Governance and policy constraints of natural forest regeneration in the Brazilian Amazon

Environmental legislation requires well‐defined concepts, criteria, and indicators to support its effective implementation and provide legal security to the diverse stakeholders involved. The Native Vegetation Protection Law (NVPL) establishes the obligation to restore native vegetation in protected areas within rural properties. This federal law is regulated and implemented by each state through its own Environmental Compliance Program (Programa de Regularização Ambiental [PRA], in Portuguese). Landowners must register their land, indicate whether native vegetation needs to be restored (i.e. if there is an environmental debt), and submit a restoration plan to the state government for analysis, validation, and approval. Due to the high cost of forest restoration, natural regeneration has most likely become a viable strategy for Amazonian landowners to meet their environmental debts. However, according to disturbance intensity, frequency, and duration, natural regeneration will not always succeed. In this context, we analyzed the PRAs of the seven main Amazonian states to assess the status of their implementation, identify how natural regeneration is defined and approached in the law, and evaluate whether improvements in the law are needed to ensure effective restoration to accomplish the NVPL.