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Help restore Brazil’s governance of globally important ecosystem services

Nature Ecology & Evolution volume 4, pages 172–173 (2020)Cite this article

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To the Editor — Since 2005, successful conservation policies have made Brazil a global example of environmental governance, in particular expanding Protected Areas and Indigenous Lands, developing advanced monitoring systems to detect vegetation loss, and intervening in soy and beef supply chains1. Now, the administration of president Jair Bolsonaro is dismantling the country’s social–environmental policies2, jeopardizing the governance of globally important ecosystem services3 (Supplementary Table 1).

To help Brazil restore a resilient and participatory governance system, we suggest three main priorities aligned with the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD, Aichi Targets), the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and the Paris Agreement.

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Fig. 1: Ecosystem services as opportunities for global sustainable development.

Carbon sequestration, Banksia films; climate regulation, extreme event regulation, biodiversity, medicine, crop genetic diversity and non-timber provision, Pixabay; cultural, spiritual and inspirational values, Bernardo M. Flores (left image) and Gleilson Miranda / Governo do Acre, Flickr, under a Creative Commons license CC BY 2.0 (right image); timber provision, Carolina Levis.

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Acknowledgements

We thank all 1,230 signatories for supporting this article; a full list of signatories and their affiliations appears in Supplementary Table 2. We also thank UNEP for providing the ecosystem assets dataset. C.L. thanks CNPq for a post-doctoral fellowship (CNPq 159440/2018-1). B.M.F. is funded by São Paulo Research Foundation Grant FAPESP 2016/25086-3. M.H. and B.M.F. acknowledge the project grant from Instituto Serrapilheira/Serra-1709–18983. N.P. thanks CNPq for a productivity fellowship (CNPq 310443/2015-6). C.R.C. thanks CNPq for a productivity fellowship (CNPq 303477/2018-0).

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Author notes

  1. These authors contributed equally: Carolina Levis, Bernardo M. Flores.

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Programa de Pós-graduação em Ecologia (PPGECO), Departamento de Ecologia e Zoologia, Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina, Florianópolis, Brazil

    Carolina Levis & Nivaldo Peroni

  2. Departamento de Biologia Vegetal, Universidade de Campinas, Campinas, Brazil

    Bernardo M. Flores, Guilherme G. Mazzochini & Marina Hirota

  3. Programa de Pós-graduação em Biologia de Fungos, Algas e Plantas (PPGFAP), Centro de Ciências Biológicas, Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina, Florianópolis, Brazil

    Guilherme G. Mazzochini & Nivaldo Peroni

  4. Arvorecer Pesquisa & Consultoria Ambiental, Campinas, Brazil

    Adriana P. Manhães

  5. Instituto de Ciências Biológicas e da Saúde, Universidade Federal de Alagoas, Maceió, Brazil

    João Vitor Campos-Silva

  6. Faculty of Environmental Sciences and Natural Resource Management, Norwegian University of Life Sciences, Ås, Norway

    João Vitor Campos-Silva

  7. Programa de Pós-graduação em Engenharia Ambiental (PPGEA), Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina, Florianópolis, Brazil

    Pablo Borges de Amorim

  8. Departamento de Física, Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina, Florianópolis, Brazil

    Marina Hirota

  9. Coordenação de Tecnologia e Inovação, Instituto Nacional de Pesquisas da Amazônia, Manaus, Brazil

    Charles R. Clement

Authors
  1. Carolina Levis
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  2. Bernardo M. Flores
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  3. Guilherme G. Mazzochini
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  4. Adriana P. Manhães
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  5. João Vitor Campos-Silva
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  6. Pablo Borges de Amorim
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  7. Nivaldo Peroni
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  8. Marina Hirota
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  9. Charles R. Clement
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Contributions

C.L. and B.M.F. conceived and designed the work; C.L., B.M.F., G.G.M., A.P.M., J.V.C.-S., P.B.A., N.P., M.H. and C.R.C. interpreted the data; C.L. and B.M.F. drafted the work and G.G.M., A.P.M., J.V.C.-S., P.B.A., N.P., M.H. and C.R.C. substantively revised it.

Corresponding authors

Correspondence to Carolina Levis or Bernardo M. Flores.

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Competing interests

The authors declare no competing interests.

Supplementary information

Supplementary Information

Supplementary Table 1 - Consequences of policy changes; Supplementary Table 2 - List of Signatories; Supplementary Text - Portuguese version.

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Levis, C., Flores, B.M., Mazzochini, G.G. et al. Help restore Brazil’s governance of globally important ecosystem services. Nat Ecol Evol 4, 172–173 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41559-019-1093-x

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