GEO Brasil - UNEP

introduction
Chapter 2 - THE STATE TE OF THE
ENVIRONMENT:
This chapter addresses the state of the environment in Brazil,
taking into account the main pressure-exerting factors and
their impact according to topics originally stipulated by the
United Nations Environment Programme - UNEP in GEO
reports. These topics include: soils, forests, biodiversity,
water, coastal and sea environments, atmosphere, urban
and industrial environments. Due to the country’s diversity,
these seven original topics were broken into sub-soils,
fishery, environmental disasters and health and the
environment. The two latter elements link all the others.
The multi-institutional approach in place shows significant
differences in approach identified within these institutions,
which will be explained throughout the report.
Chapter 5 – RECOMMENDATIONS:
This chapter addresses the necessary recommendations
for a significant change of behaviour to tackle the two critical
challenges. The first challenge is to improve the standard
of living in occupied areas, particularly in large urban
agglomerations, which have been extensively degraded in
terms of overexploitation of natural resources (e.g. water)
so that the infrastructure essential to life in all its aspects,
such as basic sanitation, can be furnished. The second
challenge is to ensure both proper preservation and
exploitation of the remaining natural resources through
sustainable management of these resources. This is
necessary so that the areas that are now poorly populated
can be occupied in a more adequate fashion.
Chapter 3 – POLICY RESPONSES:
Analysing sector-specific policies that have an impact on
the current territorial dynamics, its trends, conflicts and
challenges requires a background characterisation of the
efforts made by Brazil and of the broad range of new
participants in society. These elements often develop their
actions independently and in a vacuum in response to the
key conflicts and demands laid out in the two previous
chapters of this report. That said, the main purpose of this
chapter is to show the different views of the various
collaborative institutions with regard to the actions
considered as responses to problems that were identified
earlier, with a view towards helping improve system of
territorial management and management currently in place
in the country.
Chapter 4 – SCENARIOS:
The development of scenarios is based on the identification
of the main pressure factors that act on Brazil’s major
biomes: the Amazon, Caatinga, Cerrado, Pantanal, the
Atlantic Forest, Southern Fields and Coastal Zones. The
relevant pressures were those that imposed substantial
changes to the environment and thus helped worsen the
standard of living and undermine the continuation of local
economic activities and the survival of indigenous cultures.
As biomes are large territorial units for analysis purposes,
they were considered as space units for the diagnosis and
analysis of trends. To this end, the main vectors and their
impacts were identified for the construction of trend
scenarios and desired scenarios for the individual biomes.
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