Land use change in Amazonia: institutional analysis and modeling at multiple temporal and spatial scales

Resumo

This proposal focuses on the understanding of the complex social process of anthropogenic occupation that contributes to large-scale deforestation in Amazonia. Biomass burning emissions associated with deforestation in the region is responsible for 74% of Brazil's greenhouse gas emissions. In order to generate a better understanding of the impacts of land use dynamics in the Amazon on global environmental changes, and vice-versa, we argue that social processes underlying such changes need to be better understood, and incorporated into Land Use and Land Cover Change (LUCC) models. Thus we propose to explore the following core scientific question: How are the evolutions of land use systems and institutional arrangements interrelated in the Amazon? We will study human-induced landscape changes observed over the past 40 years as a result of the co-evolution of institutional arrangements defining resource control and ownership, including: land tenure, territorial planning, market chains, and policies to control deforestation. The study will be comprised of multi-scale and comparative case studies, each of which organized along four interrelated Iines of research, combining methods from different academic areas, including social analysis of institutional arrangements, remote sensing, landscape ecology, and dynamic modeling. Throughout the project, we will integrate case studies results to establish interrelations and an analytical understanding of social and institutional processes of change at different scales. Such findings will be incorporated into multi-scale LUCC models and scenarios. Our results and methodological advances will provide the basis for the development of more robust environmental models, predicated on the complexity of social interactions in Amazonia, to study the reciprocal relationship between deforestation and climate change. (AU)