COMBATING ILLEGAL DEFORESTATION

This white paper by the Climate Policy Initiative argues that strengthening environmental command and control—specifically through technological monitoring and law enforcement—is essential for Brazil to combat illegal deforestation, protect its native vegetation, and maintain its international agribusiness competitiveness.

• Brazil's agribusiness competitiveness in global markets is increasingly dependent on its ability to protect natural resources and comply with environmental norms, as external markets are more demanding regarding production chain compliance.
• The Action Plan for the Prevention and Control of Deforestation in the Legal Amazon (PPCDAm) reduced the annual rate of forest loss by more than 80%, with monitoring and law enforcement identified as the most significant contributing factors during the plan's first decade.
• The System for Real-time Detection of Deforestation (DETER), developed by Inpe, revolutionized monitoring by using high-frequency satellite imagery to generate georeferenced alerts for Ibama, preventing the loss of over 2 million hectares of Amazon rainforest per year during its first five years without harming agricultural production.
• A critical technical limitation of the original DETER system is its inability to detect forest loss in contiguous areas smaller than 25 hectares, which has led to a strategic shift by offenders toward small-scale clearings that now account for over half of cleared forests.
• The DETER-B system was developed to address previous limitations by detecting forest loss in areas larger than one hectare and distinguishing between degradation, selective logging, and fire damage, though it operates at a lower time frequency than the original DETER.
• Brazil lacks a monitoring system for secondary vegetation (forest regeneration), leaving it vulnerable. In the Amazon, secondary vegetation covered more than 17 million hectares in 2014, representing nearly a quarter of all deforested land.
• While satellite monitoring was previously limited to the Legal Amazon, it was expanded to the Cerrado biome by mid-2018, bringing near-real-time monitoring to 73% of Brazil's territory.
• Since 2010, approximately two-thirds of deforested areas in the Amazon have been located on public lands, specifically within agrarian reform settlements (30%) and undesignated areas (25%).

APA

ASSUNÇÃO, J., & GANDOUR, C. (2019). COMBATING ILLEGAL DEFORESTATION. Climate Policy Initiative. https://www.climatepolicyinitiative.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/white-paper-Combating-Illegal-Deforestation-Strengthening-Command-and-Control-Is-Fundamental.pdf

Chicago

ASSUNÇÃO, JULIANO, and CLARISSA GANDOUR. COMBATING ILLEGAL DEFORESTATION. Climate Policy Initiative, 2019. https://www.climatepolicyinitiative.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/white-paper-Combating-Illegal-Deforestation-Strengthening-Command-and-Control-Is-Fundamental.pdf.

Wikipedia

{{cite report |last1=ASSUNÇÃO |first1=JULIANO |last2=GANDOUR |first2=CLARISSA |title=COMBATING ILLEGAL DEFORESTATION |publisher=Climate Policy Initiative |date=February 2019 |url=https://www.climatepolicyinitiative.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/white-paper-Combating-Illegal-Deforestation-Strengthening-Command-and-Control-Is-Fundamental.pdf |access-date=17 August 2026 |via=Climate Insights Directory}}

BibTeX

@techreport{assuno2019combating, author = {ASSUNÇÃO, JULIANO and GANDOUR, CLARISSA}, title = {{COMBATING ILLEGAL DEFORESTATION}}, institution = {Climate Policy Initiative}, year = {2019}, month = feb, url = {https://www.climatepolicyinitiative.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/white-paper-Combating-Illegal-Deforestation-Strengthening-Command-and-Control-Is-Fundamental.pdf}, urldate = {2026-08-17}, note = {Indexed by Climate Insights Directory} }