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. 2020 Jul 3;49(12):2061–2067. doi: 10.1007/s13280-020-01353-5

Parks under attack: Brazil’s Iguaçu National Park illustrates a global threat to biodiversity

Victor Mateus Prasniewski 1,2,✉, Neucir Szinwelski 2, Thadeu Sobral-Souza 3, Angela Marcia Kuczach 4, Carlos Rodrigo Brocardo 5, Carlos Frankl Sperber 6, Philip Martin Fearnside 7
PMCID: PMC7568736  PMID: 32621009

Abstract

National parks are under attack in many parts of the world, including Brazil, which the Convention on Biodiversity ranks as the world’s most biodiverse country. Brazil has been experiencing an unprecedented environmental crisis, and the political situation in the country favors approval of environmentally damaging measures by both the legislative and executive branches of government. A new and largely unreported setback is a proposal in the National Congress for a road cutting the Iguaçu National Park in two. Here, we identify environmental threats from the proposed road and pressures on the park from the surrounding human population. The proposed laws violate Brazil’s constitution and would cause immeasurable damage to the park’s biodiversity and associated ecosystem services. The road would reduce the cost of transport between two municipalities (counties), but not the cost of transporting soybeans, their main agricultural product. However, the local population would be better served by strengthening its ties to the park and promoting economic alternatives such as tourism, agroforestry, and organic agriculture. The Caminho do Colono road illustrates the danger posed by downgrading the status of protected areas in order to allow environmentally damaging activities. This trend is occurring in many countries and is especially evident in Brazil.

Keywords: Atlantic forest, Biodiversity threats, Environmental throwbacks, Law, Policy

Introduction

Brazil has been experiencing an unprecedented environmental crisis since President Jair Bolsonaro took office in January 2019 (Escobar 2019; Tollefson 2019). The federal government has largely dismantled its environmental agencies, and constant anti-environmental rhetoric has encouraged violation of environmental laws (Fearnside 2019; Ferrante and Fearnside 2019). Brazil’s violation of the agreement for the Amazon Fund resulted in Germany and Norway cutting their funding, which had supported the protection of Brazilian forests. In summary, the new presidential administration consistently treats short-term economic reasoning as more important than environmental protection. This political context makes enactment of environmentally damaging laws much more likely. One such threat is the proposal to build a road through Iguaçu National Park, which protects one of the last large remnants of Atlantic Forest, in addition to the iconic Iguaçu Falls that Brazil shares with Argentina.

Brazil’s National Congress is considering two proposed laws (PL 7123/2010—https://bit.ly/2MmQAN7 and PL 984/2019—https://bit.ly/2IwdPmP), which, if approved, will cause irreversible damage to Iguaçu National Park. Both proposed laws would change Brazilian Law 9985/2000 to establish a new type of protected area, the “road-park” (estrada-parque) or parkway. The new type of protected area would be in the “sustainable-use” conservation unit category under Article 14 of Law 9985/2000. The proposed laws would also create the “Caminho do Colono” Road-Park, cutting the Iguaçu National Park through the middle. The road would be categorized as a “field-road” (Law 9503/1997) open to public circulation and would link the municipalities (counties) of Serranópolis do Iguaçu and Capanema in Paraná State (Fig. 1).

Fig. 1.

Fig. 1

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Geographical position of Iguaçu National Park (Brazil) surrounded by different uses and land occupation. Red line represents the proposed trajectory of Caminho do Colono road the will cut the park in the middle

Iguaçu National Park was established in 1939 (Decree 1035/1939). After creation of the park, there were reports of primitive trails used by indigenous people and by early colonizers. The “Caminho do Colono” was an informal road until 1954, when it was officially opened by the Paraná state government in order to befriend colonization companies. In 1986, Brazil’s federal government closed the road due to its environmental risks to the integrity of Iguaçu National Park. In the same year, Iguaçu National Park was designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site (http://whc.unesco.org/en/list/355). However, in 1987, there was an illegal reopening of the road, which remained active up to 2001. In 1999 UNESCO included Iguaçu National Park on its “List of World Heritage in Danger” (https://whc.unesco.org/en/news/163), and due to this pressure and environmental threats, an extensive operation involving federal military and environmental agencies closed the Caminho do Colono on 13 June 2001. With the closing of the road, the park was removed from the UNESCO danger list in December 2001 (http://whc.unesco.org/en/news/158). In 2003, a failed attempt to reopen the Caminho do Colono affected a small part of the road, but police contained the movement a few days later. Since closure of the road in 2001, forest regeneration advanced over the former roadbed, which is now a secondary forest that contains large mammals (Brocardo et al. 2019) and native hardwoods such as Cedrela fissilis and Peltophorum dubium. Iguaçu National Park’s 1850 km2 is a critical protected area within the highly threatened Atlantic forest, which is a global biodiversity hotspot (Myers et al. 2000).

Implementation of the Caminho do Colono Road-Park could induce unprecedented impacts of multiple types. Below, we highlight three groups of possible impacts of the “road-park” embedded in Iguaçu National Park: (i) weakening of Brazilian environmental laws, (ii) biodiversity and environmental threats, and (iii) pressures on the park from the surrounding human population.

Legal aspects

The two proposed laws embody conceptual distortions of Brazil’s legislation, since the proposed road-park would be inserted inside an existing National Park. When the concept of a parkway was developed at the beginning of the 20th Century, its objective was to provide access to areas with scenic beauty due to their cultural, economic, touristic, entertainment and educational importance (Carr 1998). Building the road-park cutting Iguaçu National Park in half does not give access to scenic beauty—it only links two municipalities (Capanema and Serranópolis do Iguaçu), facilitating logistical access. None of the park’s scenic beauty is associated with the area where the Caminho do Colono road is being proposed.

Both proposed laws are unconstitutional. Reopening the Caminho do Colono road would violate Brazil’s Federal Constitution (Article 225, Paragraph 1, Clause 3), which establishes that any modification or suppression of a protected area can only be done by means of laws that justify the modification, any use that compromises the area’s environmental integrity being prohibited. Both proposed laws are inconsistent with Brazilian Law 9985/2000, which established the National System of Conservation Units (SNUC), together with their legal hierarchy where higher hierarchical levels of protected areas must have preference over less-protected areas. Creation of a road-park, which would be in the SNUC’s “sustainable-use” category, could never legally protrude over a conservation unit in the “full-protection” category.

The two proposed laws configure a grave environmental setback for Brazil’s judicial system. In 2000, a decision by Brazil’s Superior Regional Court signed by judge Marga Inge Barth Tessler definitively closed the Caminho do Colono road, and her decision was based on the road’s threat to biodiversity and on the possibility that Iguaçu National Park would lose its UNESCO recognition. The court’s judgment emphasized that opening the Caminho do Colono road would “publicly demonstrate our government’s difficulty in preserving the only Brazilian natural area defined as a World Heritage Site, which would discredit us as a reliable nation (…)” (https://bit.ly/2r930S2). The court’s judgment represents the last jurisdiction under the Brazilian legal system, this court being considered res judicata, that is, “a decision against which no further appeal can be made,” and the road therefore cannot be legally opened. Therefore, when proposing these new laws, the Brazilian National Congress is ignoring the Judiciary Branch and disregarding all previous discussions and court judgments. Furthermore, the proposal is administratively incoherent because it gives to the state government and local communities the responsibility of (re)opening and maintaining the road, giving these bodies the authority to interfere in a federal area, which is both illegal and unworkable.

While discussion in the National Congress about (re)opening the Caminho do Colono road is useless and sterile if Brazilian laws are to be respected, this does not mean that these bills will not be passed or that passing them would not result in the road being built. In many countries, it is simply assumed that what is forbidden by the country’s laws and constitution will simply not occur, but this is not the case in Brazil. One feature of the Brazilian system is that many laws are enacted and simply not enforced, a tradition dating from Brazil’s history as a colony of Portugal (Rosenn 1971). Another is that the constitution guarantees offer relatively little protection because the constitution is easily amended: the current one, which came into force in October 1988, has already been amended 105 times (Brazil, PR, 2020). Perhaps most important, development projects that are clearly illegal and/or unconstitutional are often simply allowed to go forward to become faits accomplis, after which the damage cannot be reversed. Well-documented examples are provided by Brazil’s Belo Monte and São Manoel Dams (Fearnside 2017a, b, c).

The road proposal is being used by politicians as a tool to get votes, leading to a local movement supporting the opening of the road. This increases popular dissatisfaction with Iguaçu National Park, which is portrayed as an enemy of the people (Ortiz 2009). Politicians proposing the road also have direct financial interests in the project (Bourscheit 2020). If approved, these legal precedents will weaken Brazilian environmental laws, jeopardizing Brazil’s most emblematic national park as well as the entire protected-area system and threatening protected areas in other parts of the country (Kropf and Eleuterio 2015).

Biodiversity and environmental threats

The negative effects of roads on natural environments are well known. Roads pollute the soil, water and air due to increased leaching, alteration of nutrient cycling and release of greenhouse gases (Truscott et al. 2005). Noise pollution changes animal communication patterns and behavior. Roads also can act as physical barriers that inhibit movement (Andrews 1990), isolate populations (Laurance et al. 2009) and reduce genetic diversity (Holderegger and Di Giulio 2010). Roadkill rates for vertebrates and invertebrates are especially high when adjacent forest remnants are separated by a road (Andrews 1990). The easy accessibility increases poaching pressure (Ferreguetti et al. 2018). Biological invasions increase (Marvier et al. 2004), a process that is especially threatening for the particularly vulnerable Atlantic Forest (Bellard et al. 2014). A road can also change the microhabitat, increasing solar radiation and local temperature and decreasing soil moisture and air humidity, and the edge created by the road propagates these effects into the forest (Delgado et al. 2007). Edge effects represent a proxy that summarizes most negative anthropic impacts on natural habitats, since they are related to the physical and biological effects of deforestation and habitat fragmentation on biodiversity (Laurance et al. 2018). (Re)opening the Caminho do Colono road can bring all these threats, damaging the area’s biodiversity and its associated ecosystem services. This is especially grave because Iguaçu National Park represents the last large remnant of Atlantic Forest in Brazil’s interior (Ribeiro et al. 2009), with an irreplaceable ecosystem.

Social, cultural, and economic pressures

Pressure from the two municipalities that would be benefited by the road is inevitable. Support for the road in these municipalities stems both from economic and convenience reasons and from cultural and historical ties. The name “Caminho do Colono” evokes this connection: “caminho” means “trail” and “colono” refers to the first non-indigenous pioneer settlers in the area. The old Caminho do Colono trail may have resulted in the human community having established bonds beyond any instrumental, ethnic and economic values. The road closure could have contributed to hostile feelings towards Iguaçu National Park, since the surrounding human population had come to see the lack of a road as a barrier to their lifestyle, to their traditional spatial relationships and to their freedom, thereby undermining their “right to come and go.” This argument is being used to manipulate people in the surrounding communities.

The link between Iguaçu National Park and the surrounding population needs to be (re)created, even if this represents an egocentric utilitarian relationship to space. People need to sense that they belong to the natural space, which requires leaving aside the egocentric view of the park. One way to do this is to promote tourism in the area around the park, an alternative that is potentially more efficient and economically important for the local population than the road’s economic benefits and that requires the coexistence of undisturbed forest and a closed road (Kropf and Eleuterio 2015). For example, birdwatching ecotourism in the United States represents an economy generating US$107 billion per year (Carver 2013), while in Canada, Costa Rica and Mexico birding tourism produces gross annual returns of US$256 million, US$410 million and US$442 million, respectively (Revollo-Fernández 2015).

The road-park would represent an increase in gross returns estimated at US$900 million (Ortiz 2009) for the affected municipalities due to an increment in tolls, lower transportation costs and the reduction of costs of agricultural products. However, the loss of ecosystem services due to environmental degradation, such as lower water and air quality and biodiversity, has been estimated to represent an annual total value of US$1.95 billion, an amount more than twice as high as the projected economic benefits (Ortiz 2009).

One alternative for bringing economic value to municipalities around Iguaçu National Park is to invest in ecotourism and sustainable activities that could be more lucrative than the road. Tourism and nature conservation are already an economic alternative for all of the actors involved. Tax revenue from ecotourism would revert to the municipal governments. Besides tourism, activities such as organic agriculture, agroforestry, apiculture, meliponiculture, handicrafts, and biogas production represent additional economic potential for the region (WWF 2015). Environmental certification could increase the value of these products. It is also necessary to invest in environmental education in order to show the population the economic potential linked to the Iguaçu National Park, embedding people’s livelihoods with nature conservation and leading to effective sustainable development.

The wider significance of the Iguaçu case

This latest threat to Iguaçu National Park represents a class of setbacks to protected areas known as “downsizing, downgrading and degazetting,” which is evident in many parts of the world (Bernard et al. 2014; de Marques and Peres 2015). This is especially the case in Brazil, where this phenomenon has been present for a long time (e.g., Fearnside and Ferreira 1984). A case of “degazetting,” or complete removal of official protected status and consequent elimination, is Brazil’s Sete Quedas National Park that, like Iguaçu, protected a spectacular waterfall on the Paraná River; the former park is now flooded by the reservoir behind the Itaipu Dam. Elimination of 15 protected areas in the state of Rondônia provides a recent example of degazetting (Fearnside and Cruz 2018).

“Downgrading,” or changing the official designation of protected areas to categories with less protection is an even greater threat because of the frequency of its occurrence. Brazil’s National System of Conservation Units (SNUC) includes the category “Environmental Protection Area” (Área de Proteção Ambiental, or “APA”) (Brazil, PR, 2000). APAs allow areas to be colored green on a map, but in reality, provide almost no protection (Pádua 2011). Establishing private properties is allowed within APAs, along with licensed deforestation, forest management (i.e., logging) and mining. A proposed law is currently pending in the National Congress to convert the Serra do Divisor National Park in Acre state into an APA in order to allow a planned road to pass through the area (Rodrigues 2020).

“Downsizing,” or reduction of the size of existing protected areas is illustrated by removal of portions of protected areas that would be affected by planned dams in the Tapajós River basin (Fearnside 2015). A critical case in Brazil’s Amazon region that follows the same pattern is the Nascentes do Lago Jari National Park, located in the state of Amazonas between the BR-319 (Manaus-Porto Velho) highway and the Purus River. A planned road (AM-366) would bisect the national park, cross the Purus River at Tapauá, and continue westward to Coarí, Tefé and Juruá, thus giving deforesters access to the vast rainforest area in the western half of the state of Amazonas (Fearnside and Graça 2006). The Nascentes do Lago Jari National Park is also on the list of 67 protected areas targeted for downsizing by the current presidential administration (Borges 2019). The threat to Iguaçu is heightened by the abrupt shift in Brazil’s policies beginning in 2019 to reflect the openly anti-environmental stance of President Jair Bolsonaro, and Iguaçu National Park is included in the presidential administration’s list of protected areas targeted for downsizing.

Conclusions

There are strong reasons to reject proposed laws PL 7123/2010 and PL 984/2019. First, opening the proposed Caminho do Colono road-park would cause negative effects on biodiversity and on the structure of the forest in the Iguaçu National Park. Second, these proposed laws would result in a major setback for the Brazilian legal system because they would allow local modification of higher-level federal laws and because the proposed laws are unconstitutional and unworkable.

To attain sustainable development, the population surrounding the park needs to combine tourism and other sustainable activities with nature conservation as the main direction of development. No environmental impact or government setback is required to increase the development of the surrounding municipalities. However, it is necessary to have political will and popular participation in decision-making, so as to achieve effective social, cultural, and economic progress. The Caminho do Colono road is not the way to get this. We therefore defend keeping Iguaçu National Park as it is.

The proposed Caminho do Colono road illustrates a threat in Brazil and in other countries where downsizing, downgrading and degazetting of protected areas is rapidly increasing. The outcome of resistance to this threat to Iguaçu National Park therefore has potential implications far beyond the boundaries of this iconic national park.

Acknowledgments

We thank all scientists who contributed and support our manuscript; some of them we cannot name due to political and social retaliations. The first author was supported by CAPES, Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior (Brazil).

Biographies

Victor Mateus Prasniewski

is a doctoral candidate in the Graduate Program in Ecology and Biodiversity Conservation, at the Institute of Biosciences at the Universidade Federal do Mato Grosso, Brazil. His research interests include ecology and biological conservation.

Neucir Szinwelski

is a Research Professor at the Universidade Estadual do Oeste do Paraná – Unioeste, Brazil. His research interests include population and community ecology, impacts of deforestation and biological conservation.

Thadeu Sobral Souza

is a Research Professor at the Universidade Federal do Mato Grosso, Brazil. His research interests include macroecology, biogeography and biological conservation.

Angela Marcia Kuczach

is a Biologist graduated from the Federal University of Paraná, Brazil. She worked with conservation of large carnivores and conservation and protection of natural areas. Currently, she is the Executive Director of the National Network for Conservation Units. In 2014, she was elected one of the 100 most influential people in Brazil, by Época Magazine.

Carlos Rodrigo Brocardo

is a biologist and currently occupies the postdoctoral position at the Universidade Federal do Oeste do Pará, Brazil. His research interests include to understand how human activities affects mammalian populations, and how it interferes with forest recruitment. He had conducted researches in the Atlantic Forest for over a decade and currently develop a research in the Amazon Forest.

Carlos Frankl Sperber

is a Research Professor at the Universidade Federal de Viçosa, Brazil. His research interests include ecology and teaching and learning in ecology.

Philip Martin Fearnside

is a Research Professor at the National Institute for Research in Amazonia (INPA). His research interests include the causes and impacts of deforestation, climate change and Amazonian development projects such as dams, roads and settlements.

Footnotes

Publisher's Note

Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

Contributor Information

Victor Mateus Prasniewski, Email: victor.mateus.pras@gmail.com.

Neucir Szinwelski, Email: neucir.szinwelski@unioeste.br.

Thadeu Sobral-Souza, Email: thadeusobral@gmail.com.

Angela Marcia Kuczach, Email: angela.kuczach@gmail.com.

Carlos Rodrigo Brocardo, Email: carlosbrocardo@hotmail.com.

Carlos Frankl Sperber, Email: sperber@ufv.br.

Philip Martin Fearnside, Email: pmfearn@inpa.gov.br.

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