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In 2023, Brazil achieved positive environmental strides in the Amazon, with a 22% reduction in deforestation rates and a 16% decline in total fire counts compared with 2022, attributed to renewed environmental policy implementation. However, despite progress, deforestation remains above the target, and forest wildfires in old‐growth Amazonian forests surged by 152% in 2023 versus 2022, threatening biodiversity and carbon stocks. The rise in fires poses challenges for traditional farmers, impacts urban areas' air quality, and necessitates urgent measures like enhanced firefighting capabilities and long‐term strategies for fire‐free production chains to protect the Amazonian standing forests—a global socio‐environmental asset. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While Brazil publicly committed to reduce deforestation in Amazonia at the 26th Conference of the Parties (COP26), the Brazilian parliament is moving toward weakening environmental laws. Deforestation rates continue ascending, reaching in 2021 the highest value since 2006 (13,235 km2). To overcome this paradox, strategies to curb deforestation are mandatory. The current strategy, "Plano Amazônia 21/22," prioritizes law enforcement actions to curb illegal deforestation in only 11 Amazonian municipalities. Here, we show that this prioritization is likely to be insufficient since these municipalities account for just 37% of the current deforestation rate. This strategy may also be undermined by the leakage of deforestation actions to unmonitored municipalities. Using a set of spatially explicit datasets integrated into a deforestation‐prediction modeling approach, we propose a science‐based alternative method for ranking deforestation hotspots to be prioritized by law enforcement actions. Our prioritization method accounts for more than 60% of the deforestation, detecting larger deforested areas in both private and public lands, while covering 27% less territory than "Plano Amazônia 21/22." Optimizing the detection of priority areas for curbing deforestation, as proposed here, is the first step to reducing deforestation rates and comply with the Brazilian legal commitment of 3925 km2 year−1. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Brazil has high levels of biodiversity and has received strong criticism for the increasing country‐wide deforestation that threatens it. Although a significant percentage of land area in Brazil is protected, the areas are insufficient and unevenly distributed. Many studies have contributed to the biogeographical knowledge of Brazilian flora, but no endemicity analysis (EA) has been conducted including all endemic angiosperms. We investigated the spatial component, drawing on a huge and taxonomically diverse dataset based on 827 016 records collected over the last two centuries. We conducted an EA for 15 034 species from 173 families using an optimality criterion with 2° and 3° grid sizes, in order to search for distributional concordance, to identify the biogeographical units and discuss the implications for conservation. Six analyses were run for basal angiosperms, monocots and eudicots. The EA recovered 66 consensus areas (CAs). The concordance of CAs enabled the identification of five best‐supported areas of endemism––three in the Atlantic and Parana Forest and two areas in the Cerrado province––supported by species of 120 families. The age of divergence for some genera that contributed significantly to the identification of areas recovered in the Cerrado coincides with the recent, <10 Ma, estimated age of that province. By contrast, the areas in the Atlantic and Parana Forest are supported by genera with earlier diversification >30 Ma, supporting an ancient origin. Most areas in the Atlantic Forest are partially superimposed with the limits of the protected areas, however, big gaps were identified in the Cerrado. Protecting Brazilian biomes was at the heart of Brazil's environmental policy. Regrettably, this scenario has radically changed based on misleading divergences in conservation policy. Areas of endemism are pivotal for biodiversity conservation due to the common evolutionary history shared by their endemic taxa. Thus, we hope that these congruent patterns of endemism support the establishment of biodiversity priorities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Disaster education outcomes are highly dependent on the political context of that education. Based on a rich, in‐depth case study of the creation of community monitors in a landslide and flood‐prone city in southeast Brazil, this paper demonstrates how developmental and political environments add much additional nuance to existing theories of behaviourist and transformative education for disaster preparedness and mitigation. Beyond identifying the benefits of education, it argues that disaster risk reduction outcomes are reliant on governance frameworks that alter over time. The study reveals the political complexity associated with programme implementation and cites the perspectives of a number of participants. Disaster education is shown to be the necessary yet underappreciated twin of the militarised and technical approaches that dominate disaster response in Brazil. Understated, however, is education's situatedness: how it can become an arena of conflict between government and civil actors over matters of state and society in increasingly hazardous urbanisation settings in Latin America. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Shared ways of thinking in Brazil about the science-practice interface in ecology and conservation We aimed to identify and describe viewpoints on how the science-practice interface should work in order to improve conservation decisions by interviewing relevant actors, both scientists (ecologists or conservation scientists) and decision makers (who rely on basic and conservation-oriented ecological knowledge to make decisions). Interactive partners thought scientists had much to learn from decision makers (e.g., viability of potential actions, administrative and political constraints) and decision makers could learn from scientists how science contributes to informed decisions. Scientists in this group had diverse levels of productivity and engagement with practice, but decision makers had engaged in the last 5 years more directly with science than decision makers from other groups (Supporting Information). Finally, although some of our results suggest negative attitudes between scientists and decision makers (e.g., detached producers criticized decision makers for misinterpreting scientific knowledge), there was general agreement that addressing cultural differences is important for linking science and practice effectively. [Extracted from the article]

Cooperation between environmentalists, scientists, and governmental actors was a crucial driver behind Brazil's efforts to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from the forest sector from 2004 onward. The same climate coalition's advocacy work to reduce emissions in the energy sector, Brazil's second-most emitting sector, has been unsuccessful. Why has climate-policy development been so different in the two sectors? Building on the advocacy coalition framework, this paper analyzes the climate coalition's role, systematically comparing how the coalition has worked to influence policy development in the two key sectors for Brazilian GHG emissions between 2003 and 2015. The paper finds that strong climate-coalition unity, unambiguous scientific knowledge, economic growth, and international pressure functioned as a constellation of factors that enhanced the climate coalition's ability to take advantage of a climate-policy window and frame deforestation as a core climate concern. The same constellation of factors was missing in the energy sector. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As ecological restoration is gaining importance worldwide, researchers, practitioners, and interested people are beginning to self-organize, in order to exchange knowledge and experiences in this growing area. Latin America has recently shown some examples, and the Brazilian Network for Ecological Restoration ( REBRE) is one of them. Working on a nonhierarchical basis, its members, some of whom are important actors in the proposing and implementing of public policies, are able to freely express their doubts and share experiences, thereby contributing to legislative improvements, developing relevant restoration initiatives, and adopting novel approaches and paradigms. Through its three main communication platforms (website, Google Groups, and Facebook), REBRE has reached more than 2,300 members, and although a more equitable distribution through Brazilian regions should still be reached, it is gradually becoming stronger and more representative. In this scenario, REBRE will act with its branch organization, SOBRE (Brazilian Society for Ecological Restoration), to host the next Society for Ecological Restoration Conference, to be held in Brazil, in 2017, exchanging relevant experiences and welcoming restorationists from all over the world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is commonly recognized that large uncertainties exist in modelled biofuel-induced indirect land-use change, but until now, spatially explicit quantification of such uncertainties by means of error propagation modelling has never been performed. In this study, we demonstrate a general methodology to stochastically calculate direct and indirect land-use change ( dLUC and iLUC) caused by an increasing demand for biofuels, with an integrated economic - land-use change model. We use the global Computable General Equilibrium model MAGNET, connected to the spatially explicit land-use change model PLUC. We quantify important uncertainties in the modelling chain. Next, dLUC and iLUC projections for Brazil up to 2030 at different spatial scales and the uncertainty herein are assessed. Our results show that cell-based (5 × 5 km2) probabilities of dLUC range from 0 to 0.77, and of iLUC from 0 to 0.43, indicating that it is difficult to project exactly where dLUC and iLUC will occur, with more difficulties for iLUC than for dLUC. At country level, dLUC area can be projected with high certainty, having a coefficient of variation (cv) of only 0.02, while iLUC area is still uncertain, having a cv of 0.72. The latter means that, considering the 95% confidence interval, the iLUC area in Brazil might be 2.4 times as high or as low as the projected mean. Because this confidence interval is so wide that it is likely to straddle any legislation threshold, our opinion is that threshold evaluation for iLUC indicators should not be implemented in legislation. For future studies, we emphasize the need for provision of quantitative uncertainty estimates together with the calculated LUC indicators, to allow users to evaluate the reliability of these indicators and the effects of their uncertainty on the impacts of land-use change, such as greenhouse gas emissions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The quest to solve the climate change problem mobilizes representatives from governments, academia, private companies and civil society organizations ( CSOs). Several CSOs around the world have demanded urgent measures by governments to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and to support adaptation measures in vulnerable communities that face extreme events, such as droughts, hurricanes and storms. This article identifies and analyses the strategies developed and implemented by a group of Brazilian CSOs between 2005 and 2010 regarding national and international policies on forests and climate change. It finds that CSOs define and change their strategies as a result of specific political contexts and interactions with other social actors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]