Brazil has taken one of its most significant steps yet to protect the Amazon coast. President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva signed a decree in March 2024 C.E. creating two new extractive reserves — the Filhos do Mangue and the Viriandeua — adding 74,700 hectares of mangrove ecosystems in Pará state to federal protection. The move brings nearly the entire Amazonian coastline of Pará under legal protection, completing what experts now call the world’s largest and most conserved mangrove belt.
At a glance
- Amazon mangrove protection: The two new reserves together cover more than 74,700 hectares and support roughly 7,100 families who depend on fishing, crabbing, and harvesting for their livelihoods.
- Extractive reserves: Known in Brazil as Resex, these conservation areas allow community residents to continue traditional practices — hunting, fishing, and harvesting wild plants — while blocking large-scale industrial activity.
- Carbon sequestration: Mangroves store about 1,000 metric tons of carbon per hectare in their roots and soil, making this protected belt one of the most valuable climate buffers on Earth.
Sixteen years in the making
The campaign to get these regions recognized as federal reserves took 16 years. It survived bureaucratic delays and a full freeze on environmental protection initiatives from 2019 to 2022 C.E. under former president Jair Bolsonaro.
Sandra Regina Pereira Gonçalves, a fisherwoman and national director at the National Commission for Strengthening Extractive Reserves and Traditional Coastal and Marine Extractive Peoples (Confrem), was part of the push from the start. “It’s another win for us to protect this mangrove here in the Amazon,” she told Mongabay. Her organization worked alongside the Rare Brasil Institute and the federal agency ICMBio to bring the reserves into being.
Pará now has 14 federal conservation areas covering almost all of its mangroves — 390,589 hectares in total. Brazil as a whole holds about 10% of the world’s remaining mangroves, most of them concentrated along the Amazon coastline in three states: Maranhão, Pará, and Amapá.
Who lives here — and what they protect
The Resex model is built around the people who already live sustainably within these ecosystems. Only community members can use the local biodiversity. Large companies cannot operate inside a Resex. That distinction matters enormously here.
“It means that big companies from the private sector cannot be there,” said Monique Galvão, vice president at Rare Brasil Institute. “With this protection, it prevents big companies from setting up business in those areas to extract nature, and also to prevent the threat of oil, gas and shrimp production.”
About 90% of Brazil’s fishers are small-scale operators. Most live in the north of the country and work in and along the Amazon mangroves. A 2014 study found that traditional fishing lifestyles in the region “help maintain the nearly pristine condition of the mangroves and impede the conversion of forests for the establishment of shrimp farming operations.” The two new reserves legally entrench that relationship.
A shield against future threats
Brazil’s ICMBio estimates that 25% of the country’s mangroves have been lost since 1900 C.E., mostly in the southeast and northeast where saltwater aquaculture — especially shrimp farming — has reshaped coastlines. The Amazon mangroves have largely been spared that fate, partly because of the people living there. Advocates want to keep it that way.
The reserves also provide a layer of protection against potential oil activity. Geologists estimate there are roughly 30 billion barrels of oil in the Equatorial Margin at the mouth of the Amazon, and state-owned Petrobras has plans to explore offshore sites near Amapá state. Environmentalists have warned that a spill in this region would be catastrophic. While the new reserves don’t block offshore exploration outright, they do create formal records of beneficiaries and management plans — making it far easier to protect and compensate communities if a spill occurs.
Pedro Walfir Souza Filho, a geologist and associate researcher at the Vale Institute of Technology, put it plainly. “Conservation units, especially Resex, bring an additional layer of legal protection, because they are managed in a participatory manner by traditional fishing communities, which help to define forms of sustainable use of Amazonian mangroves.”
What comes next
The immediate next step for both reserves is developing formal management plans — a participative process involving deliberative councils made up of government agencies, civil society groups, and the traditional populations who live there. The plans will define who qualifies as a beneficiary, how resources can be sustainably harvested, and what large-scale activity remains prohibited. It is a long process, Galvão acknowledged, because it involves many stakeholders with different expectations.
Community members are already looking beyond Pará. “We are the protectors of the mangroves, we call ourselves the guardians of the sea,” Gonçalves said. “We want to go to other states, too, so that they can also do what Pará is doing, protecting the mangroves and the communities.” Advocates are hopeful that Amapá — whose government is aligned with Pará’s on conservation — could be the next priority.
One significant unresolved question is whether the federal government’s support for offshore oil exploration near the Amazon mouth will ultimately undermine the conservation work being built on land. That tension has not been resolved, and it will define the next chapter for these communities and their forests.
Read more
For more on this story, see: Mongabay
For more from Good News for Humankind, see:
- Ghana creates new marine protected area at Cape Three Points
- Renewables now make up at least 49% of global power capacity
- The Good News for Humankind archive on Brazil
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