Raoni Rajão

• PhD from Lancaster University
• Professor at Federal University of Minas Gerais

Despite the growing emphasis on ontological pluralism in environmental policy debates, innovation within national state environmental governance and management remains limited. This article outlines a conceptual framework for ontological inclusion and exclusion to examine constraints and opportunities in Brazilian participatory water governance. Th...

In this paper, we employ for the first time a Bayesian process-tracing approach to assess the role of different interventions designed to halt deforestation. We applied the methodology to six initiatives implemented between 2006 and 2019 in the municipality of São Felix do Xingu, namely: (i) institution of protected areas, (ii) environmental monito...

The Amazon forest carbon sink is declining, mainly as a result of land-use and climate change1-4. Here we investigate how changes in law enforcement of environmental protection policies may have affected the Amazonian carbon balance between 2010 and 2018 compared with 2019 and 2020, based on atmospheric CO2 vertical profiles5,6, deforestation7 and...

Este estudo objetiva analisar os impactos da intensificação da pecuária bovina de corte no tocante à produção, produtividade, ganhos econômicos e emissões de gases de efeito estufa (GEE) sob diferentes cenários de uso do solo e mixes de manejo da pecuária. Foram modelados quatro cenários sendo um “business-as-usual” (BASE) e outros três de intensif...

Tropical forests are recognized for their role in providing diverse ecosystem services (ESs), with carbon uptake the best recognized. The capacity of tropical forests to provide ESs is strongly linked to their enormous biodiversity. However, causal relationships between biodiversity and ESs are poorly understood. This may be because biodiversity is...

The Amazon Forest is a major locus for carbon and water cycling in the climate system whose function has been degraded in recent decades by land use and climate change. Most studies of Amazonia’s carbon balance have been limited by sparse sampling. We measured 742 atmospheric vertical profiles of CO2 and CO over four regions of Amazonia from 2010 t...

Technological development is key for national strategies to cope with the Paris Agreement's goals. Technology Needs Assessments (TNAs) aim to identify, prioritize, and diffuse climate change mitigation and/or adaptation technologies in developing countries. Their methodology includes a multi-criteria decision analysis (MCDA) framework but, although...

The Brazilian Cerrado is one of the most biodiverse savannas in the world, yet 46% of its original cover has been cleared to make way for crops and pastures. These extensive land-use transitions (LUTs) are expected to influence regional climate by reducing evapotranspiration (ET), increasing land surface temperature (LST), and ultimately reducing p...

Tropical forests are widely recognized for providing valuable ecosystem services (ES), but their existence is increasingly under pressure. The production of policy-relevant ES science is important to effectively convey their value. The main objective of this review is to insight into the associations between scientific knowledge, policy domains and...

This Report provides a comprehensive, objective, open, transparent, systematic, and rigorous scientific assessment of the state of the Amazon’s ecosystems, current trends, and their implications for the long-term well-being of the region, as well as opportunities and policy relevant options for conservation and sustainable development.

Falsas controvérsias têm influenciado a elaboração de políticas sobre questões ambientais e de saúde há décadas, resultando em grandes retrocessos na implementação dessas políticas em todo o mundo. Utilizando um estudo de caso, neste artigo são examinadas falsas controvérsias produzidas por um pequeno grupo de pesquisadores brasileiros que têm afet...

More and more, wildfires are raging in large parts of the world due to a warmer climate, more frequent and severe droughts, and continued land-use changes. In Brazil, the weakening of public environmental policies has further aggravated wildfires with widespread impacts across the country. Here, we investigated the determinants of the impact of fir...

Nesta nova nota técnica, pesquisadores do CSR e LAGESA estimam impactos que o PL 337/2022 terá sobre os números de Reserva Legal no Mato Grosso, caso seja aprovado, e suas consequências para o agro. Com a aprovação do PL, 16,9 milhões de hectares de vegetação nativa do estado passariam a poder ser legalmente desmatados, enquanto 3,3 milhões de hect...

Fake controversies have influenced policy making on health and environmental issues for decades, resulting in major implementation setbacks worldwide. As a case study, in this paper we examine fake controversies produced by a small group of active Brazilian researchers that have seriously impacted environmental conservation, particularly in issues...

Esta avaliação traz uma série de textos cuidadosamente elaborados por inúmeros autores e instituições para compor um quadro oportuno sobre a implementação do atual Código Florestal Brasileiro (Lei nº 12.651/2012) e seus avanços de 2017 a 2020. Ela dá continuidade à publicação anterior referente ao período 2012–2016, fazendo um balanço completo desd...

This Report provides a comprehensive, objective, open, transparent, systematic, and rigorous scientific assessment of the state of the Amazon’s ecosystems, current trends, and their implications for the long-term well-being of the region, as well as opportunities and policy relevant options for conservation and sustainable development.

The Brazilian government’s decision to open the Amazon biome to sugarcane expansion reignited EU concerns regarding the sustainability of Brazil’s sugar sector, hindering the ratification of the EU-Mercosur trade agreement. Meanwhile, in the EU, certain conventional biofuels face stricter controls, whilst uncertainty surrounding the commercialisati...

A obra de Bruno Latour, uma das mais originais e influentes que emergiram nas últimas décadas, encontra ressonância em áreas variadas de investigação, como antropologia, sociologia, filosofia, história, comunicação e educação, entre outras. Algumas leituras situam o pensador entre os mais proeminentes analistas da antropologia da ciência e do que s...

The future availability and quality of natural resources essential to life such as ecosystem services and biodiversity depend on the conservation and restoration of native vegetation. The Brazilian Native Vegetation Protection Law (NVPL) requires farmers to conserve a minimum percentage of native vegetation within their properties as Legal Reserves...

A quase totalidade do desmatamento ocorrido nos estados da Amazônia Legal e em parte do bioma Cerrado – em especial na região denominada de Matopiba – não está lastreada por Autorizações de Supressão da Vegetação (ASV) que deveriam, por lei, estar disponíveis publicamente nos sítios eletrônicos ou portais de transparência dos órgãos ambientais. A f...

Almost all the deforestation that occurred in the states of the Legal Amazon and part of the Cerrado biome – especially in the region called Matopiba – has not been backed by ecosystem clearing permits. According to the law, ecosystem clearing permits should be publicly available on the states’ environmental agencies websites and/or transparency po...

This monograph presents expert assessments of four different facets of Latin American and Caribbean (LAC) forests at the start of the 2020s. In Chapter 1, Dan Nepstad and coauthors distill lessons from case studies of the application of various approaches to forest conservation and restoration in four countries: Brazil, Costa Rica, Ecuador, and Per...

Este trabalho busca compreender como identidades pós-coloniais foram performadas nas negociações que levaram ao acordo climático assinado em Paris, em dezembro de 2015. A partir de entrevistas, análise de documentos e da observação participante das negociações foi possível identificar os discursos jurídico, econômico e científico mobilizados por pa...

https://ec.europa.eu/info/law/better-regulation/have-your-say/initiatives/12137-Deforestation-and-forest-degradation-reducing-the-impact-of-products-placed-on-the-EU-market/feedback?p_id=6348580

In the increasingly polarized international political arena, it has become difficult to find common ground to solve Brazil's ongoing environmental crisis, which has global as well as local implications. International buyers of Brazil's agricultural commodities have raised concerns about products that are contaminated by deforestation (i.e., defores...

The Amazon Fund is the world's largest program to reduce emissions from deforestation and forest degradation (REDD+), funded with over US $1b donated by Norway and Germany between 2008 and 2017 to reward Brazil for prior deforestation reductions. Olhos D'Água da Amazônia is cited as a leading project success − with over one thousand small-to-medium...

Market instruments for environmental governance have a foundation in an economic theorythat claims to be universal and atemporal, but their materialization in practice always takes place in specific socioeconomic and political contexts. The Brazilian trade in forest certificates (CRA) is a new market instrument that allows farmers that have defores...

Effectively implementing landscape-scale forest restoration on the ground is particularly challenging. Available decision-support tools particularly lack the ability to comprehensively incorporate biophysical, social and institutional dimensions in a spatially explicit manner from the pixel to the whole landscape. In order to contribute to fulfilli...

Critical scholars have addressed land use models and related technologies by pointing to their epistemological underpinnings and the social consequences of visibilities and invisibilities induced by these instruments to different forms of governance. More recently, in addition to reaffirming the old dictum that the map is not the territory, some sc...

It is often said that Brazil has some of the most advanced forest laws in the world, but this strong legislation has been rarely translated into effective environmental governance. To understand the challenges of implementing environmental policies in Brazil and elsewhere, this study conceptualizes the Forest Code as a socially constructed technolo...

RESUMO A desigualdade da distribuição da posse da terra no Brasil é uma das mais acentuadas do mundo, sendo associada a processos históricos de grilagem, conflitos sociais e impactos ambientais. A recente revisão de regulações que tratam da situação fundiária de áreas protegidas e de terras não destinadas e as de regularização fundiária pode acentu...

The article discusses the sociotechnical infrastructures of deforestation detection in the Brazilian Amazon and the forms of visibility and legality these enact. It draws upon a long-term ethnographic study of how digital infrastructures impinge upon, and are enacted as, social relations. We focus upon the role of satellite images in these processe...

Cattle ranching accounts for 44% of the greenhouse gas(GHG)emissions from the land use sector inBrazil. In response, Brazil has proposed a massive pasture restoration program that aspires to makeranching more competitive while at the same time reducing associated GHG emissions. Pasturerestoration, however, is only one of several intensification opt...

Achieving food security at a global scale while protecting the environment, as envisioned in the Sustainable Development Goals, will require a complex process of collaboration and the integration of analyses at multiple scales. Agricultural and land use models are increasingly being used to bridge the global/local divide, particularly as a means to...

Scientific Framework to Save the Amazon By Scientists of the Amazon Countries and Global Partners September 30, 2019 We, the scientists who study and monitor the Amazon rainforest, appeal to the reason and conscience of humankind. The Amazon, the largest rainforest in the world, is at great risk of destruction, and with it the well-being of our ge...

Land tenure in many parts of Brazil remains uncertain and controversial. These problems have recently been exacerbatework regulating protected areas and the land market. A particular challenge facing attempts to improve land tenure security and governance in Brazil is the lack of a single, integrated assessment of all types of lands. Here we addres...

Tropical dry forests and savannas harbour unique biodiversity and provide critical ES, yet they are under severe pressure globally. We need to improve our understanding of how and when this pressure provokes tipping points in biodiversity and the associated social-ecological systems. We propose an approach to investigate how drivers leading to natu...

Significant research efforts have been devoted to characterizing smallholding productive systems and assessing the relative contribution of small-scale farming to global food production. However, there is a noted paucity of studies addressing the determinants of and contributors to income generation of smallholders around the world, particularly in...

During almost 20 years of political debate on the nature of Payments for Ecosystem Services (PES), these schemes have been characterized mostly as a non-market approach, even though attempts to transform them into market instruments has persistently recurred in these debates. One notable example is the materialization of Reducing Emissions from Def...

Results-Based Funding (RBF) for Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD+) has become an important instrument for channeling financial resources to forest conservation activities. At the same time, much literature on conservation funding is ambiguous about the effectiveness of existing RBF schemes. Many effectiveness evalu...

Results-Based Funding (RBF) for Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD+) has become an important instrument for channeling financial resources to forest conservation activities. At the same time, much literature on conservation funding is ambiguous about the effectiveness of existing RBF schemes. Many effectiveness evalu...

Results-Based Aid (RBA) for Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD+) has become an important instrument for channeling financial resources to forest conservation activities. At the same time, much literature on conservation aid is ambiguous about the effectiveness of existing RBA schemes. Many effectiveness evaluations f...

The conservation movement has lost its critical edge by befriending agribusiness. With deforestation on the rise and a continuous roll-back of environmental protection, it is time to rethink this strategy.

The Brazilian Amazon forest is tremendously important for its ecosystem services but attribution of economically measurable values remains scarce. Mapping these values is essential for designing conservation strategies that suitably combine regional forest protection with sustainable forest use. We estimate spatially explicit economic values for...

O presente documento resgata o passo a passo recomendado internacionalmente para a formulação de sistemas de relato de emissões de Gases de Efeito Estufa- GEE e, baseado em experiência adquirida com programas de relato em diversos países, estados e regiões, apresenta uma proposta para o Programa Nacional de Relato de Gases de Efeito Estufa para o B...

No presente Produto 1 é apresentado o ambiente em que se encontra o país, com o foco nas restrições fiscais que podem vir a limitar a implementação de um Programa Nacional de Relato de Emissões de Gases de Efeito Estufa (PNR-GEE). A restrição fiscal, por outro lado, também é um argumento a favor da implantação de um instrumento de monitoramento das...

Results-based funding (RBF) is a governance concept that is rapidly becoming the mainstream paradigm for international collaborations in the environmental sector. While portrayed as a compromise solution between market-based mechanisms and unconditional donations, the implementation of RBF is revealing new conflicts and contradictions of its own. T...

Non-Timber Forest Products (NTFPs) contribute to the livelihoods of more than 6 million households in the Brazilian Amazon. Of the three most important NTFPs in the Brazilian Amazon – rubber, Brazil nut, and açaí – the latter is the least known, but the one with the most potential and fastest growing markets. Here we map the socioecology of açaí ex...

Coordenador do projeto Temático Fapesp 2016/17680-2 d. LAGESA/UFMG-Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais e. Atualmente Secretaria Executiva do Observatório do Código Florestal RESUMO EXECUTIVO • O Código Florestal se aplica em áreas urbanas e rurais, tanto em imóveis e posses rurais como em terras públicas e áreas protegidas. O Cadastro Ambiental Ru...

O presente estudo tem como objetivo apresentar de forma concisa a história da legislação brasileira, partindo de suas raízes em Portugal de 1500 e chegando aos dias atuais. Nessa primeira parte do estudo, iremos abordar até 1979, ano que marca, segundo Drummond2, o início da influência do movimento ambientalista moderno na legislação florestal do B...

Although still the largest expanse of tropical rainforests in the world, the Amazon is suffering a declining capacity to deliver ecosystem services, to which the widespread use of fire is one of the main contributing factors. Even if fires directly affect the timber sector, most current logging practices often tend to increase rather than mitigate...

In exchange for political support, the Brazilian government is signalling landholders to increase deforestation, putting the country’s contribution to the Paris Agreement at risk¹. The President of Brazil has signed provisionary acts and decrees lowering environmental licensing requirements, suspending the ratification of indigenous lands, reducing...

This study aims to understand how postcolonial identities were performed in the negotiations that led to the new climate agreement signed in Paris in December 2015. Based on interviews, the analysis of documents and participant observation of the negotiations it was possible to identify the legal, economic and scientific discourses mobilised by bot...

O projeto “Opções de Mitigação de Emissões de Gases de Efeito Estufa em Setores-Chave do Brasil”, iniciativa do Ministério da Ciência, Tecnologia, Inovações e Comunicações (MCTIC) executada em parceria com a ONU Meio Ambiente, tem por objetivo ajudar o governo brasileiro a reforçar sua capacidade técnica de apoiar a implementação de ações de mitiga...

No âmbito do setor de Afolu, objetiva-se avaliar e identificar o potencial técnico das opções de mitigação, estimando os custos de reduzir emissões de GEE, para assim avaliar barreiras, cobenefícios e potenciais efeitos adversos à adoção das atividades de baixo carbono e potenciais instrumentos de política pública capazes de viabilizá-las. Em pa...

This article examines the relation between data transparency and environmental activism in the Amazon rainforest. For this purpose, we analyze the history of PRODES and DETER, two satellite-based monitoring systems developed by the Brazilian Institute for Space Research (INPE). We discuss its role in environmental activism and the formulation of po...

In this paper we use large scale spatially explicit modelling and case study based analyses to assess the links between recreational ecosystem services and the benefits for wellbeing of traditional livelihoods in the Brazilian Amazon. Our results show that, at the scale of the Brazilian Amazon, associations between recreational ecosystem services a...

Environmental policy evaluation is crucial to determining if policy objectives were achieved. In most cases, some of the outcomes can be measured but a proper statistical analysis is difficult to achieve since the data may not represent a random sample (i.e., the data is biased), are not representative of the population or cannot be compared to a c...

Recent research on deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon has rarely included empirical observation of how land managers perceive and respond to forest governance rules. In this case study, we consider how two decades of pilot projects for integrated conservation and sustainable development (ICDPs) variously influenced forest governance across three...

The native vegetation on private land is considered a key component in the supply of ecosystem services, so the Forest Code establishes the Legal Reserve. While some studies have showed that non-compliance is common, so far no study has analyzed the willingness of producers to settle this liability. This study aimed to investigate in a exploratory...

Significance Brazil’s new Forest Code has the potential to halt illegal deforestation in the country’s native forests and savannas through implementation of a federal land registry—along with powerful tools that facilitate enforcement and give landowners a pathway to restoring or compensating their “forest deficits.” This study suggests that these...

Large-scale forest restoration is a cornerstone of Brazil's new Forest Code and a key element in its National Determined Contribution (NDC) to emissions reduction. But the path to this target remains unclear due to a lack of information on its economics and implementation challenges. Here, we begin to fill this gap by developing a spatially-explici...

This paper investigates non-governmental organisation (NGO) involvement in policy processes related to Norway's International Climate and Forest Initiative (NICFI) comparing four countries: Norway, Brazil, Indonesia, and Tanzania. Based on documents and interviews, NGO involvement is mapped using a conceptual framework to categorise and compare dif...

The article “Are Brazil's Deforesters Avoiding Detection?” published recently in Conservation Letters offers a detailed analysis of the limits of PRODES, Brazil's best known system for monitoring deforestation in the Amazon rainforest. While the article provides a useful comparison of PRODES and two other monitoring systems, we strongly disagree wi...

This paper examines how scientists deal with tensions emerging from their role as providers of objective knowledge and as citizens concerned with how their research influences policy and politics in Brazil. This is accomplished through an ethnographic account of scientists using remote sensing technology, of their knowledge-making activities and of...

In this paper, we draw upon Goffman’s symbolic interactionism to analyze the ways in which new users in developing countries have adopted ICT to present and manage contradictory self-images to different groups of the public. In particular, we show that the Acapú, an indigenous group in the Amazon, present themselves through online videos and websit...

Conhecer a fundo o territorio de uma nacao e um passo importante para se conseguir a manutencao da seguranca nacional e contribuir para o desenvolvimento. O primeiro esforco significativo de um levantamento do territorio brasileiro ocorreu em meados dos governos militares e ficou conhecido como projeto RADAM. Este projeto, apesar da sua notoriedade...

Brazil faces an enormous challenge to implement its revised Forest Code. Despite big losses for the environment, the law introduces new mechanisms to facilitate compliance and foster payment for ecosystem services (PES). The most promising of these is a market for trading forest certificates (CRAs) that allows landowners to offset their restoration...

All SI figures and SI tables. (PDF)

Biomass map and list of inholdings. (ZIP)

In a bold move, Brazil has submitted to the 21st conference of the parties (COP21) in Paris an intended nationally determined contribution (INDC) to reduce by 2030 its greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions by 43% in relation to 2005. This target goes well beyond other developing countries and is above the

Expanding on recent debates in environmental governance and political science, we show that the relation between environmental transparency and public accountability is far from linear and politically neutral. This is particularly true in moments of environmental crises, when transparency regimes are most likely to emerge as an integral part of the...

RESUMO Em tempos de revisão do licenciamento ambiental pelo Conselho Nacional do Meio Ambiente, o presente artigo apresenta reflexões sobre a participação popular no processo de Avaliação de Impacto Ambiental (AIA) no Brasil. Os apontamentos tiveram como referência o conceito de instrumentalização de participação em um ambiente de tomada de decisão...

This article examines the foundation myths of Brazil in the last two centuries, paying particular attention to the relationship between these myths and governmental attitudes toward the hybridity of Northern and Southern ethnic and technoscientific entities. Based upon this examination, the article argues that it is important to consider both the w...

Roughly 53% of Brazil’s native vegetation occurs on private properties. Native forests and savannahs on these lands store 105 ± 21 GtCO2e (billion tons of CO2 equivalents) and play a vital role in maintaining a broad range of ecosystem services. Sound management of these private landscapes is critical if global efforts to mitigate climate change ar...

Produced by the International Social Science Council (ISSC) and UNESCO, and published by the OECD, the 2013 World Social Science Report represents a comprehensive overview of the field gathering the thoughts and expertise of hundreds of social scientists from around the world. This edition focuses on the transformative role of the social sciences i...

‘Methods’ and their devices have been conventionally viewed as the means through which the move from world to representation (and back again) might be reliably performed. An alternative view, perhaps most clearly exemplified by the post-ANT empirical programme of ‘material semiotics’, sees methods and devices as integral to the ways particular ‘rea...

This paper discusses the dynamics behind the establishment of scientific representations (e.g. reports, measurements, experiments) to the detriment of local representations (e.g. oral accounts, metaphors, symbols) in environmental policy-making in the Global South. To this end, the paper attempts to understand why local accounts of the Amazon in re...

Based on detailed observations of how senior officials and forest rangers collaborate together using geographic information systems (GIS) this article examines the contradictory role of boundary objects in the enforcement of deforestation control policies in the Brazilian Amazon rainforest. Specifically, we unpack the mechanisms behind the way in w...

This paper examines the possibilities that information and communication technology (ICT) provides for the achievement of environmental sustainable development – one of the key millennium development goals (MDGs). We base our paper on primary and secondary empirical data pertaining to the history of the governance of the Brazilian Amazon and the ro...

Based on Fligstein's (1990) work on ‘conceptions of control’ (broad managerial paradigms), this paper provides an analysis of the ways in which information technology (IT) artefacts shape and are shaped by institutional contexts. Specifically, we report on primary and secondary empirical data that spans a 44-year period pertaining to the uses made...