View article

Rondônia during the construction period. When construction of the dams ends in 2013 these people will further increase the demand for arable land. In the arc of deforestation the advance of agribusiness and extensive cattle ranching has made land increasingly scarce. Therefore, we assume that reopening the road will lead to a new flux of migrants from the arc of deforestation to central and northern Amazonia. The state of Roraima lies in the far north of Brazilian Amazonia and the southern part of Roraima has 70,500 km2 of primary forests. About 35% of these forests lack any legal conservation status and are accessible from Manaus via the BR-174 Highway. This region may attract the large migratory flux that is expected if the BR-319 Highway is reconstructed because the soils in Roraima are more fertile and productive than those in central Amazonia. Based on these premises and using the DINAMICA-EGO land-use and land-cover change simulation and modeling software, we have built three future scenarios of deforestation and carbon emissions from 2007 to 2030. A baseline scenario, which assumes no reconstruction of the BR-319, follows the deforestation trend observed between 2004 and 2007. The other two scenarios were built by taking into account the reconstruction and paving of BR-319 Highway. In one of these, called BAU (business as usual), a large migratory flux occurs into southern Roraima with a consequent increase in deforestation. In the other, a conservation scenario, public preservation policies negatively influence the deforestation rate. In the baseline scenario, cumulative deforestation reaches 3478 km2 in 2030 …