Science and technology and sustainable development in Brazilian Amazon

Deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon increased from 10 million hectares in the 1970s to more than 60 million hectares at the turn of the century, resulting in growing awareness about deforestation impacts like greenhouse-gas emissions, loss of biodiversity, and motivating a number of initiatives involving the science and technology (S&T) field to address the issues of deforestation and sustainable development in the Amazon. The present work summarizes part of the large-scale land cover-use changes that occurred in the region and then analyses the organization of four S&T programs carried out in the Amazon in the context of alarming deforestation rates and rapidly changing land use in the Amazonian frontier. The four programs include two major research programs - the Large-Scale Biosphere-Atmosphere Experiment in the Amazon (LBA) and the Science & Technology Subprogram (S&T) of the Pilot Program to Conserve the Brazilian Rain Forest (PPG7) - and two examples of environmental monitoring and management - the Ecological-Economic Zoning (ZEE) and deforestation monitoring programs. In the context of high rates of forest loss and generally very weak institutions, the initiatives organized with the concourse of the S&T field may have significantly contributed to advance the discussions of sustainable development and sustainable land use in the frontier, and to mature some ideas about the participation of civil society, national environmental policy and, also, international cooperation. These exercises also suggest that the tasks of reducing and mitigating deforestation impacts and fostering sustainable land use are not to be engineered but, rather, negotiated, and that understanding how to contribute to such negotiations seems to be a major challenge for the science and technology field in Brazil.