Deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon could be halved by scaling up the implementation of zero-deforestation cattle commitments

Deforestation for agriculture is a key threat to global carbon stocks, biodiversity, and indigenous ways of life. In the absence of strong territorial governance, zero-deforestation commitments (ZDCs), corporate policies to decouple food production from deforestation, remain a central tool to combat this issue. Yet evidence on their effectiveness remains mixed and the mechanisms limiting effectiveness are poorly understood. To advance understanding of ZDCs’ potential at reducing deforestation, we developed the first spatially explicit estimates of farmers’ exposure to ZDC companies in the Brazilian Amazon cattle sector. Exposure was measured by determining the market share of ZDC firms from the first full year of ZDC adoption in 2010 until 2018. Our analysis evaluated how variation in this exposure influenced deforestation. We found the G4 Agreement, the most widespread and strongly implemented cattle ZDC, reduced cattle-driven deforestation by 7,000 ± 4,000 km² (15 ± 8%) between 2010 and 2018. Additionally, had all firms adopted and implemented an effective ZDC, cattle-driven deforestation could have dropped by 24,000 ± 13,000 km² (51 ± 28%). These results for the world’s principal deforestation hotspot suggests supply chain policies can substantially reduce deforestation. However, their effectiveness is contingent on widespread adoption and rigorous implementation, both of which are currently insufficient to prevent large scale deforestation. Increased adoption and implementation could be incentivized through greater pressure from the Brazilian government and import countries.     

Conditions influencing the adoption of effective anti-deforestation policies in South America’s commodity frontiers

Reducing large-scale deforestation in commodity frontiers remains a key challenge for climate change mitigation and the conservation of biodiversity. Public and private anti-deforestation policies have been shown to effectively reduce forest loss, but the conditions under which such policies get adopted are rarely examined. Here we propose a set of conditions that we expect to be associated with the adoption of effective anti-deforestation policies in commodity frontiers. We then examine whether these conditions have influenced policy adoption in South America’s major soy-and-cattle frontiers: the Brazilian Amazon, the Cerrado, the Chaco, the Chiquitano, and Paraguay’s Atlantic Forest. By collating empirical data from diverse sources, including literature review, extensive expert interviews, and analysis of primary and secondary data, we show that the Cerrado, the Chaco, and the Chiquitano differ from the Brazilian Amazon in multiple ways that might have inhibited adoptions of effective anti-deforestation instruments. These conditions include: a higher importance of the agricultural sector within the respective countries, lower carbon stocks and species richness, higher prevalence of private land tenure, and higher baseline compliance with forest reserve regulations on private lands. We also observe that the adoption of the most effective private anti-deforestation instrument, commodity moratoria, may respond to similar conditions as those influencing the adoption of public instruments. Incentivizing public and private actors to adopt effective anti-deforestation policies in the Cerrado, Chaco, and the Chiquitano will likely be more challenging than it has been in the Brazilian Amazon.     

Forest law enforcement in the Brazilian Amazon: Costs and income effects

Despite recent success in reducing forest loss in the Brazilian Amazon, additional forest conservation efforts, for example, through ‘Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation’ (REDD+), could significantly contribute to global climate-change mitigation. Economic incentives, such as payments for environmental services could promote conservation, but deforestation often occurs on land without crucial tenure-security prerequisites. Improving the enforcement of existing regulatory disincentives thus represents an important element of Brazil's anti-deforestation action plan. However, conservation law enforcement costs and benefits have been much less studied than for conditional payments. We develop a conceptual framework and a spatially explicit model to analyze field-based regulatory enforcement in the Brazilian Amazon. We validate our model, based on historical deforestation and enforcement mission data from 2003 to 2008. By simulating the current conservation law enforcement practice, we analyze the costs of liability establishment and legal coercion for alternative conservation targets, and evaluate corresponding income impacts. Our findings suggest that spatial patterns of both deforestation and inspection costs markedly influence enforcement patterns and their income effects. Field-based enforcement is a highly cost-effective forest conservation instrument from a regulator's point of view, but comes at high opportunity costs for land users. Payments for environmental services could compensate costs, but will increase budget outlays vis-à-vis a command-and-control dominated strategy. Both legal and institutional challenges have to be overcome to make conservation payments work at a larger scale. Decision-makers may have to innovatively combine incentive and disincentive-based policy instruments in order to make tropical forest conservation both financially viable and socially compatible.     

The Expansion of Intensive Beef Farming to the Brazilian Amazon

Systems of intensive animal farming, such as the confinement of beef cattle, are widespread in the developed world. Such practices have been under scrutiny since the 1960s for animal welfare and pollution issues. Here, we document the expansion of intensive beef farming to the Brazilian Amazon in order to assess socio-environmental implications. Using a combination of data mining and field surveys, we developed a georeferenced dataset of 201 cattle confinements in the states of Mato Grosso (Cerrado and Amazon biomes), Pará and Rondônia (Amazon biome), collected in 2017. In Mato Grosso, the country’s agribusiness powerhouse, confinements are well established and account for ˜20% of the cattle slaughter. But rapid expansion in Pará and Rondônia remains largely unnoticed due to the absence of data since 2012. We used the new dataset to map cattle confinements across space and time. For the first time, (1) we document an expansion to the Amazon biome; (2) we also show that confinements are associated with substantially higher productivity rates, though intensified pasture-based systems can reach comparable yields; (3) that confinements have crop production levels 2-3 times higher than comparable properties, both in- and out-of-farm; and (4) that confinements tend to slow down on-property deforestation when compared to fattening ranches in the Amazon biome, although off-property effects could be substantial and need further study. Overall, the implications of intensive beef farming for animal welfare and local waste generation in Brazil require attention as pressure to avoid deforestation continues to stimulate the practice.     

Estimating greenhouse gas emissions from cattle raising in Brazil

The study estimated, for the first time, the greenhouse gas emissions associated with cattle raising in Brazil, focusing on the period from 2003 to 2008 and the three principal sources: 1) portion of deforestation resulting in pasture establishment and subsequent burning of felled vegetation; 2) pasture burning; and 3) bovine enteric fermentation. Deforestation for pasture establishment was only considered for the Amazon and Cerrado. Emissions from pasture burning and enteric fermentation were accounted for the entire country. The consolidated emissions estimate lies between approximately 813 Mt CO₂eq in 2008 (smallest value) and approximately 1,090 Mt CO₂eq in 2003 (greatest value). The total emissions associated with Amazon cattle ranching ranged from 499 to 775 Mt CO₂eq, that of the Cerrado from 229 to 231 Mt CO₂eq, and that of the rest of the country between 84 and 87 Mt CO₂eq. The full set of emissions originating from cattle raising is responsible for approximately half of all Brazilian emissions (estimated to be approximately 1,055 Mt CO₂eq in 2005), even without considering cattle related sources not explicitly estimated in this study, such as energy use for transport and refrigeration along the beef and derivatives supply chain. The potential for reduction of greenhouse gas emissions offered by the Brazilian cattle industry is very high and might constitute Brazil’s most important opportunity for emissions mitigation. The study offers a series of policy recommendations for mitigation that can be implemented by public and private administrators at a low cost relative to other greenhouse gas reduction options.     

Criteria for effective zero-deforestation commitments

Zero-deforestation commitments are a type of voluntary sustainability initiative that companies adopt to signal their intention to reduce or eliminate deforestation associated with commodities that they produce, trade, and/or sell. Because each company defines its own zero-deforestation commitment goals and implementation mechanisms, commitment content varies widely. This creates challenges for the assessment of commitment implementation or effectiveness. Here, we develop criteria to assess the potential effectiveness of zero-deforestation commitments at reducing deforestation within a company supply chain, regionally, and globally. We apply these criteria to evaluate 52 zero-deforestation commitments made by companies identified by Forest 500 as having high deforestation risk. While our assessment indicates that existing commitments converge with several criteria for effectiveness, they fall short in a few key ways. First, they cover just a small share of the global market for deforestation-risk commodities, which means that their global impact is likely to be small. Second, biome-wide implementation is only achieved in the Brazilian Amazon. Outside this region, implementation occurs mainly through certification programs, which are not adopted by all producers and lack third-party near-real time deforestation monitoring. Additionally, around half of all commitments include zero-net deforestation targets and future implementation deadlines, both of which are design elements that may reduce effectiveness. Zero-net targets allow promises of future reforestation to compensate for current forest loss, while future implementation deadlines allow for preemptive clearing. To increase the likelihood that commitments will lead to reduced deforestation across all scales, more companies should adopt zero-gross deforestation targets with immediate implementation deadlines and clear sanction-based implementation mechanisms in biomes with high risk of forest to commodity conversion.     

Forest conservation effects of Brazil's zero deforestation cattle agreements undermined by leakage

Supply chain interventions, which include certification schemes and zero-deforestation commitments that aim to produce environmentally and socially beneficial outcomes, are increasingly common, but evidence of their efficacy is scarce. We quantified avoided deforestation from Brazil's zero-deforestation cattle agreements by exploiting variation in the policy's rollout and the acquisition of slaughterhouses by the agreements’ signatories from 2007 to 2015 in the Amazonian states of Mato Grosso and Pará. We found no average impact of the agreements on forest cover in the regions surrounding signatory slaughterhouses by the end of 2014. Our results show avoided deforestation of about 6% from the agreements on properties that enrolled early in the rural environmental land registry. However, forest loss increased commensurately on those properties that registered later, thus washing out the positive conservation effects from the early registrants. Our results also highlight that slaughterhouses bought plants in regions with higher deforestation both before and after the agreement, suggesting that companies are not avoiding these important hotspots. We conclude that the agreements have led to some avoided deforestation on registered properties, whose boundaries are transparent and publicly accessible, but that more robust reductions in deforestation will require additional action. The agreements could be made more effective by expanding monitoring to include all properties in the supply chain, as well as ensuring that all slaughterhouses monitor.     

Amazon forest biomass density maps: tackling the uncertainty in carbon emission estimates

As land use change (LUC), including deforestation, is a patchy process, estimating the impact of LUC on carbon emissions requires spatially accurate underlying data on biomass distribution and change. The methods currently adopted to estimate the spatial variation of above- and below-ground biomass in tropical forests, in particular the Brazilian Amazon, are usually based on remote sensing analyses coupled with field datasets, which tend to be relatively scarce and often limited in their spatial distribution. There are notable differences among the resulting biomass maps found in the literature. These differences subsequently result in relatively high uncertainties in the carbon emissions calculated from land use change, and have a larger impact when biomass maps are coded into biomass classes referring to specific ranges of biomass values. In this paper we analyze the differences among recently-published biomass maps of the Amazon region, including the official information used by the Brazilian government for its communication to the United Nation Framework on Climate Change Convention of the United Nations. The estimated average pre-deforestation biomass in the four maps, for the areas of the Amazon region that had been deforested during the 1990–2009 period, varied from 205?±?32 Mg ha^?1 during 1990–1999, to 216?±?31 Mg ha^?1 during 2000–2009. The biomass values of the deforested areas in 2011 were between 7 and 24 % higher than for the average deforested areas during 1990–1999, suggesting that although there was variation in the mean value, deforestation was tending to occur in increasingly carbon-dense areas, with consequences for carbon emissions. To summarize, our key findings were: (i) the current maps of Amazonian biomass show substantial variation in both total biomass and its spatial distribution; (ii) carbon emissions estimates from deforestation are highly dependent on the spatial distribution of biomass as determined by any single biomass map, and on the deforestation process itself; (iii) future deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon is likely to affect forests with higher biomass than those deforested in the past, resulting in smaller reductions in carbon dioxide emissions than expected purely from the recent reductions in deforestation rates; and (iv) the current official estimate of carbon emissions from Amazonian deforestation is probably overestimated, because the recent loss of higher-biomass forests has not been taken into account.     

Scaling up zero-deforestation initiatives through public-private partnerships: A look inside post-conflict Colombia

The rise of public and private zero-deforestation commitments is opening a new collaborative space in global forest governance. Governments seeking to reduce national greenhouse gas emissions by protecting and restoring forests are partnering with companies motivated to eliminate deforestation from supply chains. The proliferation of zero-deforestation initiatives is creating opportunities for policy synergies and scaling up impacts, but has led to a more complex regulatory landscape. Drawing on policy analysis and expert interviews, we explore public-private policy interactions in Colombia as a case study for tropical forested nations with interest in aligning climate, forest, and development goals. We consider how zero-deforestation priorities are set on the national agenda and scaled up through public-private partnerships. We identify zero-deforestation initiatives in three overlapping governance domains—domestic public policy, REDD+, sustainable supply chain initiatives—and highlight ten multi-stakeholder pledges that have catalyzed supporting initiatives at multiple scales. Emerging from decades of armed conflict, Colombia is pursuing a peace building model based on low-emissions rural development. The peace deal provided a focusing event for zero-deforestation that converged with political momentum and institutional capacity to open a policy window. A government pledge to eliminate deforestation in the Colombian Amazon by 2020 set the national agenda and stimulated international REDD+ cooperation. Lessons from Colombia show that governments provide important directionality among the proliferation of zero-deforestation initiatives. Public pledges and the orchestration of actors through public-private partnerships allow governments to scale up efforts by aligning transnational activities with national priorities. The case of Colombia serves as a potential zero-deforestation model for other nations, but challenges around equitable land tenure, illegality, and enforcement must be overcome for multi-stakeholder initiatives to produce long-term change.     

Oil palm expansion in Cameroon: Insights into sustainability opportunities and challenges in Africa

Oil palm production expanded 1.2 million hectares in sub-Saharan Africa since 1990, with expansion accelerating in several heavily forested countries since 2000. Despite a narrative of expansion driven by multinational corporations, we provide evidence of a dynamic non-industrial oil palm production sector linked to a burgeoning informal milling enterprise. Surveys were conducted with oil palm farmers in Cameroon (n = 546), the third largest palm oil producer on the continent with the greatest amount of deforestation due to recent expansion, to determine who is expanding into forest. Seventy-three percent of survey respondents reported clearing forest, the magnitude of which was explained by differences in milling strategies and supply chain integration. Large-scale, non-industrial producers played a disproportionate role in deforestation, many of which were engaged in informal supply chains through the use of non-industrial mills. Farms associated with more clearing tended to use high-yielding seedlings. Even the highest yielding farms, however, averaged only 7.7 tons fresh fruit bunches (FFBs) ha⁻¹ yr⁻¹, well below the potential 20 tons FFBs ha⁻¹ yr⁻¹ yield for Cameroon. We also found a strong relationship between deforestation and land claims. Most farms claimed ownership of their land, although only 5% had official land titles. Conservation challenges in the region arise from land tenure laws that incentivize forest clearing. This study sheds light on the role of informal supply chains in deforestation and highlights the need for strict implementation and enforcement of land use zoning policies.     

Spatially complex land change: The Indirect effect of Brazil's agricultural sector on land use in Amazonia

Soybean farming has brought economic development to parts of South America, as well as environmental hopes and concerns. A substantial hope resides in the decoupling of Brazil's agricultural sector from deforestation in the Amazon region, in which case expansive agriculture need not imply forest degradation. However, concerns have also been voiced about the potential indirect effects of agriculture. This article addresses these indirect effects for the case of the Brazilian Amazon since 2002. Our work finds that as much as thirty-two percent of deforestation, or the loss of more than 30,000 km² of Amazon forest, is attributable, indirectly, to Brazil's soybean sector. However, we also observe that the magnitude of the indirect impact of the agriculture sector on forest loss in the Amazon has declined markedly since 2006. We also find a shift in the underlying causes of indirect land use change in the Amazon, and suggest that land appreciation in agricultural regions has supplanted farm expansions as a source of indirect land use change. Our results are broadly congruent with recent work recognizing the success of policy changes in mitigating the impact of soybean expansion on forest loss in the Amazon. However, they also caution that the soybean sector may continue to incentivize land clearings through its impact on regional land markets.     

Designing effective and equitable zero-deforestation supply chain policies

In response to the clearing of tropical forests for agricultural expansion, agri-food companies have adopted promises to eliminate deforestation from their supply chains in the form of ‘zero-deforestation commitments’ (ZDCs). While there is growing evidence about the environmental effectiveness of these commitments (i.e., whether they meet their conservation goals), there is little information on how they influence producers’ opportunity to access sustainable markets and related livelihood outcomes, or how design and implementation choices influence tradeoffs or potential synergies between effectiveness and equity in access. This paper explores these research gaps and makes three main contributions by: i) defining and justifying the importance of analyzing access equity and its relation to effectiveness when implementing forest-focused supply chain policies such as ZDCs, ii) identifying seven policy design principles that are likely to maximize synergies between effectiveness and access equity, and iii) assessing effectiveness-access equity tensions and synergies across common ZDC implementation mechanisms amongst the five largest firms in each of the leading agricultural forest-risk commodity sectors: palm oil, soybeans, beef cattle, and cocoa. To enhance forest conservation while avoiding harm to the most vulnerable farmers in the tropics, it is necessary to combine stringent rules with widespread capacity building, greater involvement of affected actors in the co-production of implementation mechanisms, and support for alternative rural development paths.     

Effects of Amazon basin deforestation on regional atmospheric circulation and water vapor transport towards tropical South America

The water cycle over the Amazon basin is a regulatory mechanism for regional and global climate. The atmospheric moisture evaporated from this basin represents an important source of humidity for itself and for other remote regions. The deforestation rates that this basin has experienced in the past decades have implications for regional atmospheric circulation and water vapor transport. In this study, we analyzed the changes in atmospheric moisture transport towards tropical South America during the period 1961–2010, according to two deforestation scenarios of the Amazon defined by Alves et al. (Theor Appl Climatol 100(3-4):337–350, 2017). These scenarios consider deforested areas of approximately 28% and 38% of the Amazon basin, respectively. The Dynamic Recycling Model is used to track the transport of water vapor from different sources in tropical South America and the surrounding oceans. Our results indicate that under deforestation scenarios in the Amazon basin, continental sources reduce their contributions to northern South America at an annual scale by an average of between 40 and 43% with respect to the baseline state. Our analyses suggest that these changes may be related to alterations in the regional Hadley and Walker cells. Amazon deforestation also induces a strengthening of the cross-equatorial flow that transports atmospheric moisture from the Tropical North Atlantic and the Caribbean Sea to tropical South America during the austral summer. A weakening of the cross-equatorial flow is observed during the boreal summer, reducing moisture transport from the Amazon to latitudes further north. These changes alter the patterns of precipitable water contributions to tropical South America from both continental and oceanic sources. Finally, we observed that deforestation over the Amazon basin increases the frequency of occurrence of longer dry seasons in the central-southern Amazon (by between 29 and 57%), depending on the deforestation scenario considered, as previous studies suggest.     

Globalized supply chains: Emergent telecouplings in Mexico’s beef economy and environmental leakages

This article analyzes how trade liberalization in Mexico, particularly following the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), has transformed that nation’s cattle economy into a feedlot system manifesting multiple telecouplings and based on the transnational provision of inputs. A conceptual model is presented that suggests how environmental effects involving land use and GHG emissions emerge from changes in the beef supply chain. The article then presents an empirical analysis establishing that the production of corn and beef has intensified in the wake of NAFTA, and that deforestation rates have declined over the same period. Evidence is also presented showing that this has not precipitated a land sparing effect, given the leakage of deforestation into Central America, which supplies Mexican feedlots with 36 % of their source materials. The article calculates associated GHG emissions and establishes that enteric fermentation dominates deforestation as a source, and that ∼14% of GHGs produced by the post-NAFTA Mexican supply chain are emitted in Central America. This raises accounting questions for signatories to the Paris Climate Treaty, given commitments are nation-based.     

Transportation costs and the spatial distribution of land use in the Brazilian Amazon

We examine the question of whether reducing transport costs in the Amazon has lead to increased land clearing. Data on land clearing, transport costs and other related variables from 1975 to 1995 is analyzed using econometric approaches that exploit the dynamic time series dimension of the data to control for possible omitted variables and endogeneity. Our results suggest that the impact of changes in transport costs on clearing depends greatly on the initial land use. Specifically, we find that in regions where a greater proportion of the land is already cleared, reducing transport costs can lessen the rate of future clearing. On the other hand, reducing transport costs through areas that have seen little human activity is more likely to increase deforestation.     

Deforestation in the Ayeyarwady Delta and the conservation implications of an internationally-engaged Myanmar

Myanmar is a country of huge biodiversity importance that is undergoing major political change, bringing with it new international engagement. This includes access to international markets, which will likely spur investment in export-oriented agriculture, leading to increased pressures on already threatened ecosystems. This scenario is illustrated in the Ayeyarwady Delta, the country's agricultural heartland sustaining high deforestation rates. Using the Delta as a model system, we use an integrated approach to inquire about whether and how imminent agricultural reforms associated with an internationally-engaged Myanmar could introduce new actors and incentives to invest in agricultural expansion that could affect deforestation rates. We use a novel remote sensing analysis to quantify deforestation rates for the Delta from 1978 to 2011, develop business-as-usual deforestation scenarios, and contextualize those results with an analysis of contemporary policy changes within Myanmar that are expected to alter the principal drivers of land-cover change. We show that mangrove systems of Myanmar are under greater threat than previously recognized, and that agriculture has been the principle driver of deforestation on the Delta. The centrality of agriculture to the Myanmar economy indicates that emerging policies are likely to tip the scales towards agricultural expansion, agro-industrial investment and potentially greater rates of deforestation due to the introduction of well-funded investors, insufficient land tenure agreements, and low governance effectiveness. The broad national challenge is to initiate environmental governance reforms (including safeguards) in the face of significant pressures for land grabbing and opportunistic resource extraction.     

Explaining the stickiness of supply chain relations in the Brazilian soybean trade

The global trade of agricultural commodities has profound social-ecological impacts, from potentially increasing food availability and agricultural efficiency, to displacing local communities, and to incentivizing environmental destruction. Supply chain stickiness, understood as the stability in trading relationships between supply chain actors, moderates the impacts of agricultural commodity production and the possibilities for supply-chain interventions. However, what factors determine stickiness, that is, how and why farmers, traders, food processors, and consumer countries, develop and maintain trading relationships with specific producing regions, remains unclear. Here, we use data on the Brazilian soy supply chain, a mixed methods approach based on extensive actor-based fieldwork, and an explanatory regression model, to identify and explore the factors that influence stickiness between places of production and supply chain actors. We find four groups of factors to be important: economic incentives, institutional enablers and constraints, social and power dimensions, and biophysical and technological conditions. Among the factors we explore, surplus capacity in soy processing infrastructure, (i.e., crushing and storage facilities) is important in increasing stickiness, as is export-oriented production. Conversely, volatility in market demand expressed by farm-gate soy prices and lower land-tenure security are key factors reducing stickiness. Importantly, we uncover heterogeneity and context-specificity in the factors determining stickiness, suggesting tailored supply-chain interventions are beneficial. Understanding supply chain stickiness does not, in itself, provide silver-bullet solutions to stopping deforestation, but it is a crucial prerequisite to understanding the relationships between supply chain actors and producing regions, identifying entry points for supply chain sustainability interventions, assessing the effectiveness of such interventions, forecasting the restructuring of trade flows, and considering sourcing patterns of supply chain actors in territorial planning.     

Rural property size drives patterns of upland and riparian forest retention in a tropical deforestation frontier

Deforestation in Brazilian Amazonia accounts for a disproportionate global scale fraction of both carbon emissions from biomass burning and biodiversity erosion through habitat loss. Here we use field- and remote-sensing data to examine the effects of private landholding size on the amount and type of forest cover retained within economically active rural properties in an aging southern Amazonian deforestation frontier. Data on both upland and riparian forest cover from a survey of 300 rural properties indicated that 49.4% (SD = 29.0%) of the total forest cover was maintained as of 2007, and that property size is a key regional-scale determinant of patterns of deforestation and land-use change. Small properties (≤150 ha) retained a lower proportion of forest (20.7%, SD = 17.6) than did large properties (>150 ha; 55.6%, SD = 27.2). Generalized linear models showed that property size had a positive effect on remaining areas of both upland and total forest cover. Using a Landsat time-series, the age of first clear-cutting that could be mapped within the boundaries of each property had a negative effect on the proportion of upland, riparian, and total forest cover retained. Based on these data, we show contrasts in land-use strategies between smallholders and largeholders, as well as differences in compliance with legal requirements in relation to minimum forest cover set-asides within private landholdings. This suggests that property size structure must be explicitly considered in landscape-scale conservation planning initiatives guiding agro-pastoral frontier expansion into remaining areas of tropical forest.     

Forty-year multi-scale land cover change and political ecology data reveal a dynamic and regenerative process of forests in Peruvian Indigenous Territories

This article explores deforestation and reforestation dynamics over 415,749 hectares of 25 titled Indigenous Community Lands (ICLs) in the Peruvian Amazon over forty years at three scales: total area, regions, and communities. We focus on ICLs as the territorial unit of analysis, as they are increasingly discussed regarding their importance for conservation. Additionally indigenous communities (ICs) are a too-marginalized group in the Amazon that merit more attention. Analyses of this kind are often short-term and use only large-scale Earth Observation methodologies. We use a multi-method approach linking remote sensing with ground verification, and qualitative historical political ecology work with ICs. We find that overall accumulated deforestation was low at 5%, but that when reforestation is considered, net deforestation was only 3.5%. At the community level deforestation and afforestation dynamics are complex, except for one period that indicates a macro state driver in the region. Results suggest inadequate accounting for forest regeneration in deforestation analyses and challenge the notion that presenting stakeholders with accumulated forest loss values is helpful in tropical areas where forests and people are dynamic. Furthermore, our work with communities highlights that categorizing them and their lands as pro-environment or not in general terms is unhelpful for determining fund flows to ICLs for environmental or development purposes.     

Enforcement and inequality in collective PES to reduce tropical deforestation: Effectiveness,efficiency and equity implications

Collective Payments for Ecosystem Services (PES), where forest users receive compensation conditional on group rather than individual performance, are an increasingly used policy instrument to reduce tropical deforestation. However, implementing effective, (cost) efficient and equitable (3E) collective PES is challenging because individuals have an incentive to free ride on others’ conservation actions. Few comparative studies exist on how different enforcement strategies can improve collective PES performance. We conducted a framed field experiment in Brazil, Indonesia and Peru to evaluate how three different strategies to contain the local free-rider problem perform in terms of the 3Es: (i) Public monitoring of individual deforestation, (ii) internal, peer-to-peer sanctions (Community enforcement) and (iii) external sanctions (Government enforcement). We also examined how inequality in wealth, framed as differences in deforestation capacity, affects policy performance. We find that introducing individual level sanctions can improve the effectiveness, efficiency and equity of collective PES, but there is no silver bullet that consistently improves all 3Es across country sites. Public monitoring reduced deforestation and improved the equity of the program in sites with stronger history of collective action. External sanctions provided the strongest and most robust improvement in the 3Es. While internal, peer enforcement can significantly reduce free riding, it does not improve the program’s efficiency, and thus participants’ earnings. The sanctioning mechanisms failed to systematically improve the equitable distribution of benefits due to the ineffectiveness of punishments to target the largest free-riders. Inequality in wealth increased group deforestation and reduced the efficiency of Community enforcement in Indonesia but had no effect in the other two country sites. Factors explaining differences across country sites include the history of collective action and land tenure systems.