ICMS ecológico e a conservação de áreas protegidas no estado do Tocantins: um enfoque nas terras indígenas

Abstract

The Ecologic ICMS is a state politics that emerged as a way to compensate the municipal districts for the existence of protected areas within their limits, but also showed itself as a possibility to remunerate them for the execution of environmental politics, including the biodiversity and ecosystem services conservation. This work investigated which of these two paths is being followed by the municipal districts of Tocantins State which have protected areas within their limits, especially the 14 ones in which there are indigenous lands, through documental research and descriptive analysis on the evolution of protected areas creation, the municipal performance in the Questionnaires of Qualitative Evaluation of Conservation Units and Indigenous Lands, the collection of Ecologic ICMS generated by the protected areas, as well as the expenses and the institutional development in the environmental area. From this study, we concluded that the Ecologic ICMS politics has been assimilated, at least in terms of collection, by all the municipal districts of Tocantins State, radically improving the ICMS collection in the municipal districts that have more than 30% of their territory corresponding to indigenous lands. However, the transference of the Ecologic ICMS still much concentrated, mainly inside the analyzed criterion of this study Conservation Units and Indigenous Lands. Some adjustments in the legislation are necessary, as well as the improvement on institutional investment of NATURATINS and municipal structure, since they are actually insufficient to motivate and enable the municipal protagonism on the creation and conservation of protected areas. The registered performance in the creation of new protected areas was very weak. Only 5 RPPNs and 7 municipal UCs were created in the scope of 139 municipal districts in the 14 years of the politics implementation. Finally, we conclude that a mechanism of constant evaluation of the politics efficiency is fundamental, with the participation of society and environmental institutions, which must be included in every steps of the Ecologic ICMS politics execution, like the example of the incipient participation of FUNAI and indigenous associations.