Deforestation fight in the sight of Brazilian Amazonas inhabitants

Abstract

Brazilian Amazon deforestation crystallizes numerous political, economic, and social issues. Recent empirical studies explore deforestation drivers by focusing on large-scale perspective but ignore the sight of the local populations. This article aims at providing an overview of deforestation perception among local populations defined as living within or near the Amazon biome. We have conducted 197 interviews in October 2021 in the Brazilian Amazonas region. On the basis of these interviews, we provide statistical analysis to explore 5 effects capable of driving the local perception of the deforestation processes: the gender, educational, generational, geographical and indigenous effects. Our results first highlight a very high and positive educational effect for the highest education level and a high indigenous effect, both in conformity with the intuition. Second, we observe a negative gender effect, contradicting some strands in the academic literature, and a high but ambiguous geographical effect. Finally, age does not appear to be neither a driver of interest nor an engagement in the fight against deforestation. In a context where the enforcement of environmental policy has become ineffective in recent years, we argue that characterizing local perceptions of deforestation processes might help to adjust the policy campaigns against deforestation, enhance their effectivenesses, and therefore participate to the restoration of Amazonian cover.