Protection

          The protected portion of the Amazon Rainforest is divided into three types of protected areas: strictly protected areas, sustainable use areas, and indigenous lands. Each area provides a different amount and style of protection, leading to different levels of success. Because the Amazon has many important resources that are useful for various people and businesses, it is important that protection is set in place and strongly enforced in order to be effective.

An example of a community within a sustainable use zone (15).

          Strictly protected areas include biological stations, reserves, and state/national parks. These areas have proven to be the most successful in preventing exploitation and negative human impact. Sustainable use areas are less protective, allowing human inhabitance along with a low level of resource extraction (18). Indigenous lands are left primarily to natives where there is low population density anyway, and therefore a lower level of threat to the land.
Though these areas have been established and make up over 44% of the Brazilian Amazon, they have not been effectively protected until recently (14). A lack of management, staffing, and funding left many "protected" areas with no real form of enforcement to prevent deforestation and exploitation of other resources. As these areas visibly declined and were taken advantage of, the Brazilian government and conservation organizations around the world, like WWF (World Wildlife Foundation), realized something had to be done before the area that provides one in ten known species disappeared.

The result of a lack of effective protection: mass deforestation (17).

          In 2002, Brazil initiated ARPA, Amazon Region Protected Areas, which was the biggest tropical forest conservation project of all time. This project was designed to convert 150 million acres of the Amazon Rainforest into either sustainable use or strictly protected areas, as well as fund the addition of officers to enforce protection throughout these lands and others like them in the Amazon. With over $215 million dollars already available as funding for this project, organizations involved are confident that the protection of the rainforest can drastically improve (13).
Since the introduction of the plan, a study of the area conducted by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences has shown a 37% decrease in the amount of deforestation occurring in the Brazilian Amazon (14). Groups like the WWF want to continue this success and spread it to other countries throughout the Amazon such as Bolivia, Columbia, Ecuador, Peru, and Venezuela.

Improvement in deforestation rates and effective protection since ARPA (11).