- In 2006, Brazilian President Lula da Silva’s government passed the Public Forest Management Law, implementing a forest concession scheme designed to regulate and legalize logging activities in Brazil’s forest — in particular, the Amazon.
- Forest management consists of removing a small number of trees whose species are valued in the market. After that, the area can only be explored again in 30 to 40 years, following its regeneration cycle.
- Behind on its concessions targets, the current government wants to almost quadruple the current area of federal concessions by 2026.
- Even though it is different from deforestation, timber management has never been seen as a way to conserve the forest by traditional peoples.
In the early 2000s, deforestation levels in the Brazilian Amazon rose so tremendously that, faced with both national and international pressure, the federal government decided to implement forest timber management as a way to curb the destruction.
The 2006 Public Forest Management Law established standards for “the efficient use of the forests and local sustainable development.” The same act created the Brazilian Forest Service (SFB), designed to grant management concessions via public bidding to companies, cooperatives and community associations in federal public forest areas. The SFB also monitors the concessions for exploring timber, non-timber resources (nuts, rubber, oils), and services, such as ecological tourism.
“Forest management is very different from deforestation. While the former removes only a few trees of commercial value from a given area, the latter eliminates all trees and converts the forest into an agricultural area,” Ane Alencar, director of science at the Amazon Environmental Research Institute (IPAM) in Brazil, told Mongabay. “If only all timber extraction were done under a governance process, following environmental laws and regulations.”
In that economic activity, an average of three to six trees are extracted per hectare (2.4 acres). One hectare of the Amazon forest can have over 250 tree species; more than 100 of those have timber value. The same area unit has about 200 adult trees and 1,000 young ones, estimates the Institute of Forest and Agricultural Management and Certification (Imaflora), a Brazilian NGO.
“Management involves specific techniques to ensure that trees are cut in a controlled manner, such as the direction of felling, which avoids damage to surrounding trees, waterways and sensitive areas,” Leonardo Martin Sobral, director of forests and restoration at Imaflora, told Mongabay. “Endangered or protected species are excluded, and only mature individuals, that have reached the appropriate life cycle, are selected.”
In a concessioned area, the annual growth index of the forest is used as a limit for the maximum removal of wood per hectare. Divided into smaller plots called Annual Production Units (UPAs), they are managed in a rotation system and, after extraction, each UPA remains untouched for up to 40 years, until the volume of lost wood is recovered.
Although the LGFP was created 19 years ago, forest management has made little progress in the country. Only 1.3 million hectares (3.2 million acres) of the 44 million hectares (108.7 million acres) targeted by the government have been granted across 23 concessions on federal public lands (in the states of Amapá, Pará, Rondônia and Amazonas). One of those contracts was cancelled in 2022. At the state level, according to Sobral, the states of Pará and Amapá hold the largest concession areas, with 517,000 hectares (1.2 million acres) and 67,000 hectares (165,000 acres), respectively.
More forest management areas by 2026
Now, the federal government has a new goal: to achieve 5 million hectares (12.3 million acres) of timber management concessions on federal lands by 2026. And for the first time, it will grant forest restoration concessions in degraded public forest areas. To gain momentum, the SFB has partnered with Imaflora and consultancy Systemiq.
“Forest management concessions generate employment and income, and in many Amazonian municipalities they are the main employer. They also allocate part of their revenues toward the socioeconomic development of local communities,” said Renato Rosenberg, director of concessions and monitoring at the SFB, during a 2024 press conference.
A new legislation linked to carbon credits also aims to make public forest concessions more attractive. The law 14590 allows the trade of credits for environmental services, including carbon, from forest conservation projects. In December 2024, President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva approved sanctioned law 15.042, which established the regulated carbon market in the country. One of the 25 goals of the Ministry of Finance’s agenda for 2025-26 is to advance the implementation of governance and the regulatory decree for the carbon market.
However, Paulo Amaral, senior researcher at Brazil’s Amazon Institute of People and the Environment (Imazon), questions the potential of forest management concessions to generate carbon credits. “In that type of concession, the main product is timber, while carbon is a by-product. So much so that the new legal framework refers to it as an environmental service, and it was included in the forest conservation and restoration section,” Amaral told Mongabay. “There is a contradiction in using carbon as a product if, over time, regeneration [in a timber forest management area] tends to decrease and, likewise, carbon capture, yielding fewer carbon credits.”
Challenges ahead
Those medium-term goals are part of a broader ambition of the government and sectors of the timber industry to replace illegal logging in the country with management concessions. “As responsible management projects are established, following all rules, we are contributing to the market to absorb legal timber and meet the demand,” said Sobral at the press conference.
According to estimates from Imaflora, the Brazilian Amazon produces about 10 million cubic meters (353 cubic feet) of timber annually — including legal and illegal production. “We wanted to see how much forest management area would be needed to have the [equivalent] of that production. And found that concessions would have to occupy 25 million hectares [61.7 million acres] within 15 years,” said Sobral. “This represents 5% of the Amazon forest and less than half of the non-designated public forests.”
Sobral said it is not possible to determine how much of the total timber production is illegal. “[What is known is,] according to recent data from the Logging Monitoring System (Simex), about 35% of the total area where the timber is extracted does not have a license issued, that is, it is unauthorized [illegal] logging.”
While forest management is not allowed in certain public lands, such as Indigenous territories and Permanent Preservation Areas, which provide ecosystem services, non-legally designated public lands are at the mercy of environmental crimes. In 2023, 36.5% of the Amazon deforestation occurred on those lands.
About 56.5 million hectares (139.6 million acres) of public forests — an area almost the size of Spain — have not yet received land definition by the federal or state governments.
“The lack of legal status definition of public lands is one of the biggest challenges for legitimate activity in the Amazon,” said Amaral. “It is vital to resolve this historical problem, linked to land grabbing, deforestation and violence in the region, and advance in territorial designation.”
Meanwhile, in the House of Deputies, the ruralist caucus is seeking to pass bill 2550/2021, which allows the use of a Certificate of a Recognition of Occupation (CRO) to obtain financial credit and environmental licensing in projects such as timber forest management.
Issued by INCRA, Brazil’s land reform agency, the CRO certifies the occupation of a non-designated federal public area in the Legal Amazon by an individual or collective that was already occupying it before July 22, 2008. The document does not, however, prove the ownership of the property by this occupant, nor can it be used to obtain environmental licenses required for agricultural, forestry or agro-industrial activities in the region, among others.
Last November, the bill rapporteur in the House gave a favorable opinion to the text, and in December, it was going to be analyzed by the first of three designated committees. But it ended up being taken off the agenda. If approved by the committees, the text would go directly to the Senate for voting.
“The CRO was created to provide rural credit access to economically disadvantaged people, such as communities that practice family farming,” Fábio Martins, legal advisor for Rede Cerrado, told Mongabay. The organization defends traditional peoples’ rights in the Cerrado biome, which has areas within the Legal Amazon.
“Since 2017, … several legal changes have been made to land regularization laws. A recent case was in Maranhão, whose governor sanctioned the law LEI_12169/2023, allowing economic exploration of occupied areas above 2,500 hectares [6,100 acres] in forests and in the Cerrado. Until then, the limit was 200 hectares [494 acres],” said Martins.
New alternatives
In already designated lands, the government encounters a major obstacle to new management bids, according to SFB. “Coordinating incentives and interests is not a trivial process. There are many traditional communities living around the potential areas and, with them, many views on the fate of the forest,” said Rosenberg. “It is necessary to reach consensus among all, which includes the Ministry of Indigenous Peoples, the Public Prosecutor’s Office, the Federal Court of Auditors, the Ministry of the Environment, state governments and municipal governments. We need mechanisms to reach an understanding more quickly.”
Martins said not everyone sees the economic use of the forest as inevitable. “The logic in which the forest needs to have economic results to remain standing is foreign, from a conceptual and conservation point of view, to many traditional communities. This interpretation was never part of their worldview. For them, the Earth is mother, the mountain is family. Recently, however, there have been discussions about the use of sustainable forest management because they are surrounded by devastation. For some of them, this alternative is emerging. The problem is that it requires specific technical know-how and financial investment that makes access to that activity difficult,” he said.
With all the aspects involving forest management, Alencar said it is urgent to promote initiatives that value the standing forest. “As long as the rainforest is worth more if replaced by agricultural use, it will be difficult to maintain it. Economic activities must be done while preserving its potential for creating ecosystem services. Forest management, for both timber and non-timber production, serves this purpose.”
Banner image: According to the SFB, concessionaires must register each log in the Chain of Custody System (SCC, in Portuguese), established by the MMA in 2010. This allows the log to be tracked in all its stages until its arrival at the sawmill. Image courtesy of Ludmilla Techuk / SFB.
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