Spatial-temporal Assessment of Environmental Law violation patterns in permanent preservation Areas from Southern of Minas Gerais State, Brazil

Environmental impacts analysis in urban areas is a fundamental task for society’s development since support environmental preservation is a key to help society from its own disorderly land use and unplanned occupied areas that lead various urban environmental problems. The main strategy in Brazil for protecting and preserving the ecosystems remains in the adoption of some protected areas such as Permanent Preservation Areas (PPA). The objective of this study is to perform a temporal assessment of environmental law violations related to PPA interventions and spatially identify hot spots areas using data visualization techniques and geographical information systtem (GIS). The analysis of spatial-temporal patterns was based on field data registered by 17th department of civil police from Minas Gerais state. The spatial data were processed in the Quantum GIS (QGIS) software, including SpatiaLite database plugin for SQL query perform, and RStudio. A total of 2.839 environmental violations were reported between 2011 and 2019. A spatial positive autocorrelation was found in data, according to Moran’s Test. Our temporal analysis indicated reduction of reported violations in 2012 with respect to 2011 from the three police-regionals studied. One possible reason for this is that new revisions to Brazil’s Forest Code were adopted in this period, which may have law differentiates between conservation and restoration requirements related to PPAs areas. The lowest occurrence rate was found in 3rd regional of Itajubá, which reached up to 66% in 2018. Our findings indicated higher violation occurrence very close to the regional’s headquarters. This demonstrated that environmental law violations have occurred in natural resource destination areas likely due to the urban expansion process since headquarter are located in urban and populated areas, as noted by G statistic and clusters analysis. We hope that the knowledge and spatial insights developed in this paper can support civil police actions and public preservation policies.