A decade of delays and disappointment: ten years of Brazil’s Forest Code

Ten years ago this week, after years of intense back and forth in Brazil’s Congress, lawmakers approved a sweeping update to the country’s so-called Forest Code — the set of rules that dictates how Brazil’s natural vegetation can be used and exploited.

However, despite the introduction of important tools that promised to protect Brazil’s environment, the first decade of the new Forest Code’s existence has been one of mounting deforestation — and the law itself has never fully been put to use.

Such legislation is particularly important in the preservation of Brazil’s natural ecosystems, as 53 percent of the country’s forests are located on private lands. Therefore, even the strictest environmental protection policies in a country like Brazil could only do so much without properly managing privately owned territories.

The new Forest Code was written into law in 2012 off the back of monumental government efforts to cut deforestation numbers. Annual deforestation in the Amazon went from 27,700 square kilometers in 2004 — an area roughly the size of Massachusetts — to just 4,500 sq-km in the Forest Code’s first year, an all-time low since records began.

“There was a feeling deforestation wasn’t accepted anymore, that the people who did it would be caught and punished,” recalls biologist and socio-environmental public policy consultant André Aroeira. “That’s one of the best deterrents for deforestation, the feeling among potential transgressors that they wouldn’t be able to get away with it,” he tells The Brazilian Report.

Since 2012 however, deforestation figures in the Amazon have only increased. According to the National Institute of Space Research (Inpe), the 13,200 sq km destroyed in 2021 was the worst yearly performance in 16 years. And some environmental experts place the blame squarely at the Forest Code’s doorstep.

The most controversial aspect of 2012’s Forest Code was a sweeping amnesty of past environmental transgressions, which, as Mr. Aroeira notes, created the expectation of future amnesties in years to come.

“Deforestation began to rise again, and the general feeling in the field was that people would no longer need to comply with the law,” he explains. “And it seems they were right.”

Brazil’s Forest Code, versions I and II

Brazil’s very first Forest Code dates back to 1934 and the Getulio Vargas Era. In the aftermath...