14 DAY TRIAL // Authorities in the South American nation announced last week that they plan to enact a new set of measures, taken with the explicit purpose of protecting the massive savanna known as Cerrado.
This is a huge swath of land that features a magnificent diversity of animal and plant species. Its value for the world is inestimable, researchers say, and conservation efforts to protect it should be devised as soon as possible.
According to the World Wildlife Fund (WWF), the Cerrado is now under extreme pressure, coming from encroaching human development that is slowly nibbling away at it.
“The Cerrado has been traditionally been viewed as the ugly duckling of Brazil’s biomes, as a free area to expand on an unsustainable basis,” explains expert Denise Hamú.
“The Cerrado region, however, is one of the richest places of biodiversity in the world, and is a source of essential resources for Brazil’s development,” adds Hamú, who is the CEO of WWF Brazil.
The mixed woodland-savanna area will receive about $200 millions over the next 24 months, as experts will try and come up with feasible solutions of keeping the Cerrado intact.
Overall, the area is larger than Greenland, and covers about 21 percent of the entire Brazilian landmass. It contains the world’s largest wetland, the Pantanal, and also numerous tributaries to the Amazon.
At first, the goal of the conservation efforts will be to take care of the most threatened or devastated areas, which include those with high biodiversity, those that have already experienced high deforestation rates, or those which contain important freshwater resources.
“For the first time, the Brazilian government is putting its attention on the Cerrado, which is of vital importance because its ecosystem forms the transition with the Amazon forest,” Hamú says.
In addition to the conservation measures, the federal government will also be ensuring constant satellite surveillance of the area, in a bid to prevent further deforestation, or wildfires form extending.
About 25,000 square kilometers of national parks and other protected areas will be created in the Cerrado, which means that at least 4,500 new forest rangers and firefighters will need to be trained.
The WWF reports that as much as 8 percent of the Cerrado is currently officially under the watch of the Brazilian government.
The authorities also announced that as much as 5.8 million hectares of indigenous territories will be demarcated as part of the new conservation efforts.
Future land use plans, they added, will represent a carefully-analyzed balance between economic and environmental needs.