Sustainable Forest Management in Rural Southern Brazil: Exploring Participatory Forest Management Planning

Historically, agriculture and livestock farming have been the main drivers of land cover conversion replacing natural forests in tropical and sub-tropical Brazil. The consequences for the landscape are well known: habitat fragmentation, biodiversity loss, and reductions in the quality of environmental services. The intense exploitation of natural forest resources tends to generate immediate, but limited, short-term economic wealth, which is generally very poorly distributed. In the long-term, forest resources are depleted thus reducing the ability of small rural owners to move out of impoverished situations. Therefore, while conversion of forest to agriculture can in some cases improve rural incomes, all too often deforestation leads to impoverishment of both ecosystems and communities. In Brazil, forest displacement in favour of agriculture and livestock has occurred since early in its colonization; in the Southern region – the principal agricultural area – this process took place in the late XIX and XX centuries. In this part of the country, past forestry practices such as clear-cutting and predatory harvesting, combined with social and legal encouragement, produced scenarios in which forested lands are now mostly degraded, not fulfilling their ecologic, social or economic roles in our society. In spite of the challenges that forest management faces in sub-tropical Brazil, some promising experiences and experiments are helping to create an environment receptive to the reintroduction of sustainable forest management (SFM) as a means to enhance economic incomes for rural property. Herein, we explore the obstacles related to the adoption of SFM as an economic alternative and propose technical opportunities for both small and large rural properties by presenting two case studies.