The 21st Century Fight for the Amazon

Environmental Enforcement in the World’s Biggest Rainforest

Mark Ungar

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9783319565514
• eBook ISBN:
  9783319565521
• Topic: Politique et relations internationales
• Subtopic: Droit de l'environnement

This book is the most updated and comprehensive look at efforts to protect the Amazon, home to half of the world's remaining tropical forests. In the past five years, the Basin's countries have become the cutting edge of environmental enforcement through formation of constitutional protections, military operations, stringent laws, police forces, judicial procedures and societal efforts that together break through barriers that have long restrained decisive action. Even such advances, though, struggle to curb devastation by oil extraction, mining, logging, dams, pollution, and other forms of ecocide. In every country, environmental protection is crippled by politics, bureaucracy, unclear laws, untrained officials, small budgets, regional rivalries, inter-ministerial competition, collusion with criminals, and the global demand for oils and minerals. Countries are better at creating environmental agencies, that is, than making sure that they work. This book explains why, with country studies written by those on the front lines—from national enforcement directors to biologists and activists.  

© The Author(s) 2018

Mark Ungar (ed.)The 21st Century Fight for the Amazon https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-56552-1_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction: The Evolution of Environmental Enforcement

Mark Ungar¹

(1)

Brooklyn College and Graduate Center, City University of New York, New York, NY, USA

Mark Ungar

Email: [email protected]

Abstract

This book’s introduction describes the emerging structure of environmental enforcement, which the Amazonia has pioneered for the world, centered on the formation of police agencies, prosecutor units, and special courts. It shows how this structure, by giving the environment effective political and institutional support, is a historical and legal breakthrough in global protection. But the book’s analysis and case studies will also explain how that same structure is weakened by the larger political, institutional, and geographic context in which it operates.

Keywords

AmazonClimate changeDemocracyEnvironmentLatin America

End Abstract

This book brings together an extraordinary set of specialists who are tackling the extraordinarily complex threats to the Amazon Basin, the home to a full half of the world’s remaining tropical forests and well over half of its plants and animal species. If the Amazon was a nation, it would be the world’s 9th biggest. With five of just 17 countries worldwide considered “mega-diverse,” it produces more than 20% of the planet’s oxygen and stores some 120 billion tons of carbon each year—over 17 times the amount the entire US spews out. But the Amazon has also been a perennial treasure trove. From the search for El Dorado in the 1500s to the rubber barons of the 1800s to the ranchers of the 1900s, the Amazon has been coveted as a source of boundless riches and subject to an endless bloodletting of exploitation.

Only recently has the balance between pillage and protection finally shifted. Building on global environmental movements and programs like the 2005 United Nations-affiliated program Reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation (REDD+), people throughout the Amazon assiduously and courageously forged innovative initiatives of legal enforcement and sustainable development—many of which this book’s contributors helped pioneer—that have become models of conservation worldwide. They range from local programs like green municipalities and community policing to larger schemes of certified timber and protected areas. And they are all boosted by technological leaps like satellite monitoring, which provides data that is skillfully used in policy and public campaigns by organizations like the Amazonian Network of Geo referenced Socio-Environmental Information (RAISG), which includes many of this book’s authors. As a result of all these efforts, deforestation in the Amazon began to decline for the first time since rates started being tracked. In 2004 alone, an estimated 2.8 m hectares (10,700 square miles) of the rainforest were razed—an area larger than the state of Massachusetts. But in 2010, that rate dropped by over 66% to about 750,000 hectares (3000 square miles). Deforestation fell in nearly every country; in Colombia and Peru, the annual rate from 2010 to 2013 was half of the rates of the 2005–2010 period.

But ecocide is always one step ahead. While deforestation hit an all-time low in 2011, it is poised to rebound. In Brazil, it rose 28% in 2012 and 2013; nearly two million acres were cut down in that country from August 2015 to July 2016, a sharp jump from the 1.5 million recorded between August 2014 and July 2015. In Venezuela, the rate of 2010–2013 was double the rate of 2005–2010. And in every one of the Basin’s countries, the amount of territory designated as concessions for corporate extraction of hydrocarbons and minerals, or which is being inundated by small-time miners, is at a record high. So too is the amount of land being cultivated with unsustainable exports crops like palm oil and cacao. The myth of the Amazon’s untapped wealth remains as seductive and destructive as it is ultimately elusive. Rather than being emulated, protected areas have become besieged. Rather than being subsidized, sustainable economies have been displaced. Rather than being coveted as greenhouse gas absorbers, 36–57% of the region’s 15,000 tree species are under threat of extinction. The impressive but shaky edifices of legal protection are easily toppled by the governments that built them or eroded by countless acts of fortune-seeker desecration underneath them. So even as Latin America’s environmental laws become clearer and more comprehensive, they are also becoming increasingly incapable of halting deforestation, mining, incursions into protected areas, illegal road building, land appropriations, and other ruinous practices.

This book helps explain why they struggle to halt this onslaught. In its wealth of policy analysis and case studies, it describes a region caught in the pincers of fusion and fragmentation. From one side is a regional move toward extraction of oil and minerals for a ravenous global economy. This race has erased ideological boundaries, bringing in regimes spanning the political spectrum, from the neoliberal right to the socialist left—as amply discussed in the chapters on Venezuela, Bolivia, and Ecuador, which are led by the region’s most prominent leftists. The commodities boom is simply too tempting; the paradox of plenty too conveniently ignored. Even decades of sustainable development policy—from rubber tapping and medicines to eco-tourism—are still no match for grandiose mass extraction. There is also a consolidation of organized crime, whose power burns with the perpetual fuel of high prices, corrupt officials, and opportunities for collaboration. From the other side comes fragmentation. The establishment of new enforcement agencies is a key advance, but counter-productive if they lack support or are corrupt. As discussed in several chapters, in addition, Latin America’s unprecedented decentralization has expanded governance but also multiplied the agencies unprepared to resist fraud and coordinate with each other. The criminal justice system too is frayed, with weak links—such as a lack of prosecutors with environmental training—that do not just slow down an already sluggish investigatory process, but often derail it. Protected areas and indigenous peoples are also under siege by a swarm of small-scale miners and large-scale fortune-seekers. This book describes how these threats emerge and how they can be contained and possibly reversed.

The Advent of Environmental Enforcement: Ten Advances

Environmental destruction has become so difficult to curb in part because it is so wide-ranging. Even defining it is a challenge. In the simplest typology, most of it falls in two broad categories: illegal removal—of flora, fauna, minerals, and other natural resources; and illegal addition—of elements, from gold-mining mercury to construction waste. Controlling such a wide spectrum of actions requires an even wider set of enforcing tools to cover each one at each stage, from prevention to prosecution. Among them are regular water testing, protection of witnesses, physically stopping unauthorized transport, monitoring sawmills, deploying nature reserve guards, dismantling drug cartels, and promoting community policing—a tall order for countries still documenting the problem or willfully ignoring it. But ten advances, which helped bring down deforestation after 2004, are a foundation for future progress.

1. 1.
   Constitutional and Penal Law: The countries of the Amazon are among the first not just to include the environment in their constitutions, the highest level of law, but give them full constitutional protection. Around the world, just 24 countries include the full range of environmental protections; of them, five are in the Amazon. ¹ In 2008, Ecuador was the first country to constitutionally recognize nature’s rights—on a level par with humans. Such protection has been bolstered with stronger law in the region. Brazil’s 1998 Environmental Crimes Act is regarded as one of “the most modern and comprehensive legal texts focus on environmental crime” (Division of Environmental Law and Conventions 2012), while Venezuela’s 2012 Environmental Penal Law gives the statewide leeway against environmental crime. Bolivia created a legal framework for Mother Earth, or Pachamama, while Ecuador added more specific environmental crimes (article 246) to its penal code in 2014.
2. 2.
   Environmental Ministries: Cabinet-level environmental ministries give the environment political power and protection. Nearly every Latin American country has established such a ministry, some of which were separated out from larger ministries, in order to better provide regulations, funds, and policy development. As discussed in the scholarship on Latin America, institutional strength within the state is key to policy effectiveness, and a ministry is a keystone of that political and policy framework. Connected to and encouraged by these ministries have been new units formed to consolidate and direct enforcement efforts. One of the most prominent units was established by Peru, whose directors wrote this book’s chapter with a detailed focus on how it methodically documents and fights environmental crime in its vast Amazon region.
3. 3.
   Environmental Police: The police long have been empowered to enforce environmental law, but a poor record and the distinct nature of that task has spurred formation of special environment units within the security structure. The need for evidence and witnesses that only on-the-ground policing can attain, along with successes in other regions against animal trafficking and waste exports, have also encouraged this approach. In the global South, as Table 1.1 shows, Latin America pioneered this form of policing, with environmental police units in nearly half of its countries. Amid decentralization, provinces and municipalities are also forming local bodies. And as the chapter on Brazil shows, the need for policing is as great as its potential. Written by one of the country’s top law enforcement officials, it describes how the federal police turns statistics into firepower—using combinations of electronic surveillance, satellite imagery, and institutional coordinations to swoop down red-handed on environmental crime.

   Table 1.1

   Primary environmental enforcement agencies in Latin America, by Country, 2015

   Country	Police	Criminal Justice Units
   Argentina		Unidad Fiscal de Investigación en Material Ambiental
   Bolivia	Policía Forestal y de Medio Ambiente
   Brazil	Unidad do Policía Federal	Ministerio Público
   Chile	Jefatura Nacional de Delitos Contra Medioambiente y Patrimonio Cultural
   Colombia	Policía de Medio Ambiente	Unidad Nacional de Fiscalías de Delitos contra los Recursos Naturales y el Medio Ambiente
   Costa Rica		Fiscalía Adjunta Agrario Ambiental
   Dominican Republic		Procuraduría para la Defensa del Medio Ambiente
   Ecuador	Unidad de Protección de Ambiente	Fiscales de Medio Ambiente
   El Salvador	División de Medio Ambiente	Unidad de Medio Ambiente de la Fiscalía General
   Guatemala	Unidad Ambiental, Ministerio de Seguridad	Fiscalía de Delitos Contra el Ambiente
   Honduras		Fiscal Especial del Medio Ambiente
   México		Fiscalía Especializada para la Atención de Delitos Ambientales
   Nicaragua		Fiscalía General de la República
   Panamá		División de Delitos Ambientales, Dirección de Investigaciones Judiciales
   Paraguay		Unidad Fiscal de Delitos Ambientales
   Perú	Policía del Medio Ambiente	Fiscales Especiales del Medio Ambiente
   Uruguay
   Venezuela		Dirección General de Medio Ambiente

   Source Created by author
4. 4.
   Prosecutors: Since environmental law means little without bringing justice to violators, special new units within the Attorney General’s Office (MP: Ministerio Público) have been established in 13 Latin American countries. Many of them train prosecutors (fiscales) in environmental law and establish local offices around the country. The authorities and responsibilities given to these units vary widely. Prosecutors in some countries can promote public mobilization against environmental crime, for example, while other countries allow local branches to negotiate non-penal resolutions for violations. In all cases, though, t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Frontmatter
• 1. Introduction: The Evolution of Environmental Enforcement
• 2. Amazonia, Organized Crime and Illegal Deforestation: Best Practices for the Protection of the Brazilian Amazon
• 3. Deforestation in the Bolivian Amazon: The Case of the El Choré Forest Reserve in Santa Cruz Department
• 4. Peru: A Legal Enforcement Model for the Amazon
• 5. Ecuador: Rainforest Under Siege
• 6. Colombia: Bridging the Gaps Between What Is Needed and What Actually Exists Regarding the Protection of Its Amazon
• 7. Environmental Penal Control in Venezuela: Amazonia and the Orinoco Mining Arc
• 8. Suriname: An Exposed Interior
• Backmatter