Abstract
The Amazon Forest is an unquestionable cradle of planetary biological diversity and plays a fundamental role in regional and global climate change regulation. Annual deforestation rates in the Brazilian Amazon have gone up since 2012, presenting a grim scenario for 2021. The majority of this deforestation is illegal, but a significant proportion, 11.3 million hectares of forest in privately owned land, can be legally deforested and impact local climate, compromising Brazil’s Nationally Determined Contribution (NDC) to the Paris Agreement. Thus, a fundamental question remains: how can we avoid potentially legal deforestation? Farmers and ranchers who have the right to deforest have long demanded financial incentives to keep their forests standing, but few (if any) mechanisms exist to achieve it. We developed a compensation mechanism called CONSERV, hypothesizing that legal deforestation can be avoided through targeted compensation. CONSERV can potentially contribute to climate change mitigation and foster business models geared towards conservation and increased agricultural productivity when implemented at scale. We present CONSERV’s concept and potential to become an operational mechanism for Payment for Ecosystem Services/REDD + in line with Brazil’s Native Vegetation Protection Law and NDC commitment. Furthermore, we introduce some ideas on how CONSERV ensures permanence and minimizes leakage while gaining scale. To successfully maintain climatic stability and ecosystems, we need to reduce deforestation, both illegal and legal. CONSERV can help us solve the latter.
Highlights
The Brazilian Amazon houses the world’s largest tropical forest, hosting 10% of the world’s biodiversity (Cavender-Bares et al, 2018), and contributing to global climate change mitigation by retaining large carbon stocks (Phillips et al, 2017; Gatti et al, 2021)
The results for the Brazilian Amazon were lower when compared to other studies, which indicated an area of native vegetation beyond Legal Reserves” (LR) and PPA ranging from ∼21 to ∼38 Mha in the same region (Soares-Filho et al, 2014; Rajão et al, 2020; Observatório do Código Florestal [OCF], 2021)
Payment for Environmental Service (PES) initiatives are subject to numerous uncertainties (Bleischwitz et al, 2017) that relate to the impact and effectiveness of these programs
Summary
The Brazilian Amazon houses the world’s largest tropical forest, hosting 10% of the world’s biodiversity (Cavender-Bares et al, 2018), and contributing to global climate change mitigation by retaining large carbon stocks (Phillips et al, 2017; Gatti et al, 2021). We estimated the area at risk of legal deforestation by modeling the native vegetation assets in private rural properties according to the NVPL (Brasil, 2012). The results for the Brazilian Amazon were lower when compared to other studies, which indicated an area of native vegetation beyond LR and PPA ranging from ∼21 to ∼38 Mha in the same region (Soares-Filho et al, 2014; Rajão et al, 2020; Observatório do Código Florestal [OCF], 2021) This difference can be explained by the fact that we excluded from our analysis any property overlapping with public lands, and due to our restriction of defining assets exclusively as native vegetation that could legally be deforested. We are developing different business models with the private sector to enable mechanisms such as CONSERV to gain scale and become a market mechanism to avoid legal deforestation
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