If someone suddenly asks how many national parks there are in Brazil today, the interlocutor will hardly answer the right number: 71. And it is not even worth speculating how many the citizen will be able to name by name, much less locate. The lack of knowledge of Brazil by Brazilians is a sad fact and the incursions into conservation areas and forests, still limited to a handful of adventurers or to very specific places.
Perhaps the cariocas will mention the smallest national park in the country, which is in their neighborhood – Tijuca, with just under 40 square kilometers. But it will be difficult for anyone to mention the largest of them all, the Tumucumaque Mountains PN, which with more than 1 million square kilometers, occupies more than 26% of the total area of Amapá. Readers of this blog will certainly immediately remember the first PN in the country, that of Itatiaia, created in 1937. They may even cite the first one granted to the private sector, that of Foz de Iguaçu, with its fantastic waterfalls.
The biggest problem of Brazilian parks (and that includes national, state and municipal parks) has historically been the lack of effective supervision and protection of their areas, in addition to the lack of infrastructure to receive more visitors, such as bathrooms, signage of trails and camping areas. And it’s also worth remembering the endless fight between conservationists and conservationists, two groups that don’t get along. The former defend that parks should be untouched sanctuaries that keep human beings far from their limits, turning up their noses at any tourist use. The second believe that sustainable use is possible and desirable, integrating visitors and researchers to the environment through controlled and well-defined activities.
“The problem of the most Shiite conservationists is that this human being ends up unofficially entering the area that should be preserved, with illegal extraction of palm hearts, wood, mining and other activities, without any control”, argues Fernando Pieroni, director-president of the Institute Semeia, a non-profit organization that was born from the dream of the co-founder of Natura Pedro Passos and since 2011 is one of the biggest promoters of the sustainable exploration of the preserved areas of our nature.
Semeia’s study showed how much the country loses by not exploiting its immense environmental asset in a sustainable way. In partnership with the BCG (Boston Consulting Group), the study “Parks as vectors of development for Brazil: Ecotourism and the economic potential of Brazilian natural heritage” showed that these units could receive up to 56 million visitors a year, four times more than the total received in 2019, the last year before the pandemic.
Exchanged in dollar signs, this contingent could represent a total impact on GDP (Gross Domestic Product) of BRL 44 billion – in 2019, it accounted for between BRL 8 billion and BRL 10 billion. The estimated 209,000 jobs in the segment that year could jump to 978,000 jobs linked to visiting parks and their surroundings.
In addition to the dispute between the two different views of the use of parks, Pieroni points out that the country lacks a culture of investment in private partnerships and concessions aimed at this segment. And this is where Semeia seeks to enter, whose mission is to seek the best management models for each region and biome.
“It’s no use just telling big investors, more used to billionaire projects like roads, hydroelectric plants and infrastructure in general, that it’s a good deal to enter into a concession or PPP (public-private partnership) that deals with figures only in the millions”, he says. . The lack of operators in this segment led Semeia to organize road shows to publicize the potential of the business and the importance of talking to the communities surrounding the units. “Attracting new players to this area is a way to avoid vitiated concession notices, which end up targeting two or three groups, always the same”, he adds.
Among these new actors that Semeia seeks to motivate are all those who deal with concessions and operations in which there is a large circulation of people, where it is necessary to ensure security, attendance, information and crowd control — so, just like a large park, you just need to imagine what it would be like to trade the absent-minded thief for, say, a curious jaguar. Airports, shopping malls, bus stations are some of the examples that Pieroni cites. “If they already have that experience, why not attract them to something new?” he asks.
Against the usual criticism that concessions and partnerships would be, in practice, a privatization of the national patrimony, and that, by opening them up to the private sector, governments would be making cash at the expense of delivering the parks, the projects guided by Semeia start from what Pieroni calls it “the great watershed”, which is to convince the parties – and especially the governments – that the value of the grant paid by the private entity is reverted not to the black box of the National Treasury, but to actions in the area granted. and its surroundings, through the inclusion in the contracts of local actions that also benefit the affected communities.
“Ideally, the total amount of the grant would go to a fund dedicated to this segment, to help all parks, some more complicated than others”, says Pieroni. “But this requires a major change in legislation, so we guide the projects to try as much as possible to direct these resources to the park itself”, he adds. For now, that’s all you can do.
And the reader, lover of trails and hikes, which parks have you visited?
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