Sustainability in the Amazon

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A main concern with introducing sustainable practices is the cost; will be more expensive? Reduced-impact logging was found to be 12% cheaper than past conventional logging practices (Conservation 2011). The Brazilian government has established several national forests, known as FLONAs, in the Amazon Basin. A private logging company called Treviso carried out the timber extraction on the International Tropical Timber Organization’s (ITTO) project (Bacha 2007). This project took place in Flona Tapajos. The project in the Tapajos was designed to collect information about the profitability of and impact on local residents from RIL (Bacha 2007). The idea of reduced-impact logging practices has been met with resistance, as many people who benefit from harvesting timber from the Amazon questioned whether it would still be profitable. The Brazilian government wanted to show its support by introducing RIL sites, so split the Flona Tapajos into nine zones, one of which would be an RIL operation from 1999-2003 (Bacha 2007). To evaluate the profitability of this project, the average cost of the RIL operation was estimated, and included pre-harvesting activities, the costs of labor and machinery during the harvesting, and other general expenses such as wages, roads planning, and mapping (Bacha 2007).
At the end of the four-year period, it was found that the total costs and revenue from this RIL operation ended up being “more profitable than the most profitable cattle project studied in the Amazon River Basin,” (Bacha 2007). From a purely monetary standpoint, the RIL enterprise proved that a sustainable operation could be profitable, and even be more profitable than an agricultural practice, while still complying with Brazilian environmental ...

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...auch, S. (2006). Industrial development on logging frontiers in the Brazilian Amazon. International Journal of Sustainable Development, 9(3), 277-296.

Pyne, Solana (2010, October 20). Brazil offers up land for logging. Global Post. Retrieved from http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/brazil/101019/logging-amazon-rainforest?page=0,0

Serrao, E.S., Nepstad, D., & Walker, R. (1996). Upland agriculture and forestry development in the Amazon: sustainability, criticality and resilience. Ecological Economics, 18(1), 3-13.

Thurston, H. W., & Burness, H. (2006). Promoting sustainable logging in Brazil’s national forests: Tax revenue for an indemnity fund. Forest Policy & Economics, 9(1), 50-62. doi:10.1016/j.forpol.2005.02.003

Wallace, Scott. Farming the Amazon. National Geographic. Retrieved from http://environment.nationalgeographic.com/environment/habitats/last-of-amazon/

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