Payment for ecosystem services programs in the Brazilian Atlantic Forest: Effective but not enough
Graphical abstract
Introduction
Payment for ecosystem services (PES) programs are economic incentives for environmental conservation. They are generally defined as “a transfer of resources between social actors, which aims to create incentives to align individual and/or collective land use decisions with the social interest in the management of natural resources” (Muradian et al., 2010). Globally, PES have became a popular complementary strategy to existing conservation strategies like protected areas (Schomers and Matzdorf, 2013; Ezzine de Blas et al., 2016; Salzman et al., 2018). Despite the extensive investment in PES as a conservation tool, the correlates of conservation success in PES programs remain poorly understood (Ferraro and Pattanayak, 2006; Pattanayak et al., 2010; Naeem et al., 2015; Ezzine de Blas et al., 2016; Velly and Dutilly, 2016).
One reason why clear links between PES implementation and conservation outcomes are rare may be study design. Many studies either measure forest conservation outcomes in ways that obscure important underlying socio-ecological processes, or use designs that fail to demonstrate additionality (i.e. conservation outcomes that would not have happened without the PES intervention). For example, a large number of studies that evaluate PES impact consider net forest change as the main indicator of avoided deforestation (Sanchez-Azofeifa et al., 2007; Honey-Rosés et al., 2011; Arriagada et al., 2012; Robalino and Pfaff, 2013; Yang et al., 2013; Goh and Yanosky, 2016; Jayachandran et al., 2017). This is problematic, as changes in net forest cover may be driven by avoided deforestation or alternatively through forest regeneration - processes that are incentivized by distinct PES program activities. Furthermore, a lack of net change in forest cover does not necessarily mean a lack of change in the landscape, since it is possible to swap between forested and deforested states without an overall change in land use proportions (Pontius and Millones, 2011). Evaluations of PES programs for forest conservation outcomes should thus ideally be based on spatially explicit tracking of the distinct land use transitions linked to both deforestation and regeneration processes.
A second key component of PES-mediated forest conservation evaluations is the demonstration of additionality, particularly given the challenge of distinguishing PES-mediated outcomes from outcomes generated by broader ‘background’ socio-economic-ecological trends (Velly and Dutilly, 2016). Such background trends include inter alia environmental legislation, and patterns of national or regional economic growth and natural resource use. To distinguish conservation outcomes caused by conservation interventions from those that occur because of economic slow-downs, or enforcement of environmental regulation requires a counterfactual approach capable of inferring causality to interventions, particularly where randomized treatments are not possible (Engel et al., 2008; Ferraro, 2009; Jones and Lewis, 2015; Wunder, 2015; Velly and Dutilly, 2016). Despite this importance, remarkably few PES impact evaluations incorporate counterfactual approaches (Salzman et al., 2018). For example, Calvet-Mir et al. (2015) recently reported that only seven of 26 peer-reviewed evaluations of the effectiveness of 24 different PES projects incorporated some kind of counterfactual approach. These studies often employ matching methods that use strategic subsampling from among treated and potential control cases to create treatment and control assignments that are similar in all respects except the intervention of interest (Rubin, 1973; Rosenbaum and Rubin, 1983; Morgan and Harding, 2006). A smaller group of studies combine counterfactual approaches with the differences-in-differences method, that allows further comparison before and after the intervention (Honey-Rosés et al., 2011; Arriagada et al., 2012; Clements and Milner-Gulland, 2014; Costedoat et al., 2015).
In this study, we use a spatially explicit and counterfactual approach to evaluate the additional contribution of PES programs to the regeneration and avoided loss of native vegetation, i.e. PES additionality, near São Paulo, Brazil. We define forest conservation outcomes in three distinct ways, as: i) net forest change for each property, ii) the percentage of each property under regeneration, and iii) vegetation loss rate. To our knowledge, this is the first evaluation of the conservation impact of PES in South America to explicitly detect vegetation loss and regeneration with a counterfactual approach, as well as the first quantitative assessment of PES program effectiveness within Brazil’s Atlantic Forest, despite more than 20 programs operating in the region over the past two decades (Guedes and Seehusen, 2011; Calvet-Mir et al., 2015; Grima et al., 2016).
Section snippets
Study region
The study region is located within the threatened Atlantic Forest, which hosts one of the world’s most diverse tropical forest biota (Mittermeier et al., 2004). Following over 500 years of European colonial history, the Atlantic Forest’s estimated original 1,500,000 km2extent has been radically transformed. An estimated 28% of native vegetation cover remains across the Atlantic Forest, mostly consisting of edge-affected or secondary vegetation small fragments disconnected from larger remnants (
Results
We found that PES enrollment resulted in an increase in net forest change, measured as either the percentage of forest per total property area (Eq. (1)) or the rate of forest change per property (Eq. (2)), resulting in net forest gain among PES farms (Fig. 3; Table 2). Average annual net forest change on enrolled farms increased from 0.43% (± 0.80) per farm before implementation to 0.98% (± 1.81) after implementation. Over approximately five years of program implementation, this resulted in an
Discussion
We demonstrate that PES has a positive effect on forest cover, through a counterfactual assessment of the effectiveness of PES programs for vegetation loss and regeneration outcomes (Ferraro, 2009; Velly and Dutilly, 2016). PES enrollment increased both the percent of forest area per farm, and the rate of increase of forest per farm, driven by forest regeneration. We estimate that PES enrollment in the study region would result in approximately 2.8–5.6% of total farm area in additional forest
Conclusion
We found that while PES has a significant additional positive impact on forest cover in the Atlantic Forest of Brazil, the overall conservation impact is relatively low and conservation gains may be considered vulnerable. Over a five-year period, we observed PES-driven forest gain through tropical forest regeneration in the Cantareira region. Despite these gains, these positive impacts of PES may be vulnerable to both a lack of legal and or temporal additionality. In either case, any reduction
Acknowledgments
This study was developed within the ‘Interface Project’, supported by the São Paulo Research Foundation (FAPESP, 2013/23457-6). PR was supported by doctoral fellowships from the Brazilian Ministry of Education (CAPES-DS 1437068 and CAPES-PROEX 1560102), and São Paulo Research Foundation (FAPESP, 2015/16587-6). JPM was supported by the Brazilian Science Council (CNPq). EN was supported by post-doctoral fellowships from the National Science Foundation Grant (1158817) and the São Paulo Research
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