Economic Causes of Deforestation in the Brazil Amazon: A Panel Data Analysis for the 2000s

We use under-explored municipality level datasets to assess the recent economic and policy determinants of deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon. We estimate yearly panel data models (from 2002 to 2009) for 457 municipalities in the region. The results show that recent deforestation is related to economic incentives, and especially to fluctuations in product (meat and soybean) prices. Moreover, we document that the increasing monitoring efforts of the Brazilian environmental police (IBAMA) were effective in reducing deforestation rates.Brazil, Amazon, deforestation

Economic Causes of Deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon: A Panel Data Analysis for 2000s

We use newly launched and some never before analyzed datasets, to assess the recent economic and policy determinants of deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon. We estimate panel data models for the years between 2002 and 2007 for 368 municipalities in the region using municipality fixed effects and GMM. The results show that recent deforestation is driven by fluctuations in meat and soybean prices, it increases with rural credit availability, and with the size of rural reform settlements, while it decreases with protected areas. Moreover we find that higher presence of the Brazilian environmental police (IBAMA) was effective in reducing deforestation rates. --Deforestation,Amazon,Economic causes,Brazil

Is small-scale agriculture really the main driver of deforestation in the Peruvian Amazon? Moving beyond the prevailing narrative

A key premise underlying discussion about deforestation in Amazonian Peru is that small-scale or so-called migratory agriculture is the main driver of deforestation. This premise has been expressed in government documents and public outreach events. How the Peruvian government understands drivers of deforestation in the Amazon has profound implications for how it will confront the problem. It is therefore important to critically revisit assumptions under-lying this narrative. We find that the narrative is based on remote sensing of deforestation patch sizes but not on field data, potentially conflating distinct drivers of deforestation under the umbrella of “migratory,” “small-scale,” or “subsistence” agriculture. In fact, small patches of deforested land may indicate any number of processes, including sustainable fallow management and agroforestry. Moreover, the data underlying the narrative tell us little about the actors driving these processes or their motivations. Different pro-cesses have distinct implications for environmental sustainability and require targeted policy responses. We unpack these diverse actors, geographies, and motivations of small-patch deforestation in the Peruvian Amazon and argue that differentiating among these drivers is necessary to develop appropriate policy responses. We call for researchers to revisit assumptions and critically assess the motivations of observed deforestation to appropriately target policy action

Remote sensing in forestry: Application to the Amazon region

The utilization of satellite remote sensing in forestry is reviewed with emphasis on studies performed for the Brazilian Amazon Region. Timber identification, deforestation, and pasture degradation after deforestation are discussed

Property rights and deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon

This paper focuses on the impact of property rights insecurity on deforestation in the Brazilian Legal Amazon. Deforestation is considered as a risk management strategy: property rights insecurity reduces the present value of forests and fosters forest conversion into agricultural and pasture lands. Moreover, deforestation is the consequence of strategic interactions between landowners and squatters. Landowners clear the forest preventively in order to assert the productive use of land and to reduce the expropriation risk. Squatters invade land plots, clear the forest and may afterwards gain official recognition with formal property titles. A particular attention is paid to the measure of land property rights insecurity in the Brazilian context. It is assumed that property rights insecurity has a multidimensional character taken into account by the number of homicides related to land conflicts and expropriation procedures. Principal component analysis allows synthesising such information. An econometric model of deforestation is estimated on a panel dataset on the 1988-2000 period and the nine states of the Brazilian Legal Amazon. The hypothesis that insecure land property rights contribute to higher rates of deforestation is not rejected when the simultaneity bias between insecure property rights and deforestation is addressed. This result questions the modality of the Brazilian land reform that considers forested areas as unproductive and thus open for expropriation procedures.deforestation;insecure property rights;Brazilian Legal Amazon

Achieving Brazil's deforestation target will reduce fire and deliver air quality and public health benefits

Climate, deforestation, and forest fires are closely coupled in the Amazon, but models of fire that include these interactions are lacking. We trained machine learning models on temperature, rainfall, deforestation, land-use, and fire data to show that spatial and temporal patterns of fire in the Amazon are strongly modified by deforestation. We find that fire count across the Brazilian Amazon increases by 0.44 percentage points for each percentage point increase in deforestation rate. We used the model to predict that the increased deforestation rate in the Brazilian Amazon from 2013 to 2020 caused a 42% increase in fire counts in 2020. We predict that if Brazil had achieved the deforestation target under the National Policy on Climate Change, there would have been 32% fewer fire counts across the Brazilian Amazon in 2020. Using a regional chemistry-climate model and exposure-response associations, we estimate that the improved air quality due to reduced smoke emission under this scenario would have resulted in 2300 fewer deaths due to reduced exposure to fine particulate matter. Our analysis demonstrates the air quality and public health benefits that would accrue from reducing deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon

Feedback between drought and deforestation in the Amazon

Deforestation and drought are among the greatest environmental pressures on the Amazon rainforest, possibly destabilizing the forest-climate system. Deforestation in the Amazon reduces rainfall regionally, while this deforestation itself has been reported to be facilitated by droughts. Here we quantify the interactions between drought and deforestation spatially across the Amazon during the early 21st century. First, we relate observed fluctuations in deforestation rates to dry-season intensity; second, we determine the effect of conversion of forest to cropland on evapotranspiration; and third, we simulate the subsequent downwind reductions in rainfall due to decreased atmospheric water input. We find large variability in the response of deforestation to dry-season intensity, with a significant but small average increase in deforestation rates with a more intense dry season: With every mm of water deficit, deforestation tends to increase by 0.13% per year. Deforestation, in turn, has caused an estimated 4% of the recent observed drying, with the south-western part of the Amazon being most strongly affected. Combining both effects, we quantify a reinforcing drought-deforestation feedback that is currently small, but becomes gradually stronger with cumulative deforestation. Our results suggest that global climate change, not deforestation, is the main driver of recent drying in the Amazon. However, a feedback between drought and deforestation implies that increases in either of them will impede efforts to curb both.</p

Modeling Amazon Deforestation for Policy Purposes

Brazil has long ago removed most of the perverse government incentives that stimulated massive deforestation in the Amazon in the 70s and 80s, but one highly controversial policy remains: Road building. While data is now abundantly available due to the constant satellite surveillance of the Amazon, the analytical methods typically used to analyze the impact of roads on natural vegetation cover are methodologically weak and not very helpful to guide public policy. This paper discusses the respective weaknesses of typical GIS analysis and typical municipality level regression analysis, and shows what would be needed to construct an ideal model of deforestation processes. It also presents an alternative approach that is much less demanding in terms of modeling and estimation and more useful for policy makers as well.Deforestation, Amazon, Brazil, econometric modeling

Does Land Tenure Insecurity Drive Deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon?

The purpose of this paper is to highlight the detrimental impact of land tenure insecurity on deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon. It is related to recent controversies about the detrimental impact of land laws on deforestation, which seem to legitimize land encroachments. The latter is mainly the result of land tenure insecurity which is a key characteristic of this region and results from a long history of interactions between rural social unrest and land reforms or land laws. A simple model is developed where strategic interactions between farmers lead to excessive deforestation. One of the empirical implications of the model is a positive relationship between land tenure insecurity and the extent of deforestation. The latter is tested on data from a panel of Brazilian Amazon municipalities. The negative effect of land tenure insecurity proxied by the number of squatters on deforestation is not rejected when estimations are controlled for the possible endogeneity of squatters. One of the main policy implications is that ex post legalizations of settlements must be accompanied by the enforcement of environmental obligations.deforestation, land tenure insecurity, squatters, Panel Data Analysis, Brazil