Land conflicts from overlapping claims in Brazil’s rural environmental registry

作者：Paul R. Furumo, Jevan Yu, J. Aaron Hogan, Luís Marcelo Tavares de Carvalho, Brenda Brito, Éric F. Lambin · 发表于：Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences · 年份：2024 · DOI：10.1073/pnas.2407357121 · 被引用次数：12 · 研究领域：Conservation, Biodiversity, and Resource Management、Land Rights and Reforms、Agriculture, Land Use, Rural Development

Satellite-based land use monitoring and farm-level traceability offer opportunities for targeted zero-deforestation interventions on private lands. Brazil's Rural Environmental Registry (Cadastro Ambiental Rural, or "CAR"), a land cadaster based on self-declaration of property boundaries, was created to monitor compliance with national forest laws. It has become an important enabling measure for sustainable supply chain initiatives like the Amazon Soy Moratorium. However, CAR enrollment is increasingly used to bolster illegal land claims, putting it at the heart of land grabbing dynamics. Self-declaration of properties in the CAR offers a unique situation to study land conflicts and their impact on land use decisions on a large scale. We quantified competing land claims among 846,420 registrations in the Brazilian Legal Amazon and applied a series of generalized linear mixed-effects models. We determined that CAR overlaps are more prevalent on larger registrations, in more densely settled areas, and in areas with less secure land tenure. We tested how landholders respond to land conflicts, finding significantly more deforestation and declared legal forest reserve on lands with multiple claims. CAR overlap results in an overestimation of forest reserves by up to 9.7 million hectares when considering double-counted and deforested areas of reserves, highlighting an overlooked form of Forest Code noncompliance. While the CAR continues to be used as evidence of land tenure, we con...