Conciliating the overlap of protected areas and traditional territories: legal innovations for biological diversity conservation in brazilian parks

Abstract

The National System of Conservation Units was introduced as part of the normative framework that regulates the creation of protected areas implemented by the Convention of Biodiversity. Here we analyze particularly protected areas, specifically those that do not allow the direct use of natural resources and predict that the traditional populations residing within its boundaries should be relocated. However, until you can perform this resettlement, the government may take action in order to reconcile the permanence of these populations for the purposes of the unit. Our goal was to identify and analyze the legal innovation adopted by the management bodies of Brazilian Parks of State and Federal in order to ensure the right’s of traditional population living in these areas. First, we conducted an exploratory study using the Citizen Information System to raise the cases of overlapping full protection conservation units to traditional lands and territories. After this step, we conducted a cutout in the research object to analyze only the Park category and we chose the empirical research methodology with application of documentary research method in the field of official public documents, namely, the management plans of federal parks and state approved and available on the website of the Chico Mendes Institute for Biodiversity Conservation and state Departments of the Environment of all federal entities. We note that other solutions are adopted and not included resettlement as the first solution in all cases. In reality, there are several compositions using different legal instruments.