Ciência Ambiental

This analysis of Brazil's reforestation program focused on the state of Sao Paulo, one of the most highly developed states in Brazil in terms of industry, commerce, and agriculture. Sao Paulo is a logical study area, because it typifies the central forestry problem of Brazil. Its natural forests have been largely depleted, it is a center of timber-products manufacturing, and it is a major timber-products market area. Forest plantations must be relied upon, almost exclusively, for timber raw material. Reforestation was under way before the Brazilian government launched the fiscal incentives program in 1966, but the Fiscal Incentives Law offered tax incentives to individuals and corporations which greatly accelerated the establishment of forest plantations. Some 910,000 hectares in Sao Paulo have been reforested. The area is almost sufficient to balance projected yields with current levels of timber consumption in the period 1980-84, but it is insufficient for the period 1985-90. The total projected supply deficit in small timber products for the period 1980-90 is 10 million cubic meters. Fiscal incentives have been highly profitable to investors. Analysis of plantation investments under varying assumptions about land costs indicated high internal rates of return to investors under all assumptions about land costs. Returns have been higher for eucalyptus plantations than for pine, and investors who have planted eucalyptus more extensively than pine have recognized this. If actual government costs are added to investors' costs, the investments appear much less attractive, but the returns are positive. A smaller government subsidy would have permitted private investors to realize adequate returns on reforestation investments, but it is not clear that reduced government subsidies would have produced nearly as much reforestation as has occurred. The reforestation program will produce a projected yield of 166 million cubic meters of small roundwood products and 42 million cubic meters of sawlogs during the period 1980-90, with a stumpage value of more than CR $24 billion. An estimated 148,000 man-years of employment were provided between 1967 and 1978, and wages during that period amounted to CR $600 million. Reforestation has permitted rapid growth in timber industries using small timber products, particularly the pulp and paper industry, and, through multiplier effects, has contributed in other ways to the regional economy.

Although sustainable frameworks for transportation have been widely discussed in the transportation planning field in recent decades, the issue of equity in transportation systems is still relatively unexplored in comparison to the other pillars of sustainability. Globally, the concept of equity gains different nuances in developed and developing countries, and have yet new implications when considering fast emerging nations. The objective of this paper is to investigate how transit policies in fast emerging economies are used to distribute equitable access to benefits and opportunities; and to derive lessons that can orient future cohorts of emerging cities and countries to use transit as means to provide equitable improvements in accessibility. Brazil, Russia, India and China (the BRIC countries) have been treated as a unit since the turn of the millennium when economic analysts noticed similar patterns of extraordinary productivity and growth, and are the forerunners of a group of nations expected to become major economic actors on the global stage in a few decades. Case studies on the most populous and prominent metropolises of the BRIC countries were conducted, exploring three aspects of transit systems as they impact equity: system ownership and planning processes; mode predominance and choices; and fare structures and collection methods. Sao Paulo, Moscow, Mumbai and Shanghai were selected as case studies subjects because of their location in those fast emerging nations and because of their status as recognized global cities. This investigation revealed emerging nations are trying to equip their transit systems to deal with the pressures of growing population size and density, rising incomes, increasing rates of private automobile ownership and sprawling land use patterns. In order to cope with this new and fast changing environment, subjects sought to engage in long-range transportation planning, partnered with private entities for the provision of capital investment or operations, acted to strengthen (or implement) heavy rail as the anchor-mode, and moved towards automated fare collection methods. Lessons derived from these cities will serve to provide guidelines to equitable transit programs in fast emerging cities across the developed world that facing similar pressures, and to orient future research towards more complete economic efficiency evaluations of transit systems in emerging countries.

Scholars and policy-makers agree that through smart densification policies that intervene on housing, transit, and land use (termed gray ecologies), global cities can improve their quality of life while slashing heat-trapping greenhouse gas emissions. But policy implementation has stagnated. Why? Meanwhile, climate-linked extreme weather has begun to strike these cities just as they renew their efforts to tackle emissions. What effect does really existing climate change have on cities’ climate efforts? This dissertation addresses these questions through studies of two exemplary cases of low-carbon ambition and stuttering implementation, one from the Global North, the other from the Global South—New York and São Paulo. It also tracks the impact of a climate-linked hurricane on New York’s climate politics, and a historic drought on São Paulo’s. Breaking from the tradition of urban climate studies, which only follows the narrow social realm of climate policy makers, this dissertation reconceptualizes the field of urban climate politics on the basis of “social backcasting”—using our most reliable expectations of the future to develop analytic categories to understand the present and recent past, with an interest in uncovering multiple possible futures and unseen climate protagonists. Using this method of following the carbon into the viscera of social life, the dissertation focuses on three sets of actors who are working to transform the substance of urban densification policies: green policy elites, city planners, and housing-oriented social movements. And in an age of finance and revolt, the dissertation examines the impacts that growing inequalities associated with the rise of finance have on urban climate policies; and on the ways that revolts against those inequalities shape the policies’ fortunes. The dissertation finds that policies have stagnated when center-right mayors have pursued luxury ecology programs that would have mainly benefited professional class urban residents, and which were resisted—actively or passively—by housing-oriented movements concerned about displacement and gentrification. On the other hand, there is some evidence that when, through the intermediary of center-left mayoral regimes, green policy elites and housing-oriented movements cooperate, it is easier to make progress on democratic gray ecology projects that reduce emissions and social inequalities in the short-term. Mayoral leadership matters—but in interaction with political substance, political style, and political context. Meanwhile, the core factors influencing success or failure of low-carbon policies in prosperous global cities are more similar than different across the North-South divide. The dissertation also finds that climate-linked extreme weather tends to bring some green policy elites closer to housing-oriented movements. But if there is an automatic social response to climate-linked extreme weather, it is to shift political emphasis from attacking climate change’s root causes by cutting emissions to local self-defense, in a fortress of solitude logic. Nevertheless, in a context of strong political mobilization, focused on the intersection of climate change as such and local housing and transit issues, it is possible for newly formed civil society alliances to also press successfully for a combination of defensive and low-carbon policies. These dynamics hold in both the global North and South, and in conditions of both too much and too little water. But the relationship between self defense and carbon reductions is especially important in the most prosperous, Northern global cities, where cutting-edge carbon accounting shows that wealthy urban residents (and wealthy cities in general) are much more responsible for greenhouse gas emissions—in spite of dense living arrangements—than was previously known.

Environmentalists, both academics and practitioners, tend to deal with intergenerational problems of a global and rural nature, often neglecting the immediate environmental conditions that especially affect the current generation of urban poor. Much of the writings and actions of urbanists focus on the economic and political dynamics of cities, with little attention to the environmental dimension of urban development. Thus, the terrain at the nexus of environmental management and urban development has not been fully explored. In order to intellectually provision an expedition into this territory, several guiding themes were derived from the fields of economic development, ecology, governance, and sustainable development. These themes were used to design a methodology for rapid urban environmental assessment, and a research expedition was mounted to cities in developing countries on four continents: Accra (Ghana), Jakarta (Indonesia), Katowice (Poland), and Sao Paulo (Brazil). A wealth of comparative information was developed from environmental indicator questionnaires, urban environmental profiles, and environmental town meetings to answer the following research question: how can strategies be formulated for managing urban environmental problems to enhance the economic productivity, health and ecology of Third World cities? Conclusions stemming from analysis of this information were that: (1) enhanced public awareness, consultation and participation can improve environmental management; (2) solutions that are not heavily dependent on institutional performance may be necessary in the short run; (3) urban environmental strategies should have an explicit focus on the problems of the poor; (4) city-specific strategies should be guided by the configuration of key economic variables; and (5) careful attention must be paid to the selection of problem areas, their spatial scale, and institutional capacity when designing interventions. Criteria for assessing and designing effective approaches to urban environmental management were developed, combining theoretical themes with these research findings. No existing modus operandi for addressing Third World urban environmental problems fulfill the criteria. To remedy this, an initial process for urban environmental management is proposed, consisting of rapid urban environmental assessment, a city-based environmental management strategy, and an urban environmental action plan.In the last few decades, the debate over appropriate conservation tactics in the moist tropical realm has been highly contentious. In particular, issues surrounding the inclusion or exclusion of local people in protected areas have become pronounced in the academic discourse over biodiversity and environmental protection. Strategies applied throughout the New World tropics display a mosaic of different levels of protection and public participation. But with only seven percent of Brazil's Atlantic Forest remaining, and the Serra do Mar region harboring its largest fragments of forest, highly restrictive reserves have been advanced as the most appropriate conservation strategy to ensure the protection of this biologically important biome. However, there are fundamental problems with the “on the ground” realities of restrictive protected areas and their arbitrarily superimposed boundaries that both include people and paradoxically criminalize their existence. By means of a case study in Vila Picinguaba, São Paulo, this thesis explores the existing “grey areas” of strict environmental protection, that is, where intermediate spaces in protected areas have profound impacts on the livelihoods of local people.

Brazil, like many other developing countries, has suffered from the “gap” problem of environmental law: written laws are strong but their implementation and enforcement are weak. In Brazil, however, a new type of environmental enforcement appears to be making people pay greater attention to environmental laws. Beginning in the 1980s, Brazilian public prosecutors became active in environmental enforcement. They began investigating environmental problems and suing to impose civil and criminal penalties for environmental harms. They started acting as “watchdogs” over the decisions and actions of environmental agencies. They took on a new role as the legal advocates of citizens and civil society organizations concerned about environmental problems. The present research describes and analyzes how this “prosecutorial mode of enforcement” has reshaped environmental enforcement in Brazil. The prosecutorial mode of enforcement contributes to the construction of environmental “rule of law” in Brazil. Environmental law became law that mattered, law that people considered in their everyday decisions and actions. With the active involvement of Brazilian prosecutors, both private and public actors relevant to environmental enforcement began to take environmental law more seriously. The regulated community became worried about legal compliance; environmental agency officials became attentive to the letter of the law; and citizens were increasingly able to use the law to challenge the actions of others, including the government itself. These effects of the prosecutorial mode of enforcement, however, are not experienced to the same degree throughout Brazil. In the two Brazilian states considered in this research, São Paulo and Pará, prosecutorial institutions differed in the extent to which they are energetic and effective actors in environmental enforcement. In São Paulo, state prosecutors were highly energetic but their effectiveness was plagued by a lack of prioritization and coordination, institutional conflict with the environmental agency, and delays in the judicial resolution of enforcement actions. In Pará, the small number of federal prosecutors working in the state had developed a much more energetic and effective practice of environmental enforcement than state prosecutors, who were limited by a lack of independence from the state executive branch. The research concludes that, in spite of this variability, the prosecutorial mode of enforcement constitutes a model for other countries that suffer from the “gap” problem of environmental law, particularly Latin American countries that share many political, economic, and legal-cultural characteristics with Brazil.

A relação entre o Parque Estadual da Cantareira (maior floresta urbana do mundo) e a região metropolitana de São Paulo é analisada através de conflitos e negociações entre sociedade civil, ONGs e poder público. Nos 40 anos de análise histórica, mudanças intra e extra governamentais são verificadas nos discursos sobre a relação entre sociedade e meio ambiente, através da legislação ambiental brasileira e dos movimentos ambientalistas.

This dissertation analyzes the effectiveness of institutions for nature conservation by studying the management of environmentally protected areas in the State of São Paulo, Brazil in the last two decades. Using the issue of illegal human occupation to guide research in four protected areas, the dissertation addresses the question of how management has confronted the disjunction between legislation barring occupation and the reality of occupation on the ground in these areas. I examine the legal, governmental, and practical structures for the administration of protected areas. The research finds that government agencies relegated decisionmaking responsibilities on human occupation to the managers and staff of protected areas. The staff, in turn, developed informal measures and agreements to attempt reconciliation of occupation and the legal mandate. These unofficial strategies were often plagued by inconsistency and other weaknesses.

The objective of this thesis is to study the industrial wastewater pollution problem in Metropolitan Sao Paulo, Brazil, and to examine the applicability and consequences of alternative solutions for the problem, other than the traditional end-of-pipe approaches. After a brief description of the area, and identification of the interested parties, we presented several case studies of firms that adopted in-plant control measures designed to abate pollution, that were regarded as much cheaper than paying the user's charges to the public utility that owns the central treatment system. A methodology is proposed for estimating the industrial wastewater pollution loads in the region, taking into account the technological change and price elasticity of demand effects, using an input-output framework. Finally, the concept of near-optimality applied to the analysis of the industrial waste pollution control problem is discussed, using two case studies to illustrate the approach and its implications to the interested parties.