As a result of a condition of federal environmental licensing, conducted by Ibama, the Peoples Project for the Characterization of Traditional Territories has just put on the map 98 caiçara, quilombola and indigenous communities located in areas under the influence of the Pre-salt, in the Santos Watershed. The results were presented at a ceremony held on Tuesday (11/12) at the headquarters of the Brazilian Institute of the Environment and Renewable Natural Resources (Ibama), in Brasília (DF), and are already available in georeferenced form on the website.

One of the main objectives of the project is to make visible the traditional communities located in the area covered by licensed enterprises in the Santos Watershed and to support the defense of its territories, also generating quality information for decision-making in relation to the assessment of impacts and the determination of new mitigating measures to be required in future licensing processes with these peoples.

So far, 7,546 cartographic elements have been georeferenced with the active participation of more than 850 representatives of the communities, resulting in the preparation of more than 200 maps and ten publications. Executed by Fiotec, through the Observatory of Sustainable and Healthy Territories of Bocaina (OTSS), a partnership between Fiocruz and the Forum of Traditional Communities (FCT), the Peoples Project is a mitigation measure, required by Ibama, within the scope of the federal environmental licensing of oil and gas production activity of Petrobras in the Pre-Salt Pole.

Also participating in the project, as partners, are the National Coordination for the Articulation of Black Rural Quilombola Communities (Conaq), the National Coordination of Traditional Caiçara Communities (CNCTC) and the Guarani Yvyrupá Committee (CGY), the main entity representing the Guarani peoples in the south and southeast of Brazil

"We understand that this project was the first experience of characterizing a condition of environmental licensing to characterize traditional territories. For us, who played a leading role in this whole process, it is a very important result that puts traditional communities on the map, with their territory, their way of life and their culture," said Vagner do Nascimento, a quilombola who is part of the general coordination of the Forum of Traditional Communities (FCT) and the OTSS Bocaina.

"Environmental licensing is one of the few policy instruments in Brazil that reaches the ends. And then when it is said that all this could become a public policy, it can. This depends a lot on how we sell, in a good way, results like these", celebrated Claudia Jeanne da Silva Barros, Director of Environmental Licensing at Ibama.

In his speech during the opening table of the event, Hermano Albuquerque de Castro, vice president of Environment, Care and Health Promotion at Fiocruz, thanked by name all the collectives and institutions involved in the project, and highlighted the difficulties imposed by Brazilian legislation for the development of initiatives that involve the use of public and private resources. "[Fiotec] is the one who manages to make this operation, which is not simple, feasible. So that we can develop the planned territorialized actions, something that is not simple at all. Fiotec helps us in this 'engineering', to make what we put on paper a reality". On the occasion, the foundation supporting Fiocruz was represented by its technical director, Vanessa Costa.