Private reserves suffer from the same location biases of public protected areas
Graphical abstract
Introduction
One of the main policies in response to the biodiversity crisis (Cardinale et al., 2012; IPBES, 2019) is the creation of new protected areas worldwide (UNEP-WCMC, 2018). However, the location of public protected areas show a strong bias towards lands with high elevation, steeper slopes, low agricultural productivity, and low human density, not always considering biodiversity hotspots or ecological representativeness (Venter et al., 2018; Watson et al., 2014). It is thus pertinent that to achieve maximum conservation outcomes, these biases need to be reduced.
One way to reduce bias is to increase protected areas on private land (Cortés Capano et al., 2019; Drescher and Brenner, 2018). Agriculture covers >30% of the Earth's ice-free surface (Ellis et al., 2010), mostly on private property. In turn, private properties shelter vast amounts of native vegetation, for instance, 56% of the United States forests (Sass et al., 2017), 28% of Europe's forests (Pulla et al., 2013) and 53% of the native vegetation in Brazil (Freitas et al., 2017). Protecting or enhancing natural vegetation on private properties also has benefits to private landholders beyond conservation itself. Native vegetation within farms can help increase agricultural production through the provision of ecosystem services (Dainese et al., 2019). Natural pest control and pollination provided by native vegetation (Boesing et al., 2017; Potts et al., 2016; Rand et al., 2006) make economic contributions between US dollars 10–1500/ha globally (Lautenbach et al., 2012; Naranjo et al., 2015; Pimentel et al., 1997).
Some countries are implementing policies to set aside private areas for conservation in voluntary or mandatory schemes (Garibaldi et al., 2020). Brazil, in particular, has an environmental regulation, the Native Vegetation Protection Law (Federal Law 12.651/2012), which establishes that all rural properties must have natural vegetation set aside as mandatory Areas of Permanent Protection (APP; sensitive areas such as riparian vegetation, hilltops, and steep slopes) and Legal Reserves. Legal Reserves should cover from 20% to 80% of the total property area, depending on the property's biome and physiognomy, and can include APP. They are intended to support the maintenance of biodiversity and ecosystem services in agricultural landscapes, as well as provide opportunities to the sustainable use of natural resources provided by natural vegetation, and can combine native and non-native species (up to 50% of Legal Reserves area). They are thus of vital importance for biodiversity protection, water and energy security, climate regulation, and ecosystem service provision (Metzger et al., 2019). Farmers that do not have the full area of Legal Reserves vegetated must restore it, or opt for a compensation scheme outside their property (for example, trading with landowners with Legal Reserves surplus) (Mello et al., 2021a, Mello et al., 2021b). The possibility of compensation aims to allow landowners whose properties have high opportunity costs to conserve or restore less valuable areas outside their limits (May et al., 2015). Although important to attenuate conflicts between conservation and agricultural production, compensation schemes can substantially reduce the need to do restoration, thus bringing no additionality in terms of conservation. In a scenario of full off-site compensation, 85% of the legal deficit on the Atlantic Forest could be compensated in existing vegetation, without the need of restoration (Mello et al., 2021b), a missed opportunity for a hotspot biome with such high level of local endemism (Myers et al., 2000) and fragmentation (Ribeiro et al., 2009). Furthermore, the legal geographical limit for compensation is in the scale of the entire biome. For biomes such as the Atlantic Forest, in which the location of remnant fragments is largely concentrated on a few regions (Ribeiro et al., 2009) compensation could be placed thousands of kilometres from the original area to be compensated, resulting in the protection of very distinct areas, in terms of species composition, in relation to those with legal deficit.
At present, vegetated areas considered as Legal Reserves cover 167 million ha (Metzger et al., 2019) and represent nearly half of the remaining native vegetation areas in Brazil (Soares-Filho et al., 2014), highlighting the importance of their maintenance. The proportion of remnant vegetation in Legal Reserves is highest for the Atlantic Forest biome (70% of remnant vegetation), where most of the Brazilian population lives (Rezende et al., 2018). Nevertheless, to fully achieve the objectives of Legal Reserves, their location should be adequately planned in a landscape perspective to support species survival in fragmented landscapes (Fahrig, 2017; Tambosi et al., 2014) while favoring ecosystem services that can increase agricultural productivity (Boesing et al., 2017; Garibaldi et al., 2011).
The location of Legal Reserves in Brazil, as for other types of within-farms reserves globally, is dependent on economic factors. For instance, larger and more profitable farms tend to retain more native vegetation (Leite et al., 2020; Michalski et al., 2010; Trevisan et al., 2016) and are more likely to engage in conservation actions (Nielsen et al., 2017). For compliance with Brazil's Native Vegetation Protection law, the amount of vegetation on farm can directly impact farmers' livelihoods either through the cost of required restoration and/or by loss of productive areas (Jung et al., 2017). As such, restoration actions in Brazil are expected to focus predominantly on degraded pastures, which represent a pool of available land with relatively low opportunity costs (Mello et al., 2021b; Strassburg et al., 2014).
To enforce the implementation of the Native Vegetation Protection Law, in 2012 the Brazilian Government created a self-declaratory public-access database, named CAR (Portuguese acronym for environmental rural register), in which each landowner delimits the size and location of their Legal Reserves. This extensive CAR database, gathering more than 5.6 million properties and nearly 550 million ha of land (in July 2020), offers a unique opportunity to evaluate landowners management choices in response to a land-regulation policy.
Here we use CAR data to shed light on factors related to farmers' decisions about the amount and spatial location of Legal Reserves within their properties and consider the implications of their choices for biodiversity conservation and ecosystem services provision. We address two important questions: (1) which drivers predict the proportion of Legal Reserves the landowners declare inside their properties versus outside their land?; (2) For landowners that decided to allocate Legal Reserves inside their properties, which drivers can predict where those Legal Reserves are located? Following the pattern already described for public protected areas (Venter et al., 2018; Watson et al., 2014) and private land (Jung et al., 2017), we expected that land management decisions concerning Legal Reserves would be made to maximize farm income. Farms located in marginal areas for agriculture production or less profitable were thus expected to set aside larger proportions of Legal Reserves inside their properties. We also expected that larger properties, with higher vegetation cover, would declare higher proportions of Legal Reserves in-property, as opposed to paying for off-farm credits. Considering the same reasoning, we also expected landowners will tend to locate their Legal Reserves within marginal lands. Additionally, we evaluated whether farmers are choosing to allocate Legal Reserves near existing native vegetation patches, which would increase patch size and could contribute to biodiversity conservation and ecosystem services provision.
Section snippets
Study region
To test which drivers are affecting choices about the amount and spatial location of Legal Reserves, our sample included 164 municipalities between the borders of Minas Gerais (MG) and Sao Paulo (SP) States of southeastern Brazil, in one of the most important and traditional regions for coffee production (Fig. 1). This region was predominantly covered by the Atlantic Forest, a highly biodiverse tropical forest, which suffered a long history of deforestation and fragmentation (Joly et al., 2014
Results
The 3622 properties we studied covered 766,592.9 ha, of which 13.7% (105,265 ha) was natural vegetation. The agricultural area was composed of pasture (54%), crops (42%) and a small presence of forestry (4%). Less than half of the sampled properties (49%) had allocated less than 18% of their area as Legal Reserve, while the majority (51%) signalled the full Legal Reserve inside the farm or even a surplus (Box 2). Except for properties with no Legal Reserve declared, vegetation cover increases
Discussion
The major drivers influencing Legal Reserve allocation are vegetation in-farm, property size, transportation costs, and agricultural suitability. Landowners whose properties are larger, with lower agricultural suitability, higher transportation costs and have more vegetation in farm are more likely to allocate Legal Reserves in their farms. This suggests that economic processes are the primary drivers determining landowner decisions around investment in Legal Reserves. We also show that farmers
CRediT authorship contribution statement
Francisco d'Albertas: Conceptualization, Data curation, Formal analysis, Writing – original draft, Visualization, Writing – review & editing. Adrian González-Chaves: Conceptualization, Formal analysis, Writing – review & editing. Clarice Borges-Matos: Conceptualization, Writing – review & editing. Vitor Zago de Almeida Paciello: Conceptualization, Formal analysis, Writing – review & editing. Martine Maron: Conceptualization, Writing – review & editing. Jean Paul Metzger: Conceptualization,
Declaration of competing interest
The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.
Acknowledgements
We thank Imaflora for contributing with data, Gianluca Cerullo and Charles Emogor for comments on the manuscript and two anonymous reviewers for a very careful review. We also thank the Thematic Project “Relationships between landscape structure, ecological processes, biodiversity and ecosystem services”, funded by São Paulo Research Foundation – FAPESP [2013/23457-6]. Francisco d'Albertas was funded by FAPESP [2018/22881-2] and by the Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior
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