Abstract
Deforestation of the Amazon rainforest is a threat to global climate, biodiversity, and many other ecosystem services. In order to address this threat, an understanding of the drivers of deforestation processes is required. Spillover effects and factors that differ across locations and over time play important roles in these processes. They are largely disregarded in applied research and thus in the design of evidence-based policies. In this study, we model connectivity between regions and consider heterogeneous effects to gain more accurate quantitative insights into the inherent complexity of deforestation. We investigate the impacts of agriculture in Mato Grosso, Brazil, for the period 2006–2017 considering spatial spillovers and varying impacts over time and space. Spillovers between municipalities that emanate from croplands in the Amazon appear as the major driver of deforestation, with no direct effects from agriculture in recent years. This suggests a moderate success of the Soy Moratorium and Cattle Agreements, but highlights their inability to address indirect effects. We find that the neglect of the spatial dimension and the assumption of homogeneous impacts lead to distorted inference. Researchers need to be aware of the complex and dynamic processes behind deforestation, in order to facilitate effective policy design.
Highlights
The Amazon rainforest is the world’s largest forest and provides a wide range of ecosystem services
The estimated effects of the Soy Moratorium and Cattle Agreements are highly dependent on the particular time period and space under scrutiny, which is reflected in mixed results in the literature (e.g.7,8,21–23,27,29)
We identify a major pathway behind these deforestation processes in the form of spatial spillover effects
Summary
The Amazon rainforest is the world’s largest forest and provides a wide range of ecosystem services. Studies of deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon emphasise the roles of infrastructure investment and governmental programmes, such as settlement policy and credit p rogrammes[15,16] These intensified the role of market forces as a determinant of the dynamics of land use c hange[17,18]. Such command-and-control policies are the main form of intervention, as opposed to incentive-based policies[13] Their efficacy may be undermined by spillover effects, such as indirect land use change or leakage into other r egions[22,23,24]. The Soy Moratorium bans soy from previously deforested areas in the Amazon biome (see Fig. 1) since its inception in 2006, with the Cattle Agreements following in 2 0098,21 Both interventions were adapted and extended over time to achieve higher levels of compliance, applicability, and efficacy. Empirical studies that consider both spillover effects and heterogeneity of impacts in the context of the Soy Moratorium and Cattle Agreements are lacking
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