Forest Replacement in Brazil: A Fundamental Policy for Forestry

Forest replacement is a public policy consisting of a set of measures that ensure the continuity of forest raw material supply to the consumers of native species. It is currently required through Art. 33 of the Federal Law 12,651/2012. Thus, this study aimed to characterize the main legislations and facts related to the forest replacement policy, addressing their responsible bodies and indicating their contributions to the forest sector, based on an extensive bibliographical and documentary research. Three federal bodies stood out as being responsible for such policy: INP, IBDF, and Ibama; being the responsibility of the third one shared with similar state agencies. The planted area was significant, especially during the period in which the IBDF was the responsible body, due to its encouraging performance and the incentives in force. We observed there are still problems related to transparency and implementation effectiveness due to the lack of joint actions between stakeholders and the incipient technical assistance.