Regulating land tenure is not the only power available to the state for influencing how people use land. Land-use planning and land-use zoning are two closely related mechanisms that Pan Amazonian nations wield to foster sustainable development on their forest and agricultural frontiers. Like policies governing infrastructure, agriculture and land tenure, these technical programmes have evolved in response to the shifting economic and social forces within countries, as well as to the prescriptions from multilateral agencies and civil society groups seeking to protect the biodiversity of the Amazon Forest. In the 1970s and 1980s, most land-use planning programmes used a methodology developed by the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) that identifies optimum land use based on climate and soil and stratifies regions and landscapes into categories ranging from full protection to intensive agriculture. Known in the United States as Land Capability Classification, in Latin America it has been promoted by USAID as Capacidad de Uso Mayor de la Tierra (CUMAT). Top: A draft of the Macro ZEE for the Legal Amazon prepared from a harmonized version of state-level ZEE (1:1,000,000). Bottom: The final official version promulgated by the Temer administration in 2016, stratifying the region into three major (Defensive, Frontier and Network) and ten minor categories. Source (both maps): MMA (209) and MMA (2016). A similar system developed by the Instituto Interamericano de Cooperación para la Agricultura (IICA) and sponsored the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) was known as a Zonificación Agro Ecológica (ZAE). The technical details and output…This article was originally published on Mongabay
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