How We Uncovered the Largest Land Grab in the Brazilian Amazon

JUNE 26, 2023

How We Uncovered the Largest Land Grab in the Brazilian Amazon

The Rainforest Investigations Network (RIN) asked its 2022 Fellows about the innovative methodologies behind their impactful stories.

When we started this investigation (first published on Intercept Brazil in Portuguese), we knew that the main driver of deforestation in the Amazon was the land grabbing of non-designated public lands, which belong to federal or state governments and haven't been converted yet into Indigenous Land or Protected Areas. But there were many blind spots: How does this land grabbing actually happen on the ground? Does it happen randomly or is it strategically planned? How much money does it make? To answer these questions, it was necessary to do dozens of interviews, analyze several court files, and dig into many databases and social media pages.

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Methodology
We used Mapbiomas Alerta to look for the largest deforestation registered in the Amazon and we found it: a 6,500-hectare deforestation in the South of Pará.

From the Mapbiomas Alerta website, we downloaded the polygon of the deforestation, then used open-source geospatial software QGIS to cross-reference it with CNFP (public land registry) polygons. Then we saw that this deforestation happened inside a non-designated public land, confirming our hypothesis that most professional land grabbing happens in these areas.

We decided to use this approach because we wanted to go after the professional land grabbers; the ones who have a lot of money. We knew the first thing a land grabber does is to clear the forest and that the cost to deforest 1,000 hectares was around US $200,000. So, if we wanted to go after the big guys, we needed big deforestation. That is why we started our research looking for the largest area in Mapbiomas Alerta.

What was unique in our approach is that we didn't want just to tell the story of the land grabbers, but of the land as well. The deforestation itself was one of our main characters, and we wanted to tell step by step of this clearance.

More:
https://pulitzercenter.org/stories/how-we-uncovered-largest-land-grab-brazilian-amazon