Elsevier

Biological Conservation

Volume 194, February 2016, Pages 184-193
Biological Conservation

Return on investment of the ecological infrastructure in a new forest frontier in Brazilian Amazonia

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.biocon.2015.12.016Get rights and content

Highlights

  • The establishment of 9.2 million hectares of protected areas in Amapá, Brazil, requires US$147.2 million over five years.

  • The annual recurrent costs for this set of protected areas is estimated in US$ 32.7 million.

  • Protected areas have the potential to contribute at least US $362.4 million per year in direct benefits to Amapá’s economy.

  • The return on investment (ROI) of fully protected areas protected areas range from 10% to 162%.

  • Functional protected areas can become engines for socio-economic upliftment for most of the world's new forest frontiers.

Abstract

Protected areas anchor the ecological infrastructure that societies need for long-term prosperity and provide benefits to local, national, and global stakeholders. However, these areas continue to go unfunded. In this paper, we have provided the first estimate of the return on investment for nine large protected areas that compose the core of the ecological infrastructure of the State of Amapá, which is located in a new forest frontier in Brazilian Amazonia. These nine protected areas will require US $147.2 million over five years in order to be established and then US $32.7 million in annual recurrent costs. If implemented, these nine protected areas have the potential to contribute at least US $362.4 million per year in benefits (timber, non-timber forest products, nature-based tourism, fisheries, and carbon) to the local economy. The return on investment (ROI) of these protected areas will be 1.6% during the first five years and 10% thereafter; however, ROI could reach 45.8% or more if option and non-use values are also included as benefits. Although the costs of establishing the protected area system in Amapá are higher (US $3.2–3.5 ha 1 y 1) than the costs reported in other tropical forest regions (US $0.2–0.4 ha 1 y 1), the investments required are within the reach of both state and national governments. Our study shows that if fully implemented, protected areas can become engines for socio-economic upliftment, making the conservation-centered development model a feasible option for most of the world's new forest frontiers.

Introduction

Infrastructure refers to the physical elements of interrelated systems that provide goods and services essential to enable, sustain, or enhance societal living conditions (Fulmer, 2009). There are two types of infrastructure: socio-economic and ecological. Socio-economic infrastructure is composed of the physical assets required by both social sectors (such as financial, educational, health, cultural, defense, and judicial) and economic sectors (such as energy, water and sewage, food and agriculture, transportation, and communications). Economic and social infrastructures are also known as “hard” or “soft” infrastructures, respectively. The ecological (or green or natural) infrastructure is an interconnected network of natural and semi-natural areas that is planned and managed for its natural resource values and for the associated benefits it confers to human populations (Benedict and McMahon, 2006). Both types of infrastructure are required for human development, but investments in ecological infrastructure are much smaller than investments in socio-economic infrastructure (Ruggeri, 2009).

Ecological infrastructure underpins human well-being by directly supplying ecosystem services that cannot be imported and by providing services that, through interaction with the socio-economic infrastructure, become valuable to humans (Collados and Duane, 1999, Costanza et al., 2014). To be effective, ecological infrastructures should: (a) be large and connected enough to protect all species existing in a territory, (b) provide all goods and services that people need, and (c) increase society's resilience against the negative impacts of global climate changes (Garda et al., 2010, Maes et al., 2015, Sussams et al., 2015). If societies want long-term prosperity, they must design and establish their ecological infrastructures, integrating them at several spatial scales (Yu, 2012).

The core of any ecological infrastructure is composed of protected areas, which are clearly defined geographical spaces that are recognized, dedicated, and managed through legal or other effective means to achieve the long-term conservation of nature with associated ecosystem services and cultural values (Dudley, 2008). Currently, the global ecological infrastructure is built around 155,584 terrestrial protected areas covering around 12.5% of the world's land surface as well as 7318 marine protected areas covering 3% of the world's marine ecosystems (Watson et al., 2014). Most of the existing protected areas have not been fully implemented because financial resources for building the core of a global ecological infrastructure have always been significantly smaller than what is needed (Jenkins and Joppa, 2009). Although the act of designating an area as protected by governments can halt ecosystem loss for some time, a protected area can only achieve the desired goals if it receives enough funds to be well-managed (Bruner et al., 2001).

In the last few years, there has been a trend in which key national governments have reduced their commitment to supporting protected areas (Watson et al., 2014). The lack of support by governments has traditionally been demonstrated by cuts in the operational budgets of the agencies responsible for protected area management. However, currently, governments are also reducing the strictness of the conservation status of protected areas, opening them to more intense human activities, reducing their sizes via boundary changes, and removing legal protection (Mascia et al., 2014, Bernard et al., 2014).

Watson et al. (2014) suggested that more studies documenting the return on investment (ROI) of protected areas for local societies could help to renew the interest of local and national governments in this particular component of the world's ecological infrastructure. Although the use of return on investment is not new in conservation (see review by Boyd et al., 2015), it has primarily been used to identify conservation gaps during systematic conservation planning or to guide future resource allocations across regions (Murdoch et al., 2007, Murdoch et al., 2010), rather than to provide evidence that existing protected areas are indeed good investments for local societies (Task Force on Economic Benefits of Protected Areas of the World Commission on Protected Areas (WCPA) of IUCN, in collaboration with the Economics Service Unit of IUCN, 1998).

In this paper, we present the return on investment of nine protected areas that compose the core of the ecological infrastructure of the State of Amapá, Brazilian Amazonia (hereafter referred to simply as “Amapá”). We calculate the costs of implementing these protected areas as well as some direct benefits they can generate for the local human population. We selected Amapá as a case study because it is a new forest frontier, i.e., it harbors large stocks of natural ecosystems, has low deforestation rates, and has low population density (Bryant et al., 1997, Becker, 2009). New forest frontiers are relevant because they cover around 5.8 million km2 in South America, Africa, and Asia (Bryant et al., 1997) and are the places where conflicts regarding the fate of the world's largest stocks of pristine ecosystems will possibly emerge in the near future if sustainable land-use policies are not implemented at an appropriate pace.

Section snippets

Study area

Amapá is located in northern Brazil and is bordered by French Guyana and Suriname (Fig. 1). Amapá has an area of 14,281,458 ha (Drummond et al., 2008) and a population of 669,526 (Instituto Brasileiro de Geografia e Estatística, 2014). Most of the population is urban, with 74.6% of the population living in the capital of Macapá and in Santana. Amapá's gross domestic product (GDP) for 2013 was US $5.5 billion, representing 0.2% of Brazil's GDP (Instituto Brasileiro de Geografia e Estatística, 2014

Costs of protected areas

A total of US $62.0 million over five years is required to establish the nine protected areas (Fig. 2). Most of the establishment costs will go to building infrastructure (US $36.7 million), followed by equipment acquisition (US $18.4 million), and planning and demarcation (US $6.9 million).

The nine protected areas in Amapá require 3051 staff members (Table 2). There is a large gap between existing and required staff numbers. Field staff should grow from 65 to 2769, while management staff should

Discussion

We estimated that the costs for establishing the infrastructure needed to maintain 9.2 million ha is US $147.3 million over five years, followed by annual recurrent costs of US $32.7 million. This is equivalent to US $3.2 h 1 y 1 during the establishment phase and US $3.5 h 1 y 1 thereafter. Costs associated with staff salaries are the largest (51.5%) in the post-establishment phase. Currently, by combining field and management staff, the nine protected areas in Amapá have a staff density of 1:88,292 

Acknowledgments

This paper is part of the Ph.D. thesis presented by T.C.A.C. Dias in the Graduate Program in Tropical Biodiversity (UNIFAP-EMBRAPA-IEPA-Conservation International). J.M.C. Silva received support from the University of Miami and A. Cunha received financial support from the Brazilian National Council for Scientific and Technological Development (CNPq), grant #475614/2012-7. We thank Luis Barbosa for helping us with the map and spatial analyses.

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