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Legislation for wetland conservation in Brazil: Are existing terms and definitions sufficient?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 December 2017

LEONARDO MALTCHIK ,
VANESSA CALEFFI ,
CRISTINA STENERT ,
DAROLD PAUL BATZER ,
MARIA TERESA FERNANDEZ PIEDADE  and
WOLFGANG JOHANNES JUNK
LEONARDO MALTCHIK*
Affiliation:
Laboratory of Ecology and Conservation of Aquatic Ecosystems, UNISINOS, São Leopoldo, RS, 93022-000, Brazil
VANESSA CALEFFI
Affiliation:
Laboratory of Ecology and Conservation of Aquatic Ecosystems, UNISINOS, São Leopoldo, RS, 93022-000, Brazil
CRISTINA STENERT
Affiliation:
Laboratory of Ecology and Conservation of Aquatic Ecosystems, UNISINOS, São Leopoldo, RS, 93022-000, Brazil
DAROLD PAUL BATZER
Affiliation:
Department of Entomology, University of Georgia, Athens, GA, USA
MARIA TERESA FERNANDEZ PIEDADE
Affiliation:
Instituto Nacional de Pesquisas da Amazônia, Grupo MAUA, Manaus, Brazil
WOLFGANG JOHANNES JUNK
Affiliation:
Instituto Nacional de Ciência e Tecnologia em Áreas Úmidas, Universidade Federal de Mato Grosso, Cuiabá, Brazil
*
*Correspondence: Dr Leonardo Maltchik email: maltchik@unisinos.br
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Summary

Laws are crucial tools to protect wetlands. How these laws are written has important implications for conservation. We assessed all wetland terms and definitions in Brazilian legislation to identify whether legislation uses any generic terms to represent several or all types of wetlands and to determine if definitions with clear descriptors exist that can easily be used to identify wetland systems. A total of 116 local wetland-related terms and 21 wetland definitions were found in Brazilian legislation. A direct Portuguese translation of the term ‘wetlands’ was found only once in the New Forest Code. The insertion of the term ‘wetlands’ in the New Forest Code has important practical implications for the conservation, since all different Brazilian wetland types would be represented by the generic term ‘wetlands’. The existence of a definition of the term ‘wetlands’ associated with attributes of water and biota in Federal legislation will help environmental technicians to identify wetland systems and to recognize different wetland types. The insertion of this definition in the New Forest Code would make it clear that the drainage of any wetland type – large or small – is prohibited, and those who do so would be breaking Brazilian environmental law.

Keywords

biodiversitylawswater resourceswetland definitionwetland policy
Type
Report
Information
Environmental Conservation , Volume 45 , Issue 3: Thematic section. Humans and Island Environments , September 2018 , pp. 301 - 305
Copyright
Copyright © Foundation for Environmental Conservation 2017 

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