Protected Areas

Protected AreasThe recent growth of the nationalsystem of protected areasThe Brazilian System of ProtectedAreas includes areas at both nationaland subnational levels, composed of12 different categories divided into twogroups: the Full Protection group, whosemain purpose is to preserve nature withonly indirect use of its natural resources;and the Sustainable Use group, whoseaims basically is to balance natureconservation with the sustainable use ofnatural resources within its boundaries.According to up-to-date informationfrom the National Database of ProtectedAreas, coordinated by the BrazilianMinistry of the Environment, Brazil hascurrently 600 Federal and State ProtectedAreas officially recognized as part of theNational System, totalizing 99,850,500hectares distributed in all the BrazilianBiomes. When the recognition andrecording of all the State Protected Areasis completed, the National ProtectedAreas System will boost a double ofthe area under State jurisdiction thancurrently recognized – approximately anadditional 30 million hectares. Added tothe 575,000 hectares of current privatereserves, the whole area represents130,425,500 hectares of terrestrial andmarine Protected Areas – an amountsuperior to the sum of the Europeanterritories of France, Germany, Italy andPortugal. Additionally many of the 5,564Brazilian municipalities have establishedtheir own protected areas, which arerecognized as part the National Systemof Protected Areas but are currently notyet registered in the National Database onProtected Areas.New protected areas established atthe 2004-2007 periodBetween 2004 and 2007, a set of54 new federal protected areas wasestablished, and other 9 areas wereexpanded, reaching a total of 19.6million hectares protected in the period.This represents an increase of about 40%to the size of the federal protected areassystem existing in 2003.63