Serra do Gandarela National Park

We, the undersigned, direct this petition to the competent authorities to support the creation of the Serra do Gandarela National Park in Minas Gerais, Brazil. The Serra do Gandarela, located 30 km from Minas Gerais state capital Belo Horizonte, is a range of mountains comprising ferruginous rupestrian fields and Atlantic rain forest, two of the most endangered ecosystems in southeast Brazil. It is the home of rare and endemic flora and fauna biodiversity, and its thousands of pure water springs provide great part of the water used by Belo Horizonte's metropolitan area. The region also holds numerous historical and cultural sites that represent an enormous potential for local economic development through tourism-related initiatives.
This potential, though, is very dependent of the preservation of the region's natural and scenic attributes, which are currently being threatened by some very large scale mining projects. These mining projects could also jeopardize the future public water supply for the surrounding cities, to a total of more than four million people. Considering all this, we demand that the creation of the Serra do Gandarela National Park be done according to the technical proposal presented in September 2010 by the ICMBio, the Brazilian authority in charge of creating and managing federal conservation areas, as the best means to protect the region against the degradation of its environmental, scenic, social and cultural attributes.