Atlantic Forest has more protected areas than the Cerrado in São Paulo

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The Atlantic Forest, in São Paulo and in the rest of the country, receives more protection than the Cerrado — the former even has its own law for this purpose. But even the areas that protect the conservation units, called buffer zones, present differences in the level of protection and are more preserved in the case of the first biome.

This is the conclusion of the study that won the 4th MapBiomas Award, carried out in partnership with Instituto Ciência Hoje, in the youth category (for people up to 30 years of age who did not complete their graduation or graduated in 2021). The award recognizes works that use the data produced by the MapBiomas initiative.

Buffer zones are regions around a protected natural area with rules and restrictions for human use, aiming to limit possible impacts on the conservation unit. The idea is to try to avoid the so-called “edge effect”.

For example, a protected area very close to a road may suffer from animals being run over or from man-made fires.

In his final thesis, Alexandre do Carmo, who holds a degree in biological sciences from Ufscar (Federal University of São Carlos), analyzed the conditions of these buffer zones in the state of São Paulo.

In the first place, he found a reduction of 38 thousand hectares of native forest in these protective surroundings, from 1988 to 2018. The curious thing is that there has been an increase in native vegetation in the state as a whole, according to data from the São Paulo Forest Inventory.

In the same period presented in the study, there was a decrease in the pasture area and an increase in the agricultural area. And it was precisely these activities that most impacted the native vegetation of the buffer zones, according to the MapBiomas award-winning study.

“What motivated us was the lack of research on the subject [zonas de amortecimento]. When I looked for Professor Paulo [Guilherme Molin], we did a bibliographic research and realized that there were no studies on these areas. What we found were studies on one or another conservation unit”, says do Carmo.

The research then observed and classified the percentage of vegetation in the buffer zones, with those with more than 40% forest cover being considered “high conservation”. Throughout the analyzed period, all highly conserved areas belonged to the Atlantic Forest biome. In addition, thanks to the rugged terrain of Serra do Mar (bad for agricultural practices), these more preserved regions are concentrated in the east of the state.

This would show, according to the work, a conservation deficit in the São Paulo savanna.

“These areas [zonas de amortecimento] are very important for the conservation of the unit. If we are unable to mitigate external impacts, this can harm the unit’s objects. Knowing what happened to these zones is of mega importance”, says the MapBiomas awardee.

Last year, Parque Juquery, the last fragment of cerrado in the metropolitan region of São Paulo, was devastated by a great fire. The fire was started, according to investigations, by a balloon — one of the many risks faced by protected land near urban areas.

Thinking now about Atlantic Forest, but across the country, destruction in the biome had a 66% jump in 2020-2021, compared to the previous period (2020-2019). This is the highest percentage increase recorded since the beginning of monitoring carried out by the NGO SOS Mata Atlântica and Inpe (National Institute for Space Research), in 1985 (until 2010, data were published and covered a period of five years). In the same period, the state of São Paulo presented a 43% growth in forest clearing.

THE Sheet contacted the São Paulo Secretariat of Infrastructure and Environment, but had not received a response until the publication of this text.

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