Rural environmental registry as an environmental management tool: Lábrea/AM case study

Abstract

The Rural Environmental Registry - CAR was implemented in 2014 in a process of decentralization of the Forest policy to the states. Among the various expectations generated by its implementation, it stands out the potential as a tool in environmental monitoring and management. However, several studies have been question in the quality of information available by the system, compromising its applicability. In this sense, the present study aimed to evaluate the CAR as na environmental monitoring and management tool, with the municipality of Lábrea, in the state of Amazonas, as a case study. This work quantified and classified the results of deforestation occurring with in properties classified as small (≤4 MF) and large (>4 MF); deforested áreas with in the irrespective Legal Reserve Areas; as well as the problem of over lapping areas. In the preparation of this work, geoprocessing tools were used, extracting the vectors of the boundaries of the properties of the public base of the National Rural Environmental Registry System until 2018 and of the Amazon Deforestation Calculation Program Project between 2014 and 2018. The study identified a high rate of deforestation in legal reserves with in the registered properties, with a predominance of those properties > 4MF. The validation analyses of the declared LRA showed that 48% of properties contain some type of inconsistency in the insertion of data in the registration module. During the analyses, 14.1% of overlapping áreas were found in relation to the total área of the registered properties, in addition to 127 overlapping cadastres to Conservation Units and six overlapping cadastres to Indigenous Lands. Despite the importance and versatility that the CAR potentially represents for environmental monitoring and management, it is necessary to improve the methodologies for entering data into the system and validating them.