Crossing spatial analyses and livestock economics to understand deforestation processes in the Brazilian Amazon: the case of São Félix do Xingú in South Pará

The Amazon is the largest tropical forest area on Earth, and has been undergoing rapid deforestation for the last four decades. In the Brazilian Amazon, large‐scale pasture for cattle ranching and soybean production are the main land uses, leading to a yearly deforestation rate of 0.5%. These conversions are mostly located in frontier areas distributed along the so‐called “arc of deforestation”. Within this large zone, various land use change processes are interacting through several modes of land valuation and organisation. From several case studies in the State of Pará (Brazil), the current project aims at analysing how landscape dynamics are related to infrastructure development, ecological conditions, zoning policies and to the evolution and the organisation of the production, consumption and marketing chains of livestock products. This paper presents the results for one test site, the region of São Félix do Xingú, South of Pará This region is the focus of land speculation, cattle expansion, and deforestation. Road construction, investments in electrical energy, financial credit for cattle, and the land reform policies have all fuelled this process. All these factors make this region one of the most dynamic agricultural frontiers in the Brazilian Amazon. The main objective of the paper is to improve our understanding of deforestation processes by crossing spatial analyses and 1ivestock economics.studies, and to characterise the role and impact of various natural and anthropic factors in the location and development of the main types of farmers, and their policy implications.     

Land governance as a precondition for decreasing deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon

This paper’s aim is to show that improvements in land governance in Brazil, and particularly in the Amazon region, have been the main pre-condition enabling reductions in deforestation of the Amazon rainforest. Deforestation occurs primarily where property rights are not clearly established, and occurs mostly on land directly or indirectly under state responsibility. This paper also shows that land speculation plays an important role in deforestation. Based on these findings, it is evident that Brazil must improve its land governance in order to decrease rates of deforestation. The Brazilian government has adopted important new efforts to improve land administration, including improvements in the registration process and the Terra Legal program, which are addressing public land problems across large areas of the Amazon. The concluding section highlights how efforts to reduce deforestation will only be possible through more efficient land governance, especially in the Amazon region, and discusses the important role that participatory land governance may play in improving land use and land ownership through application of land taxes.     

Are capacity deficits in local government leaving the Amazon vulnerable to environmental change?

The last 20 years have seen remarkable progress in monitoring and modelling environmental change in the Amazon region. As a result, scientists and policy makers now have robust and spatially explicit knowledge and forecasts of critical phenomena such as deforestation and bioclimatic uncertainty. However, whether this knowledge is used to support the implementation of policies and initiatives to cope with environmental changes in the Amazon depends on the ability of the political institutions to proactively integrate the scientific evidence into land planning at multiple spatial scales. In Brazil, municipalities are constitutionally responsible for legislating on land planning and therefore have a power to significantly influence the future trajectory of environmental change. Here, we assess the environmental capacity of municipalities in the Brazilian legal Amazon based on data from a self-assessment survey and from the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics database. Municipalities generally have a low level of institutional capacity and there is no evidence that the municipalities most at threat from environmental change are taking proactive measures to reduce their vulnerability. We argue that structural reforms and capacity raising initiatives are urgently needed, especially in smaller, less economically developed municipalities located in areas at high risk of imminent environmental change.     

Mapping properties to monitor forests: Landholder response to a large environmental registration program in the Brazilian Amazon

Across the tropics, development banks and conservation donors are investing millions in property mapping and registration projects to improve accountability for deforestation. An evaluation of the effectiveness and accuracy of existing environmental registries is crucial to assure the success of future efforts. This study presents an evaluation of deforestation and registration behavior in response to one of the largest of these property registration programs to date — the Rural Environmental Registry (CAR) in the Amazonian state of Pará. From late 2007 to 2013, approximately 100,000 properties covering 30 million hectares of self-declared claims were entered in this digital registry. We used fixed effects regression models and property level data to assess how registration influenced deforestation on different sizes of properties. Registration had little impact on deforestation behavior, with the exception of a significant reduction on “smallholder” properties in the size range of 100–300 ha. We link this reduction to interacting incentives from forest protection and land regularization policies and suggest that desire to strengthen land claims motivates these landholders’ response to the environmental registry. We also present evidence that some landholders may be registering incomplete or inaccurate parcels into the self-declared system to strategically benefit from policy incentives. Our results for smallholder properties indicate that environmental registries may have potential to facilitate reductions in deforestation if combined with a favorable combination of incentives. However, in places where land tenure is still being negotiated, the utility of environmental registries for forest policy enforcement and research may be limited without ongoing investment to resolve uncertainty around land claims.     

Persistence of cattle ranching in the Brazilian Amazon: A spatial analysis of the rationale for beef production

Fed by demand for beef within Brazil and in global markets, the Brazilian herd grew from 147 million head of cattle in 1990 to ≈200 million in 2007. Eighty-three percent of this expansion occurred in the Amazon and this trend is expected to continue as the industry bounces back from a recent agricultural downturn. Intensification of the cattle industry has been suggested as one way to reduce pressure on forest margins and spare land for soybean or sugarcane production, and is the cornerstone of Brazil's plan for mitigation of greenhouse gas emissions. To this end, federal credit programs and research and development activities in Brazil are aligning to support intensification goals, but there is no guarantee that this push for intensification will decrease the demand for land at the forest margin and as result curb CO₂ emissions from deforestation. In this paper we use a spatially explicit rent model which incorporates the local effects of biophysical characteristics, infrastructure, land prices, and distance to markets and slaughterhouses to calculate 30-year Net Present Values (NPVs) of extensive cattle ranching across the Brazilian Amazon. We use the model to ask where extensive ranching is profitable and how land acquisition affects profitability. We estimate that between 17% and 80% of land in the Amazon would have moderate to high NPVs when ranched extensively if it were settled, i.e. if the rancher does not buy the land but acquires it through land grabbing. In addition, we estimate that between 9% and 13% of land in the Amazon is vulnerable to speculation (i.e. areas with positive NPVs only if land is settled and not purchased), which suggests that land speculation is an important driver of extensive ranching profitability, and may continue to be in the future. These results suggest that pro-intensification policies such as credit provision for improved pasture management and investment in more intensive production systems must be accompanied by implementation and enforcement of policies that alter the incentives to clear forest for pasture, discourage land speculation, and increase accountability for land management practices if intensification of the cattle sector is to deter new deforestation and displace production from low-yield, extensive cattle production systems in frontier regions of the Brazilian Amazon.     

Property-level assessment of change in forest clearing patterns: The need for tailoring policy in the Amazon

Once driven by large-scale clearings, Amazon deforestation now occurs mostly in small increments. Did this result from the emergence of a new group of agents or from a strategic adaptation in the behavior of those who led deforestation in the past? We address this question using georeferenced data on private rural properties and deforestation. We cross property-level and forest clearing data in an empirical setting designed to detect shifts toward clearing patches that were knowingly invisible to the monitoring system. We are therefore able to assess not only whether deforesters were responding strategically to stricter monitoring of deforestation, but also how this response differed across actor types. Results suggest that centralized policy efforts introduced starting in the mid-2000s inhibited medium- and large-scale deforestation, but had heterogeneous effects on small-scale deforestation. Although the relative participation of small deforestation polygons increased in both sample states, the relative participation of smallholders in total state deforestation increased in Pará, while remaining constant in Mato Grosso. We interpret these results as suggestive — albeit not causal — evidence that landholders strategically responded to the monitoring system by adapting their forest clearings practices to elude monitoring in both Mato Grosso and Pará. In the latter, however, the increase in smallholders’ share of annual deforestation suggests that their clearing practices were relatively less affected by what effectively contained deforestation in large properties. The apparent similarity in scale of deforestation across states conceals relevant baseline differences between the agents engaging in forest clearing in each locality. Tailoring policy to account for such differences could strengthen Brazilian conservation policy.     

Evaluating sustainability options in an agricultural frontier of the Amazon using multi-criteria analysis

Agricultural expansion and deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon are driven by a complex interaction between economic and demographic drivers and institutional constraints. Land use policies such as Conservation Units and the Forest Code law should conserve biodiversity and other environmental aspects while, on the other hand, increasing commodity prices of beef and soy, driven by world markets provokes economic growth and expansion of the agricultural area. We carried out an impact assessment in eleven municipalities within an agricultural frontier along the road BR-163 that runs in the Brazilian Amazon states of Mato-Grosso and Pará. The impact assessment, covered a period between 2008 and 2020, showed that the autonomous development in the study area results in a strong increase in the performance of economic indicators but a reduction in environmental and some social indicators. The studied conservation policies are able to reduce negative environmental impacts to some extent, while hardly affecting economic and social indicators. The multi-criteria analysis (MCA) showed a trade-off relation between the economic and environmental dimension in such a way that the effect was much stronger in the high commodity price scenario than in the low price scenario. The policy implications of the MCA results are discussed in light of the institutional capacity of the Brazilian States under study, to implement effective conservation policies.     

Controlling deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon: Regional economic impacts and land-use change

Brazil confirmed targets for reducing greenhouse gas emissions in 2008, including an 80% reduction in deforestation in the Amazon by 2020. With this in mind, we investigated the trade-off between environmental conservation and economic growth in the Amazon. The aim of this study is to project the economic losses and land-use changes resulting from a policy to control deforestation and the rise in land productivity that is necessary to offset those losses. We developed a Dynamic Interregional Computable General Equilibrium Model for 30 Amazon regions with a land module allowing conversion between types of land. The results have shown that the most affected regions would be soybeans and cattle producers as well as regions dominated by family farms. To offset these impacts, it was estimated that an annual gain of land productivity of approximately 1.4% would be required.     

Solving Brazil's land use puzzle: Increasing production and slowing Amazon deforestation

Brazil has become an agricultural powerhouse, producing roughly 30 % of the world’s soy and 15 % of its beef by 2013 – yet historically much of that growth has come at the expense of its native ecosystems. Since 1985, pastures and croplands have replaced nearly 65 Mha of forests and savannas in the legal Amazon. A growing body of work suggests that this paradigm of horizontal expansion of agriculture over ecosystems is outdated and brings negative social and environmental outcomes. Here we propose four strategies that can reduce deforestation, while increasing production and social wellbeing. First, eliminate land grabbing and land speculation through designation of public forests. This would clarify land tenure and limit the pool of land available for uncontrolled expansion of agriculture and ranching. Second, reduce deforestation on private properties by implementing existing mechanisms in Brazil’s Forest Code to facilitate payments for environmental services, with support from market initiatives for sustainable sourcing of agricultural products. Third, incentivize increased productivity on medium and large properties through targeted investments. By stimulating adoption of proven technologies for sustainable intensification, this would help meet Brazil’s production targets and growing international demand for agricultural products, without expanding into new production areas. Finally, foster economic, environmental and social improvements through technical assistance to small farmers. Small farmers occupy a large swath of the Amazon and often lack access to technical assistance, production technology, and markets. Providing quality technical assistance to small farmers could help them better align production practices with local opportunities; increase household income and improve livelihoods; and reduce deforestation pressure. By implementing these four strategies in a coordinated effort between public and private agents, Brazil can show the world how to reduce deforestation while increasing agricultural output, reestablishing its leadership in managing natural resources and mitigating climate change.     

The impact of commodity price and conservation policy scenarios on deforestation and agricultural land use in a frontier area within the Amazon

Deforestation in the Amazon is caused by the complex interplay of different drivers. Price of commodities such as beef and soya, and incoming migration are paramount factors. Construction of new highways is a key aspect, as they enable a growing flow of people and economic activities, provoking an intensification of the conversion of forests into pasture and agricultural areas. The pavement of road BR-163 accelerates the expansion of the agricultural frontier from the state of Mato Grosso to Pará, inside the Amazon. Today, the Brazilian government applies two main kinds of policies to protect the environment. First by establishing conservation units (CUs) that include an array of reserve types from natural areas to indigenous lands, and second by enforcing the Forest Code (FC), a law that limits the occupation and use of forests. Legal reserve requirements for rural properties are 80% in the Amazon rainforest, 35% in the Cerrado shrublands and 20% in other regions. However, the effectiveness of these policies relies on a fragile institutional capacity, which causes a flawed monitoring, law enforcement and control. To assess the impact of effective conservation policies on land use and deforestation by 2020, we used the LUSMAPA model in combination with two scenarios, one that included different commodity price developments and migration rates and one on the assumption of the institutional strength to uphold the conservation policies. A revision of the FC from an average 80% policy target to 60% effective implementation and disregard borders of CUs by allowing 5% deforestation in CUs, that both corresponds to a ‘weak’ governmental enforcement, leads to additional deforestation of 41–57%, depending on the commodity price scenario. The results of the simulations are discussed in the light of recent policy changes in Brazil.     

Towards zero deforestation and forest restoration in the Amazon region of Maranhão state,Brazil

The Amazon forest in the state of Maranhão ensures ecosystem services that directly and indirectly affect the life quality of its population and economy, via hydrologic and climatic regulation, among other benefits. Currently, only 25% of the original forest cover (24.7 thousand km²) remains while illegal deforestation persists in a violent process that provokes visible social, economic and environmental harm. Simultaneously, Maranhão has seen record levels of burning, faces a water shortage and fights against the worst social and economic indicators in the country. Conversely, secondary vegetation covers 19.9 thousand km² (27% of deforested area) and is completely unprotected. Contrary to the international commitments assumed by Brazil to combat deforestation and restore forests, some of the political representatives of Maranhão have sought legal mechanisms to further diminish forest cover in public and private areas. To promote the conservation and restoration of Maranhão Amazon Forest, a multi-institutional network of researchers was established in 2015. This viewpoint paper aims to draw attention to this endangered region of the Brazilian Amazon and give science-oriented recommendations to policy makers in order to avoid more setbacks. We argue that Maranhão state must urgently establish a policy of Zero Deforestation, protect secondary forests and comply with the national forest restoration policy, thus ensuring long-term economic sustainability.     

Public policies can reduce tropical deforestation: Lessons and challenges from Brazil

Reducing carbon emissions from deforestation and forest degradation now constitutes an important strategy for mitigating climate change, particularly in developing countries with large forests. Given growing concerns about global climate change, it is all the more important to identify cases in which economic growth has not sparked excessive forest clearance. We address the recent reduction of deforestation rates in the Brazilian Amazon by conducting a statistical analysis to ascertain if different levels of environmental enforcement between two groups of municipalities had any impact on this reduction. Our analysis shows that these targeted, heightened enforcement efforts avoided as much as 10,653 km² of deforestation, which translates into 1.44 × 10⁻¹ Pg C in avoided emissions for the 3 y period. Moreover, most of the carbon loss and land conversion would have occurred at the expense of closed moist forests. Although such results are encouraging, we caution that significant challenges remain for Brazil's continued success in this regard, given recent changes in the forestry code, ongoing massive investments in hydro power generation, reductions of established protected areas, and growing demand for agricultural products.     

Offsetting legal deficits of native vegetation among Brazilian landholders: Effects on nature protection and socioeconomic development

The Brazilian native vegetation supports essential ecosystem services and biodiversity for the global society, while land use competition may intensify around the increasing needs for food, fibre and bioenergy. The Brazilian Forest Act of 2012 amplified a market-based mechanism for offsetting native vegetation deficits in private farmlands. This mechanism enables a large-scale trading system allowing landholders to offset their own deficits of native vegetation by purchasing certificates associated with a surplus of native vegetation from other landholders. This mechanism is an alternative for the more expensive restoration of native vegetation on own land. The launching of the mechanism now depends on specific regulations at state level, which may include geographical restrictions for offsetting deficits. The aim of this study is to evaluate the effects in nature protection and socio-economic development of different offsetting implementation alternatives. Our findings suggest that in a business-as-usual scenario the offsetting mechanism may have little or no additional effects on protection of native vegetation, because most of the offsetting is likely to take place where native vegetation is already protected by prevailing legislations. We concluded that it is possible to maximise environmental and socio-economic returns from the offsetting mechanism without undermining productive land. This would be possible if regulations ensure additionality in nature protection while enabling a self-sustaining mechanism for income generation for small-scale family farmers in the poorest region of Brazil, protecting biodiversity and counteracting major trade-offs between ecosystem services.     

Livestock intensification as a climate policy: Lessons from the Brazilian case

Brazil is trying to identify ways to ally economic growth with climate change mitigation. Productivity gains in livestock have been pointed out as a promising alternative to achieve that goal. Thus, this paper analyses the economic impacts of a policy of productivity gains in the Brazilian livestock. Besides, we evaluate if the policy may conciliate agricultural growth and deforestation control, bearing in mind the reduction of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from land-use changes. The analysis was carried out through a computable general equilibrium (CGE) model, tailored to represent land-use changes, GHG emissions and removals. Besides, it made progress modeling the heterogeneity of climate, soils, and emissions in inter-regional models with many regions. The results show that productivity gains can effectively “save” land and thus avoid deforestation, especially in the Amazon and Cerrado (savannah) biomes. The policy also may boost the economic growth, spreading it to other regions of Brazil, like Centre-West and North, and increasing income and consumption in those places. However, as a climate policy, focused on the reduction of GHG emissions, the results may be counterproductive. The net amount issued may increase, as a result of the positive stimulus of the policy on the economy, and GHG emissions are directly related to the economic growth.     

From “Green Hell” to “Amazonia Legal”: Land use models and the re-imagination of the rainforest as a new development frontier

Critical scholars have addressed land use models and related technologies by pointing to their epistemological underpinnings and the social consequences of visibilities and invisibilities induced by these instruments to different forms of governance. More recently, in addition to reaffirming the old dictum that the map is not the territory, some scholars have analyzed how land use models can shape perceptions, narratives and policy, and in this way “make” the territory and the state. In this study, we adopt the notion of sociotechnical imaginaries to highlight the role of land use models and basin-wide development schemes in the emergence of military developmentalism in the Brazilian Amazon. We show that earlier surveys of the Amazon were created in order to substantiate territorial claims and to guide the exploitation of natural rubber and other extractive resources. Mapping of the rivers as arteries with limited upland assessment implied a view of the Amazon as an immutable and invincible nature where resources were given as elements of natural landscapes. The approach of economic sectorial mapping that had dominated earlier surveys began to shift during and especially after World War II in an effort to imagine Amazonia as a separate and identifiable policy space which transformation would be possible with the application of development frameworks, such as the one derived from Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA). Likewise, experts from the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization played a key role in providing land use models and assessment that “proved” the economic viability of large-scale colonization projects. This article points out that the extensive occupation and ongoing destruction of the Amazon rainforest was also informed by US large-scale planning regimes infused with technoscientific approaches derived mostly from Global North scientific institutions. Those concepts underpinned imaginaries of an integrated region whose “planning surface” would be oriented by the idea of the “Legal Amazon”, subject to a technocratic, centralized and authoritarian style of developmentalism. In this way this paper shows how land use models are not mere representations of the territory but also carriers of sociotechnical imaginaries that coproduce radical changes in social and natural landscapes.     

Amazon forest on the edge of collapse in the Maranhão State,Brazil

The year 2019 in Brazil was marked by environmental setbacks, which catalyzed the increase of illegal deforestation and fire rates in the Brazilian Amazon. In the Amazon region of Maranhão state, original forest cover diminished from 25 % (24,700 km²) in 2016 to 24 % (23,967 km²) in 2019, and 6,038 km² of remaining forests were degraded by fires and/or illegal logging – processes related to high levels of violence against indigenous and rural communities. Almost half of all deforested areas in the region (36,060 km²) are considered a global restoration hotspot, however secondary vegetation remains unprotected and 8,294 km² were cleared between 2014 and 2018. Due to uncontrolled deforestation and fragmentation, Maranhão has no more forest core areas (outside protected areas) with the minimum size to ensure sustainable forest management practices for timber production. New policies at the state level must promote old-growth and secondary forest conservation and restoration. However, the trends point to the opposite direction: the Ecological-Economic Zoning (ZEE) allows the reduction of forest protection and the State Forest Policy reinforces federal legislation setbacks. The Amazon region of Maranhão state has forest aptitude, and forest and agroforestry product chains would bring social and environmental benefits, making them the best opportunity for sustainable economic development in the region. Therefore, the forest must be re-planted for the benefit of people and nature.     

The Brazilian Cattle Sector: Status, Prospects and Controversies

The cattle sector in Brazil (and in other countries of South America) is substantial in terms of size and potential impacts in world markets. Due to the sheer magnitude and potential of the Brazilian cattle sector, it merits our attention. A trend to more productive cattle systems, new rules for trade in livestock products and more effective control of hoof and mouth disease in some areas of Brazil could cause it to become a more formidable beef exporter. Brazil also warrants attention because of the controversial practice of deforestation for cattle production in the Amazon rain forest. A vocal environmental lobby has decried cattle production in the Amazon, but this practice continues. This paper reviews the status, prospects and controversies of the beef sector in Brazil, with a special focus on deforestation and cattleproduction in tropical ecosystems.     

Do protected areas hamper economic development of the Amazon region? An analysis of the relationship between protected areas and the economic growth of Brazilian Amazon municipalities

The Brazilian Amazon harbours 70 % of the world’s tropical forests and is essential to the country’s economy because it maintains biodiversity, sustains the livelihoods of the indigenous people and local communities, and provides ecosystem services such as water production, soil stabilization, flood prevention, and climate regulation. In the last three decades, the Brazilian government has established a regional protected area (PA) network that currently covers approximately 48 % of the region. Despite their importance, some sectors of the Brazilian society have argued that the expansion of the PAs across the region hampers the local economic development, because they make less area available for non-forest economic activities such as large-scale agriculture, mining, and power generation. In this study, we analysed the relationship between local economic growth and PA coverage in 516 municipalities in the Brazilian Amazon from 2004 to 2014. We modelled the impact of the coverage of the three types of PAs (strictly-protected, multiple-use, and indigenous lands) on the (i) compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of the real gross domestic product per capita (GDP per capita), and (ii) real gross value added per capita (GVA per capita) of the agriculture, industry, services, and government sectors in each municipality. The models also considered the following control variables at the municipal level: area, age, per capita GPD in 2004 (or per capita GVAs in 2004), population growth rate between 2004 and 2014, education index, deforested area outside PA per capita, deforested area inside PA per capita, degraded area outside PA per capita, degraded area inside PA per capita, and presence of illegal mining within PA. We applied spatial Durbin error models (SDEM) to analyse the direct, indirect, and total impacts of the PAs on the local economic growth. We did not find a statistically significant relationship between the local economic growth and PA coverage in any of the three PA groups evaluated. Only the total impact of the GVA per capita of the industry was negatively correlated with the coverage of the strictly-protected PAs. Our findings do not support the arguments used by some interest groups of the Brazilian society that the social and environmental gains generated through the expansion of PAs across the region constrain the overall local economic growth.     

Policy lessons from spatiotemporal enrollment patterns of payment for ecosystem service programs in Argentina

Payment for ecosystem services schemes (PES) are lauded as a market-based solution to curtail deforestation and restore degraded ecosystems. However, PES programs often fail to conserve sites under strong long-term deforestation pressures. Underperformance, in part, is likely due to adverse selection. Spatial adverse selection occurs when landowners are more likely to enroll parcels with low deforestation pressure than parcels with high deforestation pressure. Temporal adverse selection arises when parcels are enrolled for short time periods. In both cases, financial resources are allocated without having a sizeable impact on long-term land use change. Improving program performance to overcome these shortcomings requires understanding attributes of landowners and their parcels across large scales to identify spatial and temporal enrollment patterns that drive adverse selection. In this paper, we examine these patterns in Argentina’s PES program in Chaco forest, a global deforestation hotspot. Our study area covers 252,319 km². Results from multinomial logistic regression models showed that large parcels of enrolled land and parcels owned by absentee landowners exhibit greater evidence of spatiotemporal adverse selection than smaller parcels or parcels owned by local landowners. Furthermore, parcels managed under land use plans for conservation and restoration are more likely to be associated with adverse selection than parcels managed for financial returns such as harvest of non-timber forest products, silviculture, and silvopasture. However, prior to recommending that PES programs focus on land uses with higher potential earnings, a greater understanding is needed of the degree to which these land uses meet ecological and biodiversity goals of PES programs. We suggest that increased spatial targeting of enrollment, along with enrollment of local landowners and further incentives for land uses that support conservation and restoration, could promote long-term conservation of forest lands.