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The 12th edition of the National Symposium on the Recovery of Degraded Areas (SINRAD) was held this week, on the campus of the Federal Rural University of the Amazon (Ufra), in Belém. The symposium, considered the largest event in the country on the subject, brought together participants from Brazil and abroad, including professionals from companies operating in the Amazon region, such as Mineração Paragominas, our bauxite mine in Pará.

The objective of SINRAD was to identify and evaluate the recovery of degraded areas, practical solutions, successful cases, ways of monitoring, as well as promoting discussions to advance the development of models useful for these activities. To contribute to the debates, the environmental analyst at Mineração Paragominas, Victor Barbosa, presented the lecture "Hydro's experience in search of the 'State of the Art' in the recovery of green areas", on November 27th.

“Mineração Paragominas has set environmental goals and commitments for its operations in the Amazon, such as forest recovery of 1 hectare for each hectare mined. In addition, it created the Brazil-Norway Biodiversity Research Consortium (BRC) that seeks to understand the ecological dynamics in several areas of knowledge, related to the mining stages - before, during and after bauxite mining, ”he said.

Mineração Paragominas has been a laboratory for scientific analysis by researchers from the consortium formed by the Federal University of Pará (UFPA), Rural University of the Amazon (UFRA), Museu Paraense Emilio Goeldi, University of Oslo (UiO) and professionals from Hydro. More than 2,300 hectares have been rehabilitated to date after the extraction of bauxite. "Our goal is to seek the 'State of the Art', guaranteeing sustainable mining and returning the areas to society as similar as possible, or even better, than they were at the beginning of mining activities", adds Victor Barbosa.

Several areas of the natural sciences are researched in the BRC: birds, fish, algae, mammals, wood decomposition, soil fungi, pollination, insects, genetic studies, among others. In studies with fungi and lichens, for example, three new species of fungi were found, a new species of lichen, eight new species occurrences for Brazil and three new occurrences for the Amazon. In studies with large mammals, 27 large species were identified. Of these, ten species are under some degree of threat, according to the IUCN (International Union for Conservation of Nature) list.

The environmental analyst reinforces that the company works to meet more than what is foreseen in the environmental legislation, and in that sense it searches for partnerships, technologies and innovative strategies for sustainable mining. "The establishment of bold goals, combined with involvement with the academic community to understand the impacts of mining and to establish recovery indicators, are examples of differential actions of Mineração Paragominas", he believes. At the BRC, by 2018, 155 people, including researchers, advisors, technicians and students, were involved in the 26 approved research projects, with six of them being completed in the field.

The Symposium was organized by the Brazilian Society for the Recovery of Degraded Areas (Sobrade), an initiative that aims to bring together the social actors that influence land use, occupation and modification, such as mining, agriculture, logistics, among other activities, in order to discuss how to promote economic and social development, respecting the environment.

This text is machine translated. To view the original Portuguese text, click on PT on the top right of this window

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