Governance, Location and Avoided Deforestation from Protected Areas: Greater Restrictions Can Have Lower Impact, Due to Differences in Location
Introduction
Loss of standing forest generates a major component of emissions in developing countries, particularly in the tropics, e.g., Brazil and Indonesia, where recent deforestation has been occurring. As a result, the desire for reductions in emissions from deforestation and degradation (REDD), alongside longstanding concerns about species and other forest services (such as water quality), motivates consideration of various new policies—or shifts in policy—that could conserve forest. Yet, forest protection has tradeoffs. It is a challenge to conserve forest and improve livelihoods. As is clear in World Bank studies of development options World Bank, 2008, World Bank, 2010a, World Bank, 2010b, the sectors that drive losses of forest also play major roles within forested countries’ economies. Such conservation-development tradeoffs call for efficiency and creativity within policy, based upon solid evidence.
Any such policy deliberation should involve consideration of candidate policies’ impacts upon deforestation, economic aggregates, and distribution (Corbera et al., 2007, Scharlemann et al., 2010, e.g., discuss the choice of policy instruments for REDD). We provide evidence that protected areas that differ in governance also differ in location and, thus, in deforestation impact (others make claims about the local economic impact of such interventions; see, e.g., Section 21).
Protected areas generally have been assumed to lower deforestation, yet solid evidence is limited, despite many past evaluations (Joppa & Pfaff, 2010a2). A policy counterfactual, i.e., a claim about what would have occurred without protection, is required for evaluation. Often, this has not been based upon the characteristics of the protected areas’ locations (although lately, the set of conservation evaluations that include more careful counterfactuals has been growing3). Our focus is variation in locations. We show that protected-area types which differ in governance also differ in their locations, which, in turn, influence their forest impacts—and thus REDD.4
For our study of Acre, in the Brazilian Amazon, local terms for the governance of protection evoke a variety of goals. The less-restrictive governance categories we study are sustainable use (IUCN V–VI5), which brings to mind local needs, and indigenous lands (no IUCN bin), which refers to un-empowered peoples. Those two categories can be compared to integral governance (IUCN’s I–IV), which is more restrictive, officially not permitting any production and clearing.6 Acre State clearly sees tradeoffs in improving both forests and livelihoods (e.g., Sills, Pattanayak, Ferraro, & Alger, 2006). Our evidence suggests that local political economy, within various informed deliberate processes (not observed by us, and consistent with Alston et al., 1999), implied that governance differences led to differences across protection types in locations, clearing threats and, thus, forest impacts.
Building upon prior work,7 we examine deforestation during 2000–04 and 2004–08, in order to estimate the impact on deforestation rates of each of the categories of protected area: sustainable use, indigenous and integral. The impact of a policy is just a difference—between what occurred and a counterfactual scenario, without a policy, that we stress cannot be observed. To estimate such counterfactuals, i.e., what would have happened to the forest in protected areas if not protected, we use clearing of similar unprotected land (supported by theory in Hyde, 2012).
The characteristics of a protected location are critical to include in impact evaluation. Estimating the counterfactual without them, yields errors.8 A counterfactual based upon clearing for all unprotected land tends to overestimate protected areas’ impacts, as it ignores protection’s low-threat locations (globally, protection is biased toward lower threats (Joppa & Pfaff, 2009)). That same approach underestimates impact for situations in which conservation targeted threats, as was suggested by Pfaff and Sanchez-Azofeifa (2004) concerning locations for protected areas and as was done for payments in some cases in Costa Rica and Mexico (which were evaluated in Arriagada, Ferraro, Sills, Pattanayak, & Cordero, 2012 and Alix-Garcia, Shapiro, & Sims, 2012, using counterfactuals based on characteristics).
For Acre, we find that protection’s locations are, on average, biased toward lower threats. Our matching (apples-to-apples) impact estimate, based on unprotected land similar to protected land, suggests that a great deal of protected forest would have remained standing without policy. This approach lowers impact estimates by over half (from ∼2% avoided deforestation to ∼1%).
We also analyze subsets of protected areas that differ in terms of some key characteristics such as distances to roads and cities—influential in deforestation and the location of protection. For all governance types and for each type, protected areas closer to roads or cities avoided more deforestation than the distant protected areas. Those farther than average from roads and cities effectively did not block clearing, while those closer blocked over twice the average clearing.9 Time periods also provide subsets that differ in deforestation and in protection’s implementation.
Building upon all of that, our focus is the variation in impact by protection’s governance. Protection types differ in location—perhaps as governance affects tradeoffs that affect locations. Sustainable use protection targets areas with people, while integral protection seems to target an absence of local stakeholders. Thus, sustainable use protection occurs closer to clearing threats. Due to such locations, sustainable use areas have more impact despite permitting more clearing. Thus, the governance type oriented toward local livelihoods has avoided more deforestation. That is not because forest outcomes necessarily are ordered in this way, for any given location.10 Rather, it seems that sustainable use protection simply is more feasible in high-threat locations, which is important for decisions about how to allocate the global resources in support of REDD.
The paper proceeds as follows. Section 2 provides background on protection in Acre. Section 3 provides relevant frameworks. Section 4 describes data and our matching approach. Section 5 presents all of our results, while Section 6 concludes with summary and discussion.
Section snippets
Multiple investments in protection
In the Brazilian Amazon, protection includes: (i) developing a legal framework for forest conservation and management, (ii) establishing areas, (iii) regularizing tenure, (iv) developing and implementing management plans, (v) investing in technologies to monitor, (vi) building enforcement capacity, and (vii) supporting sustainable economic activities using natural resources.
Importance of location (i.e., land characteristics)
Figure 1 presents a simple but useful framework for considering protected areas’ impacts by providing an important perspective on the expected variation in land use without protection. Land is ordered by the rent that it provides, lower to higher as we move to the right (for empirics, we use observed characteristics that affect rents). Where rents are greater than zero, land will be deforested in the absence of protection. Where rents are negative, the land will remain in forest even without
Deforestation
We study deforestation in Acre during 2000–04 and 2004–08. We use PRODES15 remotely sensed pixel data on land cover in 2000, 2004, and 2008 from INPE (Brazil’s Instituto Nacional de Pesquisas Espaciais) and calculate the deforestation during these two time periods. For one observation, the data indicate a single class of land cover. Deforestation is the change from the forest land cover to a non-forest
All unprotected versus protected, including by protection type
Table 1 shows that protected lands’ characteristics differ from those of unprotected lands. The two upper rows provide averages for these groups, showing that the protected areas created before 2000 are farther from roads than unprotected lands, as well as less often on gentle slopes. The two groups are not very different in their distances to cities or to forest edges, or in rainfall. The protected lands are deforested less than are the unprotected lands. Of course, given the other differences
Discussion
We found that, on average, protection in Acre tends toward lower clearing pressure, limiting deforestation impact. Yet sustainable use protected areas face relatively higher threat. Thus, though that less restrictive form of governance permits some deforestation, still its partial blockage of higher clearing threats on average avoided more deforestation than strict protection. Such results are highly relevant for the allocation of any global resources in support of REDD.
Acre’s indigenous lands,
Acknowledgments
For financial support we gratefully thank the IDB (Interamerican Development Bank), the IAI (Inter-American Institute for Global Change Research), the Tinker Foundation, the NASA LBA (project led by R. Walker and E. Reis) and, finally, the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency (Sida) through the Environment for Development Initiative (EfD) of the Department of Economics, University of Gothenburg. USAID TransLinks project No. EPP-A-00-06-00014-00 provided additional support for
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