Guarantee of Access to Land and Maintenance of the Amazon Forest: The Case of Extractive Reserves

The creation of Protected Areas (PAs) has been a global strategy for the preservation and conservation of natural resources, increasingly threatened by human action. In Brazil, from the 1990s onwards, the incorporation of the sociocultural perspective into the creation of PAs was verified, through the creation of Sustainable Use Conservation Units, among them the Extractivist Reserves (Resex), a Protected Area category created from the struggle of traditional populations to guarantee the maintenance of their ways of life. Thus, we analyzed the dynamics of land use and cover of the territory in the five Resex in the state of Acre, Brazil, in order to verify whether the permanence of families living in these areas is associated with low rates of deforestation. Information on land use and cover classes from the MapBiomas Project was used for a multitemporal analysis of forest loss. The results show that the forested area represents 98.7% of the totality of these territories, in addition to revealing the absence of significant changes in the use and cover of these territories. Deforestation totaled 23.5 thousand hectares from the creation of the Resex until 2017, which represents only 0.8% of the total area analyzed. It was found that the Resex are effective for the conservation of the Amazon Forest, capable of reconciling the ways of life of the traditional populations that inhabit these territories with low rates of deforestation.