Accessibility in the Legal Amazon: Delimiting the Area of Influence and Environmental Risks

This report analyzes the socio-environmental impacts of logistics infrastructure in the Legal Amazon, Brazil, noting that such projects often drive deforestation and carbon emissions while providing limited local benefit. It proposes replacing inconsistent geographic-based 'area of influence' delimitations with a 'market access approach' based on transportation costs and market size. Using the BR-319 highway as a case study, the report demonstrates how this approach identifies a much larger area of risk, including numerous indigenous territories and conservation units, and recommends that the Ministry of Infrastructure integrate these assessments into the earliest stages of project planning.

• The Legal Amazon is characterized by extreme economic isolation compared to the rest of Brazil, with the potential market of a typical municipality in the region being 2.1 times smaller than those in other parts of the country. This isolation is primarily attributed to the limited coverage and poor quality of waterways, railways, and roads.
• Logistics infrastructure investments in the Legal Amazon, particularly in the road sector over the last 30 years, have often resulted in high socio-environmental costs without providing significant benefits to local populations. These costs include increased deforestation driven by land grabbing and agricultural frontier expansion, which leads to global carbon emissions, biodiversity loss, altered local rainfall regimes, and increased infant mortality due to air pollution from fires.
• Past methods for delimiting the 'area of influence' for logistics projects—the zone where economic, social, and environmental dynamics are impacted—have been inconsistent and overly reliant on simple geographic distance or microbasins. For example, the Midwest Integration Railway (FICO/EF-354) used geographic distance, while the Ferronorte railway (EF-364) used microbasins.
• The report proposes a 'market access approach' to define the area of influence, which uses a metric of accessibility based on transportation costs and market size. This methodology allows for a more transparent and realistic identification of impacted regions, enabling socio-environmental risk discussions to occur during the feasibility phase rather than only during environmental licensing.
• Applying the market access approach to the BR-319 highway project (linking Porto Velho and Manaus) reveals a significantly larger area of influence than traditional distance-based metrics. While distance-based criteria would estimate an area between 7,600 km2 and 38,000 km2, the market access approach identifies impacts across nine municipalities in Amazonas state, covering over 300,000 km2 and affecting 49 indigenous territories, 49 conservation units, and over 140,000 km2 of undesignated public forest.
• To improve the governance of logistics projects, the report recommends that the Ministry of Infrastructure require socio-environmental risk assessments at the start of the project life cycle, adopt a public-domain methodology for calculating the area of influence to reduce discretion, and maintain an up-to-date geographic information system (GIS) for the National Logistics Plan (PNL).

APA

Araujo, R., Bragança, A., & Assunção, J. (2022). Accessibility in the Legal Amazon: Delimiting the Area of Influence and Environmental Risks. Climate Policy Initiative. https://www.climatepolicyinitiative.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/05/AMZ-2030_Area-of-Influence.pdf

Chicago

Araujo, Rafael, Arthur Bragança, and Juliano Assunção. Accessibility in the Legal Amazon: Delimiting the Area of Influence and Environmental Risks. Climate Policy Initiative, 2022. https://www.climatepolicyinitiative.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/05/AMZ-2030_Area-of-Influence.pdf.

Wikipedia

{{cite report |last1=Araujo |first1=Rafael |last2=Bragança |first2=Arthur |last3=Assunção |first3=Juliano |title=Accessibility in the Legal Amazon: Delimiting the Area of Influence and Environmental Risks |publisher=Climate Policy Initiative |date=June 2022 |url=https://www.climatepolicyinitiative.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/05/AMZ-2030_Area-of-Influence.pdf |access-date=17 August 2026 |via=Climate Insights Directory}}

BibTeX

@techreport{araujo2022accessibility, author = {Araujo, Rafael and Bragança, Arthur and Assunção, Juliano}, title = {{Accessibility in the Legal Amazon: Delimiting the Area of Influence and Environmental Risks}}, institution = {Climate Policy Initiative}, year = {2022}, month = jun, url = {https://www.climatepolicyinitiative.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/05/AMZ-2030_Area-of-Influence.pdf}, urldate = {2026-08-17}, note = {Indexed by Climate Insights Directory} }