Estudo da relação entre queimadas e atividades de mineração licenciadas na Amazônia Legal

Abstract

The mineral extraction process can cause great damage to the environment, such as exposure of the soil to erosion processes, changes in the quantity and quality of surface water resources, air pollution, among others. This pollution comes mainly from mining companies, which are concentrated in some regions of the planet, such as the Legal Amazon, the main destination for large companies seeking to obtain minerals such as iron, bauxite and copper. In addition to the problems related to mining and extraction of natural resources, the forest has also been suffering from the huge number of fires. Thus, the present study seeks to verify whether there is a relationship between the increase in the number of fires observed in the Legal Amazon region with the licensed mining industries in the region, over a period of 20 years (period 2000 - 2019) and also to verify whether the environmental impacts predicted by these projects are consistent with their respective environmental impact studies (EIA). For this, the occurrence of burning was verified by satellite images provided by the National Institute for Space Research (INPE) and selected mining companies that have locations presented in the EIA, so that it can be verified whether there is a relationship between them. With the spatial arrangement of the mining companies and the distribution of fire outbreaks, maps were made for two analyses, one taking into account the Directly Affected Area (ADA) and the Direct Influence Area (AID) of the projects and the other defining radii of the same value for all mining companies. It was possible to notice that the state with the most mining companies is Pará, with approximately 57% of the projects with a federal environmental license and the occurrence of fires is distributed along the deforested areas surrounding the projects. In addition, it was verified that the studied mining companies did not foresee the induction of fire outbreaks as possible environmental impacts in their EIA, and that, even not directly causing the occurrence of fires in the regions, the projects can indirectly cause the emergence of outbreaks. However, to confirm this relationship, further studies are needed.