Abstract
Regulatory enforcement of forest conservation laws is often dismissed as an ineffective approach to reducing tropical forest loss. Yet, effective enforcement is often a precondition for alternative conservation measures, such as payments for environmental services, to achieve desired outcomes. Fair and efficient policies to reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation (REDD) will thus crucially depend on understanding the determinants and requirements of enforcement effectiveness. Among potential REDD candidate countries, Brazil is considered to possess the most advanced deforestation monitoring and enforcement infrastructure. This study explores a unique dataset of over 15 thousand point coordinates of enforcement missions in the Brazilian Amazon during 2009 and 2010, after major reductions of deforestation in the region. We study whether local deforestation patterns have been affected by field-based enforcement and to what extent these effects vary across administrative boundaries. Spatial matching and regression techniques are applied at different spatial resolutions. We find that field-based enforcement operations have not been universally effective in deterring deforestation during our observation period. Inspections have been most effective in reducing large-scale deforestation in the states of Mato Grosso and Pará, where average conservation effects were 4.0 and 9.9 hectares per inspection, respectively. Despite regional and actor-specific heterogeneity in inspection effectiveness, field-based law enforcement is highly cost-effective on average and might be enhanced by closer collaboration between national and state-level authorities.
Highlights
Annual deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon is down from 27772 km2 in 2004 to 4656 km2 in 2012—the lowest annual forest loss since annual satellite-based deforestation data became available in 1989
Any empirical evaluation of the Brazilian field-based forest law enforcement strategy has to deal with the fact that enforcement operations are not randomly allocated in space
In the states of Mato Grosso (MT) and Rondônia (RO) on the other hand, inspections are rather scattered and deforestation seems to have increased in most grid cells in the subsequent year
Summary
Annual deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon is down from 27772 km in 2004 to 4656 km in 2012—the lowest annual forest loss since annual satellite-based deforestation data became available in 1989. Effectiveness of Field-Based Forest Law Enforcement law enforcement operations, and embargos on blacklisted districts and farms in the Amazon have been key success factors [1,2,3,4]. Arima et al [5], for example, find that forest conservation policies have avoided 10,653 km of deforestation in a subgroup of priority districts over the period from 2009 to 2011. Understanding how the specific Brazilian policy mix has caused land users in the Amazon to deforest less, can help countries concerned with Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation (REDD+), a planned international climate policy mechanism, to conserve forests more effectively. It can contribute to fine-tune the Brazilian anti-deforestation strategy in the light of increased legal scope for deforestation after a recent forest law reform [6, 7]
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