Public spending in federal protected areas in Brazil

Highlights

• Protected areas (PAs) are essential for sustainable development.

• Public spending on protected areas is not well documented worldwide.

• Brazilian government spent annually between US$ 0.3/km2 and US$ 392,250/km2 in 289 federal PAs from 2013 to 2016.

• Public spending in Brazilian PAs varied with PA’s contextual factors.

• A global system to track financial flows to PAs is proposed to improve financial transparency and accountability.

Abstract

Establishing protected areas (PAs) is one of the most common land use policies implemented by governments to maintain healthy ecosystems at different spatial scales and in distinct socioeconomic settings. However, reliable knowledge on government spending in PAs and the factors that influence this spending is limited. In this study, we describe the public spending by the Brazilian government in a set of 289 federal PAs that altogether cover an area of 743,406 km². Then, we assess how six contextual factors (area, age, population density, human development index [HDI], ecological regions, and management group) influence this spending. From 2013–2016, the Brazilian government invested at least US$197.8 million in 289 PAs. The average annual spending per km² presents a wide variation, ranging from US$0.3/km² to US$392,250/km². A linear regression model indicates that (1) the annual public spending increases with PA size, PA age, human population density, and HDI; (2) multiple-use PAs receive fewer resources than strict-protection PAs do; and (3) no difference exists in the public spending in PAs between Amazon—the region perceived by the national population as the most important for Brazil’s natural resources—and other ecological regions in the country. Our study highlights the urgent need to document the flows of financial resources to PAs, with the aim of understanding their variation patterns and the processes that cause such a variation. Similar studies in other countries are required to evaluate if the patterns that we describe here are general or are country specific. Besides, separately assessing the investments coming from governments and the financial resources provided by other conservation investors (i.e., NGOs, multilateral, corporations) is worthwhile to produce a more comprehensive and nuanced view of financial flows to PAs.

Introduction

Establishing protected areas (PAs) is a common land use practice by governments to maintain healthy ecosystems at different spatial scales and in distinct socioeconomic settings (Watson et al., 2014). PAs form the backbone of a country’s green infrastructure and are essential to conserve biodiversity, mitigate greenhouse gas emissions, enable societal adaptations to climate change, and deliver a range of other ecosystem services that are essential to human prosperity (Benedict and McMahon, 2006; Silva and Wheeler, 2017).

The importance of PAs to human prosperity has been recognized by several global agreements, such as the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals and the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD). Under the CBD, for instance, countries have committed to expanding and funding a global PA network covering at least 15% of their terrestrial areas and 10% of their territorial waters (Watson et al., 2014). However, as with any public policy, PAs are not free, and achieving their goals, such as biodiversity conservation and provision of ecosystem services, requires substantial public investments. For instance, McCarthy et al. (2012) projected that a comprehensive global PA system would cost between US$65 and US$76 billion annually.

Currently, most PAs are managed by public agencies and have national budgets as their primary sources of income (Hein et al., 2013; Watson et al., 2014). Therefore, the amount of resources a PA receives depends on the decisions made during government budgeting. Government budgeting is usually described as a complex political process that involves competition among budget stakeholders and scarce public resources (Scartascini and Stein, 2009); this process provides a picture of the relative power of budget actors within the government and the importance of citizens, interest groups, and political parties in defining budget priorities (Rubin, 2016). Government budgeting is one of the most critical aspects of policymaking because policy decisions are meaningless if the resources to put these decisions into practice are inadequate (Rubin, 2016).

Budget decisions are made at different levels of the government. A distinction therefore exists between macrobudgeting and microbudgeting (Guess and LeLoup, 2010). Macrobudgeting represents the more centralized, top-down processes and decisions made by higher-level officials. By contrast, microbudgeting is a combination of lower-level choices of programs, agencies, and ministry budgets, which are influenced by specialized interests and constituents (Guess and LeLoup, 2010). Decisions about fund allocation to PAs are a part of the microbudgeting process and are guided by both technical input and political interests. If technical input predominates, PA budgets are expected to be based on anticipated expenditures (Rubin, 2016). These expenditures, in turn, can be projected, for instance, by considering PAs’ contextual factors, such as their location, size, age, and management categories (Balmford et al., 2003; Armsworth et al., 2011). On the other hand, if political interests prevail, public budgets are expected to be driven by opportunism; consequently, they would not be related to PAs’ contextual factors.

Empirical studies on public spending in PAs are limited because national governments neither make their conservation spending publicly available for scrutiny nor share information on the criteria used to allocate public resources to PAs (Emerton et al., 2006; Waldron et al., 2013; Lindsey et al., 2018). These studies are fundamental to understand conservation financial gaps, project financial needs, and support the design of financially sustainable long-term national conservation strategies (Bruner et al., 2004; Waldron et al., 2017; Oliveira and Bernard, 2017; Mayer and Job, 2014). Studies to date reveal a marked variation in public spending across countries. At a global level, James et al. (2001) found that developed countries invested, on average, US$929 per km² in their PAs, whereas developing countries spent US$93 or less per km². In Latin America, the total public spending in PAs ranged from US$0.4/km² in Bolivia to US$795/km² in Costa Rica (Bovamick et al., 2010), whereas in Sub-Saharan Africa, the median values by country ranged from US$0/km² in the Democratic Republic of Congo to US$3.014/km² in South Africa (Lindsey et al., 2018). Despite these efforts, several knowledge gaps need to be filled, including, for instance, understanding how public spending varies within a country and how such a variation could be explained by PAs’ contextual factors.

In this study, we describe the patterns of public spending across 289 Brazilian federal PAs from 2013 to 2016. We selected Brazil as a case study because this megadiverse country is heterogeneous from a socioeconomic perspective (Thery and de Mello-Thery, 2012); harbors some of the world’s most important tropical terrestrial, freshwater, and marine ecosystems (Mittermeier et al., 2005); is perceived as a global conservation leader because it has the world’s most extensive terrestrial PA network (UNEP-WCMC and IUCN, 2016); and has made, more recently, its general public expenditures available. We use a dataset assembled from official sources to assess the amount of resources allocated to each PA and how such an allocation is influenced by the PA’s contextual factors. These two questions are relevant from a land use policy perspective because no formula explaining how Brazil’s national government defines the annual budgets of its PAs is publicly available. More specifically, we test the following general hypotheses derived from the literature about PA management costs:

• Public spending increases with PA size because large PAs require more staff, infrastructure, and equipment (Bruner et al., 2004).

• Public spending increases with PA age because PAs that received public spending in previous years are expected to have larger budgets than PAs that have been incorporated into the national budget more recently (Guess and LeLoup, 2010; Rubin, 2016).

• Public spending increases with human population density because PAs with high human pressure in their surroundings have higher management costs (Balmford et al., 2003).

• Public spending increases with the local human development index (HDI) because societies that are better off have strong pro-environmental behavior and, consequently, demand more and better PAs (Franzen and Meyer, 2010; Franzen and Vogl, 2013).

• Multiple-use PAs receive, on average, fewer public funds than strict-protection PAs do because multiple-use PAs have their managed costs shared directly or indirectly with other stakeholders (Bruner et al., 2004; Emerton et al., 2006).

• Public spending is expected to be higher in those PAs protecting regions or ecosystems whose conservation is considered by most of the national population as a priority for investments because budget authorities consider public perceptions in their decisions (Rubin, 2016).