Abstract
Protected areas (PAs) cover a quarter of the tropical forest estate. Yet there is debate over the effectiveness of PAs in reducing deforestation, especially when local people have rights to use the forest. A key analytic problem is the likely placement of PAs on marginal lands with low pressure for deforestation, biasing comparisons between protected and unprotected areas. Using matching techniques to control for this bias, this paper analyzes the global tropical forest biome using forest fires as a high resolution proxy for deforestation; disaggregates impacts by remoteness, a proxy for deforestation pressure; and compares strictly protected vs. multiple use PAs vs indigenous areas. Fire activity was overlaid on a 1 km map of tropical forest extent in 2000; land use change was inferred for any point experiencing one or more fires. Sampled points in pre-2000 PAs were matched with randomly selected never-protected points in the same country. Matching criteria included distance to road network, distance to major cities, elevation and slope, and rainfall. In Latin America and Asia, strict PAs substantially reduced fire incidence, but multi-use PAs were even more effective. In Latin America, where there is data on indigenous areas, these areas reduce forest fire incidence by 16 percentage points, over two and a half times as much as naïve (unmatched) comparison with unprotected areas would suggest. In Africa, more recently established strict PAs appear to be effective, but multi-use tropical forest protected areas yield few sample points, and their impacts are not robustly estimated. These results suggest that forest protection can contribute both to biodiversity conservation and CO2 mitigation goals, with particular relevance to the REDD agenda. Encouragingly, indigenous areas and multi-use protected areas can help to accomplish these goals, suggesting some compatibility between global environmental goals and support for local livelihoods.
Highlights
Tropical deforestation accounts for between one fifth and one quarter of the total human contribution to greenhouse gases [1,2], and 80% of emissions from the least developed countries. (Data for 2005, including land-used change and forestry, from CAIT 8.0.) Reduction of deforestation contributes to climate change mitigation and may provide development benefits [3,4,5]
2000 protected areas, alongside the crude estimates from Table 3. (In all cases the crude –comparing all protected pixels against all never protected pixels – and prematch rates – comparing an unmatched 10 percent sample of protected pixels against a similar proportion of never protected pixels – were very similar or identical, implying that the random sample was representative of the population.) Table 6 repeats, but uses the 1990–2000 protected areas as the treatment group
Protected areas reduced the incidence of forest fires by 2.7–4.3 percentage points against a mean loss of 5.8 percent (Table 3) over 2000–08
Summary
Tropical deforestation accounts for between one fifth and one quarter of the total human contribution to greenhouse gases [1,2], and 80% of emissions from the least developed countries. (Data for 2005, including land-used change and forestry, from CAIT 8.0.) Reduction of deforestation contributes to climate change mitigation and may provide development benefits [3,4,5]. Tropical deforestation accounts for between one fifth and one quarter of the total human contribution to greenhouse gases [1,2], and 80% of emissions from the least developed countries. (Data for 2005, including land-used change and forestry, from CAIT 8.0.) Reduction of deforestation contributes to climate change mitigation and may provide development benefits [3,4,5]. Where deforestation is a threat to biodiversity, successful conservation or sustainable management efforts will have a side benefit of reducing forest carbon emissions. This is especially salient in the humid tropical forests, where deforestation rates and carbon densities are both high.
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