ESSAY Brazil’ s Amazonian protected areas as a bulwark against regional climate change Euler Melo Nogueira 1,2 & Aurora Miho Yanai 1 & Sumaia Saldanha de Vasconcelos 1 & Paulo Maurício Lima de Alencastro Graça 1,3 & Philip Martin Fearnside 1,3 Received: 25 June 2017 /Accepted: 24 July 2017 # Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany 2017 Abstract Brazil ’ s Amazonian protected areas play an important role in maintaining the environmental services of the region, in- cluding Amazonia’ s role in regional and global climate. These protected areas face threats both from deforestation and from deg- radation of standing forest. Preserving carbon stocks in protected areas is important both because of the climatic benefit of avoiding greenhouse gas emissions and because of the potential to provide a monetary value that contributes to supporting local human popu- lations in ways that maintain rather than destroy the forest. REDD+ represents one potential mechanism for maintaining these areas. A variety of legal threats to protected areas in Brazilian Amazonia has arisen, leading to concern over the future of these areas and their role as a bulwark against regional climate change. Keywords Conservation units . Indigenous reserves . Biomass . REDD . Amazon . Global warming Brazil’ s Amazonian protected areas Brazil’ s Amazon forest has an important role in avoiding regional as well as global climate change thanks to Amazonia’ s large stock of carbon that could be emitted as greenhouse gases (Nogueira et al. 2015; Fearnside 2016a) and thanks to the forest’ s role in recycling water that both maintains precipitation in the region and supplies water vapor that is critical to rainfall in other parts of Brazil and in neighboring countries (Arraut et al. 2012). Deforestation is advancing in Brazilian Amazonia, and the forces underlying this process threaten vast areas of the remaining forest (Fearnside 2017). Protected areas represent an important part of strategies to slow and contain deforestation (e.g., Ricketts et al. 2010). Over the past few decades, Brazil has greatly expanded its Amazonian protected areas, which include federal, state, and municipal (county) Bconservation units^; Indigenous lands; and Maroon territories (Quilombos) (Fig. 1). Brazil’ s Legal Amazonia region had 718 protected areas covering 2.2 million km 2 in 2014, representing 43% of the region’ s area and 57.0% its carbon stock in vegetation at that time considering losses to de- forestation (Nogueira et al. 2017). Deforestation had reduced the Bpre-modern^ (pre-1970) carbon stock in these protected areas by 2.3% by 2014 (Nogueira et al. 2017). Some additional bio- mass carbon had been lost to forest degradation. A variety of threats face Brazil’ s Amazonian protected areas, thus threatening an important bulwark against regional climate change. Degradation of standing forest Forest degradation is a major source of uncertainty concerning current and past carbon emissions in Amazonia and throughout the tropics. In a review of perturbations in the carbon budget of the tropics, Grace et al. (2014) found that Binsufficient information is available to estimate the tropical * Philip Martin Fearnside pmfearn@inpa.gov.br Euler Melo Nogueira euler.melo.nogueira@gmail.com Aurora Miho Yanai aurorayanai@gmail.com Sumaia Saldanha de Vasconcelos sumaia_sv@hotmail.com Paulo Maurício Lima de Alencastro Graça pmlag@inpa.gov.br 1 National Institute for Research in Amazonia (INPA), Av. André Araújo, 2936, Manaus, Amazonas CEP 69067-375, Brazil 2 Guanambi Faculty, Av. Governador Nilo Coelho, 4911, São Sebastião, Guanambi, Bahia CEP 46430-000, Brazil 3 Brazilian Research Network on Climate Change (RedeClima), São Paulo, Brazil Reg Environ Change DOI 10.1007/s10113-017-1209-2