Clarissa Costalonga e Gandour.
03/09/2018
Orientador: Juliano Assunção.
Banca: Alexander Pfaff. Carlos Augusto Klink. Eduardo Augusto de Souza-Rodrigues. Francisco Junqueira Moreira da Costa.
Forest Wars: A Trilogy on Combating Deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon
Nível:
This dissertation assesses policy effects of conservation efforts adopted within the scope of the federal action plan to combat Amazon deforestation in Brazil. Chapter 1 provides a description of key policy changes and surveys the associated effectiveness literature. It finds evidence that supports the action plan’s efficacy in reducing aggregate deforestation levels, but notes that indirect impacts of conservation policies have received little attention.
The remaining chapters explore direct and indirect impacts of action plan policies using a georeferenced ten-year panel dataset to account for spatial dynamics. Chapter 2 tests whether legal territorial protection grants actual protection against advancing deforestation. Using a measure of neighboring clearing activity to capture local deforestation risk, the analysis compares forest clearing outcomes in unprotected and protected territory under equivalent deforestation pressures. The empirical strategy draws on the dataset’s raster structure to mitigate concerns of potentially confounding unobservables via the use of raster cell fixed effects. Results document protection’s efficacy in a high-risk context, with significantly less forest being cleared in protected cells than in unprotected ones. Yet, although protected territory effectively shields vegetation under its domain from advancing deforestation, it appears to deflect clearings to unprotected areas. Protection therefore affects regional forest clearing dynamics, but not the overall level of deforestation. Chapter 3 investigates whether changes in tropical regeneration constituted a spillover effect from law enforcement targeting forest loss. Secondary vegetation was vulnerable during the first decade of the action plan, which neither promoted tropical regeneration nor sought to conserve existing secondary vegetation. Moreover, regeneration remained undetected in satellite-based forest monitoring systems. Still, during this period, the extent of Amazon secondary vegetation increased by nearly 7 million hectares. The final part of this dissertation examines whether law enforcement contributed to this growth, albeit unintentionally. The empirical strategy uses a ten-year cross-sectional difference in observed regeneration outcomes to address the intrinsically time-consuming nature of this phenomenon. Results are shown to be robust to the inclusion of a host of raster cell-level controls, mitigating concerns about omitted variable bias.
Findings indicate that the intensity of enforcement in a location’s close surroundings is associated with both increased probability of secondary vegetation expansion and increased area of secondary vegetation in that location. This lends support to the hypothesis that environmental offenders, once faced with a higher perceived cost of engaging in illegal deforestation, abandoned the area they were operating in and thereby allowed a natural process of forest regrowth to occur. The spillover effect of enforcement on regeneration appears largest in places that have undergone neither too much nor too little deforestation: in the former, forest clearings and non-forest land use are probably more consolidated, and regrowth is therefore less likely; in the latter, there is still relatively little area for the forest to grow back in.
Counterfactual exercises shed light on the magnitude of this effect. An enhanced satellite-based monitoring system for targeting enforcement would have resulted in nearly 300 thousand additional hectares of secondary vegetation.
