Vulnerability Assessment in the Brazilian Amazon

VULNERABILITY ASSESSMENT IN THE BRAZILIAN AMAZON

in the Nikita | Pratibha Singh 1| Vasanth Mayilvahanan Vulnerability Assessment Brazilian Amazon

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Contents Preface Background Summary Context - Why Brazilian Amazon?

Issues

“Imagine a man without lungs. Imagine earth without Amazon Rainforest.”

- Vinita Kinra

Research Question and Hypothesis Methodology Data Operations • Indigenous Territories • Protected Areas • Deforestation • Mining • Hydropower Extraction • Forest Fires Impact of Human Interventions Map Ecosystems Map - Indigenous Territories and Protected Areas Vulnerability Assessment Map Conclusion Limitations Bibliography

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Preface

Tropical rainforests are luxuriant, hot and moist biomes that occur in areas with no dry seasons.

Rainforests are necessary for the functioning of human life and hence they are called as the lungs of the planet. They help stabilize the world’s climate by absorbing carbon dioxide and producing oxygen that is necessary for sustaining human life. Tropical Rainforests are also home to a huge variety of biodiversity with over half of all plant and animal species considering rainforests their home. Rainforests receive 60 to 160 inches of rainfall on an average that is distributed throughout the year, making it one of the ideal climates for a number of indigenous population living there for centuries. Considering that they are constituted of all of the above-mentioned factors, it also makes them an extremely vulnerable ecosystem.

tied to these forests in one way or the other. Further, the vulnerabilities of these forests has increased significantly owing to the recent global climate change and global warming creating severe additional burden on these forests.

In order to understand the vulnerabilities, the forests are classified into a variety of divisions based on the threats. This report is specifically focused on the vulnerabilities of protected areas and indigenous territories, which are one of the most threatened areas. With a lack of awareness and a number of illegal activities carried out in these areas, there is a need to understand the impact of adverse human interventions in these areas to be able to make a change and create a resilient environment.

For the past 40 to 50 years, these forests have been facing many risks due to a number of direct and indirect human interventions. This creates a huge threat to not only the biodiversity within these forests, but also to the global population since everyone on the planet are closely

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Background Summary

The Amazon is the world’s largest rainforest and one of its kind in terms of size and diversity. It represents around 50 percent of the global rainforest cover. The amazon is also home to 34 million peopl with over 350 indigenous groups. Hence, there is a pressing need to understand the susceptibility of tropical rainforests through the lens of Amazon to get a broader perspective of the impacts.

The WWF Living Amazon Initiative (LAI) developed one of the first biome-level vision in 2009. They developed a 12-year strategic plan for the years 2009-2020. In order to develop a comprehensive strategic plan, it is important to understand the various critical components involved: • Protected areas • Forests • Marine systems • People • Economy • Governance

The Amazon forest spans an area of 2,300,000 sq. mi over the countries of Brazil, Peru, Colombia, Venezuela, Ecuador, Bolivia, Guyana, Suriname and French Guiana. Owing to its size and spread, it has the ability to regulate global climate patterns. One of the first major pressures on the native habitats arose when around 270,000 sq. mi of forest cover was lost in the 1980s due to deforestation.

Unmindful developments with no considerations to the ecosystems lead to mass depletion of the Amazon basin. Such adverse interventions peaked in the 90s leading to pressures from national and international organizations.

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While the above components are a set of integrated systems that do not operate independently of each other, the report’s scope is restricted to understanding the vulnerabilities of the protected areas and the people (indigenous population) based on high-impact adverse human interventions.

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Context - Why Brazilian Amazon?

Though, the Amazon as an ecosystem functions as a single unit, the scope of the study is restricted to Brazil since around 65% of the entire Amazon basin falls within Brazil. Further, Brazil owns such an incredible heritage that is as old as 5,000,000 years; it becomes a crucial resource in the current times of climate change.

lead to a lack of preparedness in the event of a crisis in the forests. Hence, there is a major need to shed light on the various vulnerable areas of Brazilian Amazon to create awareness among the locals and the political organizations involved nationally.

In terms of its geography, the Brazilian Amazon is majorly restricted to the Northwestern part of Brazil with the state of Amazonas having the greatest cover in terms of area.

Since there are just 26 states and the majority of Amazon rainforests are located within a few states, aggregating the vulnerabilities based on the states might lead to a skewed result. Therefore, for calculating the impacts we consider the next level of administrative divisions, the municipalities.

Despite being dominant in terms of the area covered by the Amazon, most Brazilian people never get to see the forest in their day-to-day life and it is as remote to the Brazilian people as it is to people living in distant areas of the world. While other countries share a far less area of the Amazon rainforests, they have a much more intimate relationship with the forests and are aware of the importance of it. The understanding of Brazilian Amazon is restricted to the indigenous population living in them.

This can be attributed to the lack of awareness among the other locals.

Further, there has been a complete disregard by the national political organizations on the Brazilian amazon leading to illegal developments in the Amazon creating a huge threat. Such high levels of ignorance has also

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Issues

Figure: Results of Deforestation activities in the Amazon.

(Source: Mercy for Animals)

Figure: Mining activities in the Amazon. (Source: AP Photo / Rodrigo Abd, File)

Since the scope of the report is limited to testing the vulnerabilities of the protected areas and indigenous populations, only the issues that affect these are taken into consideration.

Further, there are direct and indirect impacts of human interventions. For instance, forest fires seem to be a natural occurrence but the majority of the forest fires are due to deforestation owing to urbanization, ranching and agriculture.

cattle pastures and the majority of the remaining for agricultural activities.

• Mining Activities - Mineral extraction not only involves contamination of the soil and its surroundings, but also necessitates the construction of roads leading to clearing of land.

• Hydropower Extraction - Also involves clearing of land, and displacing a huge number of indigenous population mostly along tributaries.

However, only protected areas have the legal rights over the area and have the capacity to enforce policies against deforestation, mining and large-scale agriculture, indigenous territories are also considered as original landowners and are vested with some powers and representation. This is also because 31.27% of the Brazilian Amazon covered is of indigenous territories, which are not necessarily protected areas.

Figure: Hydroelectric plants clearing forests in the Amazon. (Source: Brazil’s Growth Acceleration Program)

Figure: Results of Forest Fires in the Amazon. (Source: Natalie Gallon, CNN)

• Forest Fires - While appears to be a natural occurrence, large-scale deforestation and fires used to manage fields also spread to the forested areas.

The main sets of issues that affect the protected areas and the indigenous territories are: • Deforestation - 80% of the deforested areas are used as

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Research Question and Hypothesis

Methodology

How human interventions like deforestation, mining, hydropower extraction and forest fires affect the protected areas and indigenous territories in the Brazilian Amazon? Are the protected areas and indigenous populations located closer or farther from such interventions?

Our goal is to understand the impacts of various human activities that affect protected areas and indigenous populations living in those areas. Based on the datasets we have, we analyze the overlaps of the impacts of various human interventions (deforestation, mining, hydropower extraction and forest fires) on the base layers (protected areas and indigenous territories) under consideration.

We are creating a ranked model which classifies areas based on various hierarchies of impact levels from most vulnerable to least vulnerable as a consequence of human activities.

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Data

In order to carry out operations, it is important to gather data from trustworthy sources. While there are plenty of sources from which data can be extracted, we collected our data from four main sources namely:

Ecosystems • River - “Overview of the Amazon Ecoregion”,WWF_Globil, Dec 27,2017. https://tiles.arcgis.com/ tiles/RTK5Unh1Z71JKIiR/arcgis/ rest/services/Amazon_forest/MapServer • Protected Areas - “Protected Areas”, Maps & Publications. (n.d.). Retrieved from https://www. amazoniasocioambiental.org/en/ maps/ • Inidigenous Territories - “Indegeneuos territories”, Maps & Publications. (n.d.). Retrieved from https://www.amazoniasocioambiental.org/en/maps/

• WWF - It is a Global Observation and Biodiversity Information Portal. (WWF 2019) • Amazonia - The Amazon Geo-Referenced Socio-Environmental Information Network is a consortium of civil society organizations from the Amazon countries.

(Amazonia Socioambiental 2019) • IBGE - The Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics is a federal entity that is a national research entity that documents data in 27 state units using 570 data collection agencies. (Jesus “Institucional” 2019) • NASA - Earthdata Search enables data discovery and access to more than 33,000 Earth observation data collections from NASA’s EOSDIS. (“Data and Information Policy” 2019)

Human Interventions • Deforestation “Download Files.”

Terrabrasilis, http://terrabrasilis.dpi.inpe.br/en/download-2/.

• Mining - “Overview of the Amazon Ecoregion”,WWF_Globil, Dec 27,2017. https://tiles.arcgis.com/ tiles/RTK5Unh1Z71JKIiR/arcgis/ rest/services/Amazon_forest/MapServer • Hydropower Extraction “Overview of the Amazon Ecoregion”,WWF_Globil, Dec 27,2017.

• Forest Fires - Fire Information for Resource Management System (FIRMS), NASA https://earthdata. nasa.gov/earth-observation-data/ near-real-time/firms

The data we are using can be classified as follows: Municipalities - https://portaldemapas. ibge.gov.br/portal.php#mapa219027

Municipalities

Rivers

Indigenous Territories

Protected Areas

Forest Fires

Hydropower Extraction

Forest Cover Mining Geographic Information Systems

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Deforested Area 15

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Indigenous Territories With over 30% of the Brazilian Amazon comprised of indigenous territories. These territories play a significant role in conserving the Amazon basin since the indigenous populations use only sustainable practices to manage the land.

Indigenous territories layer. Now the resulting layer is converted to a raster image. This image is then reclassified to rank municipalities. The ranking is based on a scale of 1 to 10 where 1 represents the municipalities with the most cover of indigenous territories with 10 representing municipalities with the least cover of indigenous territories.

Using the base municipalities layer, we performed a spatial join with the

1 2 3 4 5 10

Figure: Municipalities ranked based on Areas of Indigenous territories.

Indigenous territories

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Figure: Indigenous People in their territories. (Source: WWF) 16

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Protected Areas Brazil has around 20% of the amazon demarcated as protected areas. Though the percentage of area covered is large, the demarcation of protected areas have significantly diminished with increased intensity of habitat loss due to several adverse interventions.

we performed a spatial join with the protected areas layer. Now the resulting layer is converted to a raster image. This image is then reclassified to rank municipalities. The ranking is based on a scale of 1 to 10 where 1 represents the municipalities with the most cover of protected areas with 10 representing municipalities with the least cover of protected areas.

Using the base municipalities layer,

1 2 3 4 5 10

Figure: Municipalities ranked based on Protected Area cover.

Protected Areas

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Figure: Protected Areas in the Amazon (Source: IUCN) 18

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Deforestation Deforestation is majorly caused by large-scale agriculture, cattle-ranching, physical infrastructure development and logging. Loss of forests also means loss of ecosystems associated with them impacting the livelihoods of the indigenous people living in the forests along with other larger impacts on the general population.

we performed a spatial join with the deforestation layer. Now the resulting layer is converted to a raster image.

This image is then reclassified to rank municipalities. The ranking is based on a scale of 1 to 10 where 1 represents the municipalities with the most deforested areas with 10 representing municipalities with the least deforested areas.

Using the base municipalities layer, 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

Figure: Municipalities ranked based on deforestation occured over the period of 1988-2007.

Forest cover

Figure: Illegal Logging in the Amazon. (Source: Futurism)

Deforested Area 1988-2007

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Mining Mining has two significant impacts namely deforestation and the destruction of rivers. Mining also causes contamination of water, soil and air.

While these are direct impacts, there are a lot of indirect impacts that affect the indigenous communities and protected areas leading to social and physical vulnerabilities.

we performed a spatial join with the mining layer. Now the resulting layer is converted to a raster image. This image is then reclassified to rank municipalities. The ranking is based on a scale of 1 to 10 where 1 represents the municipalities with the most cover of mining areas with 10 representing municipalities with the least cover of mining areas.

Using the base municipalities layer,

1 2 3 5 7 10

Figure: Municipalities ranked based on total area of mining activities.

Mining Areas

Figure: Mining activities causing degradation to the soil in the Amazon. (Source: WWF) Geographic Information Systems

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Hydropower Construction of dams primarily threatens the flow of the Amazon river.

But in recent times, a number of dams are constructed by clearing huge amounts of forest covers affecting indigenous territories in those areas.

the plants based on the generating capacities. Using the base municipalities layer, we performed a spatial join with the hydropower extraction layer.

Now the resulting layer is converted to a raster image. This image is then reclassified to rank municipalities. The ranking is based on a scale of 1 to 10 where 1 represents the municipalities with the most area of hydropower extraction with 10 representing municipalities with the least area.

The hydropower extraction layer was a point shape file with the details of generating capacities of each plant.

Based on a set of case studies, we calculated the area requirements for

1 2 3 4 5 10

Figure: Municipalities ranked based on total area of hydropower extraction facilities.

Figure: Hydropower dams degrading the river in the Amazon (Source: National Geographic)

Hydropower plant

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Forest Fires While forest fires can happen due to naturally occurring events like lightning, most of the forest fires in recent years are due to the indirect impacts created by farmers and loggers clearing land for crops, grazing and timber. Further, frequency of forest fires increase during the dry season between July and October.

we performed a spatial join with the forest fires layer. Now the resulting layer is converted to a raster image.

This image is then reclassified to rank municipalities. The ranking is based on the area of spread of forest fires with a ranking scale of 1 to 10.

1 represents municipalities with the maximum spread of forest fires with 10 representing municipalities with the least spread of forest fires.

Using the base municipalities layer,

1 2 3 4 5 10

Figure: Municipalities ranked based on areas of spread of forest fires.

Fire Origin

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Figure: Forest Fires in the Amazon. (Source: WWF) 26

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Impact of Human Interventions Map

Now that we have got the ranking of municipalities based on the impact of various interventions individually, our goal is to understand the impact of all of these interventions together on the municipalities. So, we perform a weighted overlay operation with different weights allocated to different layers. Since Hydropower extractions have the maximum area of impact, we assign a weightage of 40% to it followed by mining with a weightage of 25%, followed by deforestation with a weightage of 20% and forest fires with a weightage of 15%.

Deforestation

Forest Fires

Mining

Hydropower Extraction

Once the operation is performed, the municipalities are ranked on the basis of the impacts of all of the interventions combined by the weights allotted by us. The idea is to show where the impact of these human interventions combined together are at the most and least.

The ranking is based on a range of 2 to 10 where 2 represents the municipalities that are most vulnerable and 10 represents municipalities that are least vulnerable.

2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

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Ecosystems Map - Indigenous Territories and Protected Areas Now that we also have the ranking of municipalities based on the most cover of indigenous territories and protected areas individually, we try to understand the cover of indigenous territories and protected areas combined together in municipalities.

We perform a weighted overlay operation by assigning equal (50%) weightages to both protected areas and indigenous territories.

Protected Areas

Indigenous Territories

Once the operation is performed, municipalities are ranked, but this time with both layers combined. The ranking is based on a range of 3 to 10 where 3 represents the highest concentration of these two in a municipality and 10 representing the least concentration.

3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

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Vulnerability Assessment Map

Our goal is to assess the vulnerabilities of municipalities based on indigenous territories and protected areas towards these human interventions. To be able to assess the vulnerabilities of these municipalities we perform a final weighted overlay operation combining the human interventions and the ecosystems layers. Since different weightages have to be assigned to these layers, we assign a positive weightage of 8 to 0 to the human interventions ranking 2 to 10 respectively. Similarly, a negative weightage of -7 to 0 is assigned to the ecosystem layer ranking 3 to 10 respectively.

Human Interventions

+ Ecosystems

So when these two maps are overlaid, the more the positive value the resultant map has, the more vulnerable it is and vice versa. The ranking of the resultant map is based on values from -2 to 4 where -2 represents the least vulnerable areas and 4 represents the most vulnerable areas.

4 3 2 1 0 -1 -2

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Conclusions

Limitations

The final map gives a spatial aggregation of the most to least vulnerable municipalities through the lens of four interventions (deforestation, mining, hydropower extraction and forest fires) based on their impact on protected areas and the indigenous communities. As one can see there are certain areas which are more exposed to threat than the other areas. This study can be used to identify the most vulnerable areas and suggest removing some adverse interventions in these areas.

Considering that a large number of new infrastructures are being proposed in these areas, policies can be made to avoid additional activities in these areas.

Further, steps could be taken to reduce the existing threats in these areas.

For future analysis, policies and political influences can be taken into account when considering the municipalities. Future analysis can also remove certain aggregations that we have taken into account by being more specific on case by case basis.

The results of this analysis gives a more comprehensive approach in assessing the relation between the adverse human activities and their impact on the local ecosystem.

The analysis has been performed on municipalities and these are administrative divisions with their own autonomous local government.

Therefore, this study can be used to address certain policy considerations with regards to removing additional pressures in these vulnerable areas.

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• One of the first limitations is that, we are focussed only on the Amazon forests in Brazil. In Brazil, the Amazon forest as a geographic boundary is heavily influenced by political decisions.

We are not considering the impact of policies and political influences even though we perform our analysis on municipalities that has its own autonomous local government and other state and national level jurisdictions.

• Activities like deforestation, mining and hydropower extractions is heavily dependent on political decisions, we are not taking into account the various policies, amendments or changes in leadership that influence such decisions.

• There are certain marginal errors that might occur due to border issues and areas of conflict where the amazon forest doesn’t have a precise boundary demarcated, especially in international boundaries between Brazil and other countries. For example the overlaps between protected areas and Indigenous populations were not taken into account.

• There are a number of threats that affect the ecosystem and we are

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considering only the threats that affect the protected areas and indigenous territories.

The size of hydropower extraction plants are based on power extraction and not on the size in terms of area. Since we are considering the area of the Hydropower plants, this might lead to some discrepancies.

Though the majority of the mining activities are gold mining, the mine size varies based on the substance being mined.

Forest fires: Areas of impact of forest fires varies from area to area depending on a number of factors.

But we are taking an aggregated average for all forest fires leading to some inaccuracies in certain areas. Impact also depends on the time period and that is not considered.

There are places where human intervention is maximum and also has a high ecosystem cover. These areas have lower values which necessarily doesn’t mean that these areas are less vulnerable.

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Vulnerability Assessment in the Brazilian Amazon

Geographic Information Systems Professor Leah Meisterlin Professor Carsten Rodin Fall 2019 Columbia University in the City of New York Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation Nikita, MSAUD Pratibha Singh, MSAUD Vasanth Mayilvahanan, MSAUD

Geographic Information Systems

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Vulnerability Assessment in the Brazilian Amazon