Perspectives for environmental conservation in the tropics: New challenges or old problems in the face of environmental disasters?

Society and the environment coevolved through feedbacks between human demands for natural resources and enviromental carrying capacity. Coupled socio-ecological systems are complex, adaptive and delimited by spatial or functional bound-aries surrounding ecosystems in which natural components (e.g., water, land, forest) are affected by human interactions.
Using a territorial and integrative approach based on ecological and socioeconomic factors, we envision innovative policies and initiatives aiming to reconcile urban economic development with rural conservation and restoration projects.
Ecologists and environmentalists have faced a dilemma during the last years in Brazil. Since the Samarco disaster in 2015, there is a high demand for ecological studies generated by environmental disasters, but the calls are often rigidly scoped, avoiding unfolding that would generate large expenditures by responsible companies or avoiding embarrassing inadequate activities. Such projects would eventually achieve scientific and environmental relevance, but restricting calls only to the immediate needs of governments and businesses, achievements may be far less effective than those obtained through advance-induced research, studying threatened communities, ecosystems and landscapes.
We postulate that more freely induced research aimed at deepening the environmental knowledge in threatened areas can generate not only relevant scientific information, but also improve conservation actions demanded when the problems arrive.