Impacts of conservation policies and electoral cycles on protected areas and forest cover in the Brazilian Atlantic Forest

• Ano de defesa: 2018
• Autor(a) principal: Ruggiero, Patricia G. C.
• Tipo de documento: Tese
• Tipo de acesso: Acesso aberto
• Idioma: eng
• Instituição de defesa: Biblioteca Digitais de Teses e Dissertações da USP
• Palavras-chave em Português: Áreas protegidas; Conservation Units; Deforestation; Desmatamento; Ecological ICMS; Financial incentives; Forest regeneration; ICMS ecológico; Incentivos financeiros; Pagamento por serviços ambientais; Payment for environmental services; Políticas públicas; Protected areas; Public policies; Regeneração florestal; Unidades de Conservação
• Link de acesso: http://www.teses.usp.br/teses/disponiveis/41/41134/tde-13122018-104400/

What strategies really work against the intense loss of native habitat? How can we improve forested areas around the world? The creation of protected areas - natural reserves aiming at preserving biodiversity and ecological relations in pristine environments - has been the main strategy against land surface transformation and the loss of natural capital. Recently, financial incentives have promptly become the most promising and accepted new strategies for conservation, and several experiences were implemented, particularly in the tropics. However, we urge to systematically evaluate the effectiveness of these mechanisms, both old and new, and several researchers have argued that econometric methods, traditionally used in impact evaluation of development, health, and education policies, should be applied in assessing the impacts of interventions for environmental conservation. Our goal in the present study is to estimate the effectiveness of two popular financial incentives against native vegetation loss in Brazil: payments for ecosystem services (PES) and the intergovernmental fiscal transfer based on ecological criteria - the Ecological ICMS. We used a counterfactual approach, which seeks adequate control groups in order to estimate what would have happened in the absence of the intervention - i.e., we search for additional gain or additionality. Payment for ecosystem services programs were evaluated regarding the promotion of additional native forest areas while the Ecological ICMS was assessed for its ability to promote new legally protected areas for conservation. We evaluated two of the oldest and most well established payment for ecosystem services programs in the Atlantic Forest, located in the Cantareira Water System, near the metropolis of São Paulo: the \\textit{Produtor de Água} (Water Producer) in Joanópolis and Nazaré Paulista (SP), and the \\textit{Conservador das Águas} (Water Conservationist), in Extrema (MG). In total, 83 rural properties contracted by the programs, and 83 properties selected as control units, were mapped using satellite images available in Google since 2003 and evaluated for the presence of regeneration and deforestation in three moments: before the program, at the time of program implementation and after program implementation. We show that PES programs positively affect the area under regeneration inside contracted rural properties, but does not affect deforestation. The average effect on regeneration was 0.69\\% of property area per year, which means that in 0.69\\% of the evaluated property area there would be no regeneration of native vegetation were it not for PES programs intervention. This result shows the additional effect of PES programs on regeneration of native forest but also shed light that this is a slow process. Secondly, the effect of the Ecological ICMS mechanism was evaluated regarding the expansion of Conservation Units - protected areas for conservation. We compared 2,481 municipalities from eight states in the Atlantic Forest region, in a panel data (i.e., longitudinal database) covering the period from 1987 to 2016. We show that municipalities under the incentive of the ecological ICMS law, when compared to control municipalities not subject to the same mechanism, present a small increase in area of new conservation units in the first years of law existence. However, this effect decreases over time disappearing about 10 years after the approval of the law. In addition to the temporary effect, we show that protected areas created, particularly by local governments, are preferably Environmental Protection Areas (APA) - a category that imposes few restrictions on land use and promotes little contribution to the conservation of natural resources. In order to estimate the effect of the Ecological ICMS on regeneration and deforestation processes, we accessed a national database on land use change between 1985 and 2017. However, observing deforestation patterns throughout this historical data series, it called our attention the possible existence of electoral cycles affecting deforestation - which gave rise to the third chapter of the thesis. We analyze deforestation (percentage deforested over previous forested area) in a panel with 2,277 municipalities within the Atlantic Forest region, from seven states of the South and Southeast, considering the period from 1991 to 2014. We demonstrate the existence of electoral deforestation cycles, linked to state elections in five observed states and municipal elections in three states. We also show evidence that elections in which the incumbent is losing by a large margin of votes tend to be the events with greater observed deforestation, and that party alignment between mayor and governor parties can also contribute to an increase in deforestation during municipal elections. Financial mechanisms, at least in the way they have been designed to date, are limited as major instruments in achieving the goals of conservation and restoration of native forests. In addition, eventhough there is a major effort to create new mechanisms and increase conservation gains, it is of concern that these gains can be offset by losses due to political motivations, even in the region of the country with one of the most stringent legislations for tropical forests in the world