Print PageHealthy forest ecosystems are fundamental to our societies. They provide a huge range of products, whose importance is directly appreciated by forest owners, who rely on them for extraction of economic resources. But urban citizens also use a good share of what forests produce. In addition to the direct provisioning of goods, forests provide ecosystem regulating services that are crucial to the maintenance of a healthy global environment. Although these services benefit everybody, it seems that they are more greatly appreciated in cities. The scenario is then set for an apparent dichotomy of interests between forest owners, mainly interested in using forest resources for making a living, and people mainly concerned with the conservation of ecosystems as a basis for continued environmental services. In Brazil, conservationists have strongly influenced the development of environmental policies biased towards conservation, especially as direct regulation through legislated standards, law enforcement and financial penalties. In a country with the largest tropical forests in the world and with alarming deforestation rates, forest conservation must be a concern. However, the use of a command and control approach virtually as the only strategy to achieve the targets is unwise, naive and of only limited effectiveness.
Results/Conclusions
Land owners argue that forest regulations constrain their freedom to use their own land, and strongly oppose laws enforcement. Perverse outcomes are that sound forest management has declined sharply in the Atlantic forest region and the exclusion of forest communities from forest management can be shown to have resulted in the erosion of local knowledge on useful species. Clandestine exploitation of forest resources is another response to the situation. But the most radical measure land owners take is to illegally get rid of the natural forest, either through deforestation followed by land use change or by replacing natural forests with tree plantation, typically formed from exotic species. Exotic plantations are unregulated, which provides incentive to convert natural forest to this kind of land use.The situation is a fascinating example of unintended consequences of a linear thinking and acting when dealing with a complex system that includes people and their aspirations: strong law enforcement imposed to halt deforestation and forest degradation is achieving exactly the opposite result. The emergence of this vicious cycle suggests that acting to benefit both forest use and conservation might result in a more balanced outcome.
