The Rural Environment Catalog System: A New Sociotechnical Paradigm for Remote Monitoring of Native Forest Protecting and Recovering

摘要

Cultural changes are crucial to a deep reform in the public management around the world and technology can leverage these changes in a steady motion. This paper shows an example of important technology-driven social and cultural change in the rural environment management in Brazil with the progressive use of satellite images embedded in geographical information systems (GIS). Important lessons to the rural environment public policies in underdeveloped and developing countries can be drawn from the case of the Rural Environment Catalog System (SICAR) and the most important of them is the power of digital satellite imagery of the Earth to remote monitoring of the rural landscape and forest protection. Other important lesson is that international and multilateral agencies need to be more strategically oriented in the role of structuring funding sources to implement important projects for the rural environment protection.