula also set up a commission with 19 portfolios to rebuild actions and reorganize what would have been dismantled during the previous administration in the environmental area.

The expectation is that public consultations will be opened for these other actions soon — probably starting with those in the cerrado, which has been registering deforestation records, with high destruction rates since the Bolsonaro government.

According to the government, the objective of the plans is “to integrate the fight against deforestation into Brazilian State policies, starting from the principle that the fight against the causes of deforestation cannot be conducted in isolation by environmental agencies”.

“The challenge’s complexity and transversality demand coordinated efforts from different sectors”, defines the management.

The new PPCDAm will have four strategic axes — sustainable productive activities, environmental monitoring and control, land and territorial ordering, and economic normative instruments.

176 lines of action were created to achieve 36 goals, which touch on points such as training and qualification of personnel, production based on sustainable management, recovery of native areas, reduction of areas affected by fires, regularization of indigenous and quilombola lands, implementation of the CAR (Rural Environmental Registry) and inspection of mining activities.

The document, after the public consultation period, can still be changed.

The return of the PPCDAm was part of a context of restructuring the Ministry of the Environment, which was emptied under the management of Ricardo Salles —while the Ministry of Agriculture was strengthened.

Salles and Bolsonaro, for example, removed the Forestry Service and CAR from the environmental portfolio to that of agro. In January of this year, Lula and Marina undid the change.

However, as shown by Sheeta series of amendments presented by parliamentarians to the provisional measure that restructures the ministries tries to revert the changes and resume the organization chart of the previous administration.

At the same time, Congress is moving forward with a provisional measure by the Bolsonaro government, which has been amended and which, if approved, will drastically reduce restrictions on protecting the Atlantic Forest, in addition to expanding the amnesty for loggers.

_{The Planeta em Transe project is supported by the Open Society Foundations.}