Eroding resilience of deforestation interventions—evidence from Brazil’s lost decade

Abstract

Brazil once set the example for curtailing deforestation with command and control policies, but, in the last decade, these interventions have gone astray. Environmental research and policy today are largely informed by the earlier successes of deforestation interventions, but not their recent failures. Here, we investigate the resilience of deforestation interventions. We discuss how the recent trend reversal in Brazil came to be, and what its implications for the design of future policies are. We use newly compiled information on environmental fines in an econometric model to show that the enforcement of environmental policy has become ineffective in recent years. Our results add empirical evidence to earlier studies documenting the erosion of the institutions responsible for forest protection, and highlight the considerable deforestation impacts of this erosion. Future efforts for sustainable forest protection should be aimed at strengthening institutions, spreading responsibilities, and redistributing the common value of forests via incentive-based systems.

Scaling forest restoration in the tropics: evidence from Brazil's Atlantic Forest Restoration Pact

“…We tested to see if a possible explanation for the variation in the impact across states is that some states impose greater institutional pressure than others. Figure 6 provides evidence of differential enforcement of the Forest Code using data on environmental fines from 2000 to 2019 [15]. Fines per capita are among the highest in Bahia, Parana, and Espírito Santo, states where we observe higher restoration impacts.…”

“…The bottom figure shows the value of environmental fines per 10,000 people and per 1,000 ha of forest for each state in the sample between 2000 and 2019. The data come from [15].…”

“…Only temperature and precipitation are time-variant and are observed annually at the municipality level using the CHIRPS dataset [25]. Finally, although we occupy the data only to establish state-level correlations, we do report summary statistics from environmental fines data [15].…”

Sexual and reproductive health and rights in low- and middle-income countries: An evidence gap map

“…This sector is an active research focus. We have identified new studies that would have been included if available when we conducted the search in February 2023 (e.g., government deforestation enforcement in Brazil, by Kuschnig et al, 2023).…”