Land-Tenure Dynamics and Deforestation Pressure in MATOPIBA, Brazil: An Assessment of the Rural Environmental Registry (CAR), 2019–2025

Agricultural expansion in frontier regions is reshaping land-tenure arrangements and accelerating native vegetation loss, posing significant challenges to territorial governance. MATOPIBA, Brazil, epitomizes this dynamic, concentrating long-standing tensions between agribusiness expansion and environmental conservation in the Cerrado biome. This study examines how the Rural Environmental Registry (CAR) reflects these pressures by analyzing property records from 2019 and 2025, mapping overlaps with public lands, and quantifying vegetation change between 1985 and 2024 to evaluate CAR’s potential as a territorial governance instrument. We integrated public datasets, applying geometry validation and cadastral hierarchization procedures. Between 2019 and 2025, registered properties nearly doubled, rising from 7734 to 14,231. Overlaps with protected and public lands were identified, and native vegetation declined by 38.12% over the study period, with losses recorded in approximately 75% of the properties analyzed. These findings indicate that CAR holds significant potential for territorial and environmental governance, but its effectiveness depends on continuous data validation, institutional integration, and strengthened conservation policies.