Brazil's quilombola people, the descendants of Africans who escaped slavery, have lived in the nation's vast Amazon and Atlantic rainforests for centuries. Today, the quilombolas number about 1.3 million people in the country and have cultivated deep ties to their ancestral territories, where they raise their families and steward the land.
But these communities remain largely unseen in the eyes of the government and neglected in scientific research, especially when it comes to their legal rights to the land they call home.
A new study published in World Development Sustainability sheds light on this critical gap. Previous research has shown that Indigenous peoples who have secured formal land rights in Brazil have reduced deforestation in their territories. But, according to research from CU Boulder and the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul in Brazil, the team didn't see the same pattern in quilombola communities.
While the team was surprised by the result, they said it could point to deeper systemic issues, including a lack of research on the quilombolas and Brazil's convoluted process for obtaining land rights.
"Our research reveals a significant data gap that has rendered quilombolas less visible in research and reporting," said Peter Newton, the paper's senior author and associate professor in the Department of Environmental Studies. "These communities have been significantly less studied than some others, and without data, the plight of these residents often goes undiscussed and unrecognized."
Traditional peoples and lands
Brazil's 1988 Constitution recognized that traditional peoples, including quilombola and Indigenous communities, have rights to receive formal recognition of their ancestral lands, known as land tenure.
Prior research from Newton and his colleagues found that Indigenous communities in Brazil's Atlantic Forest who attained full land tenure reduced deforestation and increased forest cover in their communities between 1985 and 2019. The researchers wondered if the same would hold true for quilombola territories.
"Legally-enforced land rights provide communities the ability to prevent invaders from encroaching and land grabbing," said Rayna Benzeev, the first author of both papers who earned her doctorate from CU Boulder in 2022. "At the same time, when a community knows they'll be able to access the land for many generations into the future, they have more incentive to care for this land." For example, quilombola farmers have ancestral traditions involving agro-ecology and crop rotation which allows forests to regenerate.
After analyzing more than three decades of satellite imagery and land tenure data, the researchers found no clear difference in deforestation or reforestation rates between territories that had secured formal tenure and those still awaiting it.
A broken process
The arduous land tenure process for quilombola communities might be one reason for the result.
When Benzeev began collecting data on forest coverage change in quilombola territories, she noticed a shockingly low rate of land tenure more than three decades after the constitution first guaranteed the rights. Out of 5,900 quilombola territories, only 176—or fewer than 3%—have been able to complete the process to obtain formal land rights.
The contrast is striking. About 69% of Indigenous territories in Brazil have secured formal tenure.
Brazil's National Institute for Colonization and Agrarian Reform (INCRA) oversees quilombola land tenure applications. It requires communities to navigate a complex six-step process to prove their territories are traditional lands.
"For a lot of these communities, it's been really hard to reach the end of the six-stage process. This could be due to huge recent decreases in the government budget, or because of strong political opposition to recognizing these territories," Benzeev said.
Between 2014 and 2019, Brazil cut INCRA's budget for formalizing land tenure by 89%, effectively paralyzing the process.
In addition, reliable data on land use within these areas is sparse. As a result, the team could only include a total of 313 quilombola territories in their analysis of the 5,900 territories that exist across Brazil, including 98 with full tenure and 215 still in process.
"We could only analyze a very small proportion of all quilombola territories, and that sample might not be representative of the whole picture," Benzeev said.
More than trees
Even though this study didn't detect an immediate forest benefit from land tenure among quilombolas, the researchers note that securing land rights for these communities may still be crucial.
Forests in Brazil remain under persistent threats, including from legal and illegal logging, ranching, gold mining and large-scale plantations.
"It's not that those activities were necessarily legal before a territory gets its land tenure, but once tenure is granted, it becomes clear who owns and manages the land. When those boundaries are fuzzy or can be contested, it's much easier for others to move in," Newton said.
Some quilombola community leaders Benzeev has collaborated with said they had been fighting against encroachment from eucalyptus companies for decades. People died in these conflicts, but without land rights, the quilombolas were not able to stop the violence.
"Quilombolas are some of the most marginalized communities in Brazil," Benzeev said. "The fact that they are entitled to land by law but they're not receiving this recognition is a violation of rights, and shows there is still a big gap to address."
