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Category: Secondary Data

What Drives the Erasure of Protected Areas? Evidence from across the Brazilian Amazon

Published April 19, 2020 by Alex Pfaff
Derya Keles, Philippe Delacote, Alexander Pfaff, Siyu Qin, Michael B. Mascia
Ecological Economics 176 (2020) 106733 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecolecon.2020.106733

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Protected areas (PAs) are a widely used strategy for conserving forests and ecosystem services. When PAs succeed in deterring economic activities that degrade forests, the impacts include more forest yet less economic gain. These economic opportunity costs of conservation lead actors with economic interests to resist new PAs, driving their sites away from profitable market centers and towards areas featuring lower opportunity costs. Further, after PAs are created, economic actors may want PA downgrading, downsizing, and degazettement (collectively PADDD). We examine reductions in PAs’ spatial extent – downsizings (partial erasures) and degazettements (complete erasures) − that presumably reduce protection. Using data for the entire Brazilian Amazon from PADDDtracker.org, our empirical analyses explore whether size reductions from 2006 to 2015 resulted from bargaining between development and conservation. We find that the risks of PA size reductions are raised by: lower travel costs (as implied by distances to roads and cities), which affect economic gains and enforcement; greater PA size, which affects enforcement; and more prior internal deforestation, which lowers the impacts of size reductions. These dynamics of protection offer insights on the potentially conflicting factors that lead to PA size reductions, with implications for policymaking to enhance PA effectiveness and permanence.

 

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The Effectiveness of Forest Conservation Policies and Programs

Published March 7, 2020 by Alex Pfaff
Jan Borner, Dario Schulz, Sven Wunder, Alexander Pfaff
Annual Review of Resource Economics 12:19.1-19.20 (2020) https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-resource-110119-025703

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The world’s forests provide valuable contributions to people but continue to be threatened by agricultural expansion and other land uses.Counterfactual-based methods are increasingly used to evaluate forest conservation initiatives. This review synthesizes recent studies quantifying the impacts of such policies and programs.Extending past reviews focused on instrument choice, design, and implementation, our theory of change explicitly acknowledges context. Screening over 60,000 abstracts yielded 136 comparable normalized effect sizes (Cohen’s d). Comparing across instrument categories, evaluation methods, and contexts suggests not only a lack of “silver bullets” in the conservation toolbox, but that effectiveness is also low on average. Yet context is critical. Many interventions in our sample were implemented in “bulletproof” contexts of low pressure on natural resources. This greatly limits their potential impacts and suggests the need to invest further not only in understanding but also in better aligning conservation with local and global development goals.

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Evaluating REDD+ at Subnational Level: Amazon Fund impacts in Alta Floresta, Brazil

Published February 3, 2020 by Alex Pfaff
Juliano Correa, Elias Cisneros, Jan Borner, Alexander Pfaff, Marcelo Costa, Raoni Rajao
Forest Policy and Economics 116:102178

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The Amazon Fund is the world’s largest program to reduce emissions from deforestation and forest degradation (REDD+), funded with over US $1b donated by Norway and Germany between 2008 and 2017 to reward Brazil for prior deforestation reductions. Olhos D’Água da Amazônia is cited as a leading project success − with over one thousand small-to-medium-sized crop and livestock producers in the municipality of Alta Floresta, Mato Grosso State receiving more from the Amazon Fund than all but two other municipalities. To secure property rights, aid environmental planning, and raise farmers’ productivity and output diversity, the project helped farmers register in Brazil’s environmental cadaster and receive property certificates. Furthermore, Olhos D’Água supported milk and honey production and paid farmers to conserve riverine forest sites. We estimate causal effects of Olhos D’Água, versus a counterfactual estimate of what would have happened without the project, using a synthetic-control method. We build from the pool of blacklisted municipalities weighted averages (synthetic controls) that best match pre-treatment outcomes for Alta Floresta. Project effects are estimated as post-treatment differences between Alta Floresta and the synthetic controls. We find that the project increased new CAR registrations, and INCRA certifications, and may have moderately increased honey and milk production. Alta Floresta’s annual forest losses remained historically low but we find no clear causal effect of the project on deforestation rates. Our results support that rigorous impact evaluation can motivate and guide project improvements.

 

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Investing in local capacity to respond to a federal environmental mandate: forest & economic impacts of the Green Municipality Program in the Brazilian Amazon

Published January 1, 2020 by Alex Pfaff
Erin Sills, Alexander Pfaff, Luiza Andrade, Justin Kirkpatrick, Rebecca Dickson
World Development 129:104891 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.worlddev.2020.104891

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Over the past decade, the Brazilian federal government has offered a negative collective incentive to reduce deforestation by ‘blacklisting’ the municipalities in the Amazon with the highest deforestation rates. As for any unfunded mandate, the responses to blacklisting depend on both local incentives and local capacities. We evaluate a state program — Programa Municípios Verdes (PMV) or the Green Municipality Program — to increase the capacity of municipal governments in the state of Pará to respond to this federal incentive. The PMV is voluntary, as municipal governments choose whether to participate. To control for differences due to self-selection into the program, we employ quasi-experimental methods: two-way, fixed-effects regressions in matched samples of municipalities; and the synthetic control method that compares outcomes in a participating municipality to outcomes in a weighted blend of control municipalities. Neither approach suggests that the PMV reduced deforestation beyond the effect of the blacklist. We hypothesize that municipalities joined the PMV to ameliorate the costs of complying with blacklist requirements, including the costs of exiting the blacklist. We show that the PMV increased total value added – with substantial heterogeneity – in participating blacklisted municipalities, and that these gains likely are not due to agricultural intensification. They may result from reductions in compliance risk and cost that make economic investments in a municipality more appealing. In the long run, this could make forest conservation more socially and politically sustainable.

 

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Pervasive human-driven decline of life on Earth points to the need for transformative change

Published December 16, 2019 by Alex Pfaff
Sandra Diaz, Josep Settele, Eduardo Brondizio, H.T. Ngo, A. Arneth, P. Balvanera, K.A. Brauman, S.H.M. Butchart, K.M.A. Chan, L.A. Garibaldi, K. Ichii, J. Liu, S.M. Subramanian, G.F. Midgley, P. Miloslavish, Z. Molnar, D. Obura, A. Pfaff, S. Polasky, A. Purvis, J. Razzaque, B. Reyers, R.R. Chowdury, Y. Shin, I. Visseren-Hamakers, K.J. Willis, C.N. Zayas
Science 366 DOI:10.1126/science.aaw3100

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The human impact on life on Earth has increased sharply since the 1970s, driven by the demands of a growing population with rising average per capita income. Nature is currently supplying more materials than ever before, but this has come at the high cost of unprecedented global declines in the extent and integrity of ecosystems, distinctness of local ecological communities, abundance and number of wild species, and the number of local domesticated varieties. Such changes reduce vital benefits that people receive from nature and threaten the quality of life of future generations. Both the benefits of an expanding economy and the costs of reducing nature’s benefits are unequally distributed. The fabric of life on which we all depend — nature and its contributions to people — is unravelling rapidly. Despite the severity of the threats and lack of enough progress in tackling them to date, opportunities exist to change future trajectories through transformative action. Such action must begin immediately, however, and address the root economic, social, and technological causes of nature’s deterioration.

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Impacts of protected areas vary with the level of government: comparing avoided deforestation across agencies in the Brazilian Amazon

Published October 20, 2019 by Alex Pfaff
Diego Herrera, Alexander Pfaff, Juan Robalino
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences www.pnas.org/cgi/doi/10.1073/pnas.1802877116

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Protected areas (PAs) are the leading tools to conserve forests. However, given their mixed effectiveness, we want to know when they have impacts internally and, if they do, when they have spillovers. Political economy posits roles for the level of government. One hypothesis is that federal PAs avoid more internal deforestation than state PAs since federal agencies consider gains for other jurisdictions. Such political differences as well as economic mechanisms can cause PA spillovers to vary greatly, even from “leakage,” more deforestation elsewhere, to “blockage,” less deforestation elsewhere. We examine internal impacts and local spillovers for Brazilian Amazon federal and state agencies. Outside the region’s “arc of deforestation,” we confirm little internal impact and show no spillovers. In the “arc,” we test impacts by state, as states are large and feature considerably different dynamics. For internal impacts, estimates for federal PAs and indigenous lands are higher than for state PAs. For local spillover impacts, estimates for most arc states either are not significant or are not robust; however, for Pará, federal PAs and indigenous lands feature both internal impacts and local spillovers. Yet, the spillovers in Pará go in opposite directions across agencies, leakage for indigenous lands but blockage for federal PAs, suggesting a stronger external signal from the environmental agency. Across all these tools, only federal PAs lower deforestation internally and nearby. Results suggest that agencies’ objectives and capacities are critical parts of the contexts for conservation strategies.

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