Elsevier

Land Use Policy

Volume 100, January 2021, 104926
Land Use Policy

Funding deficits of protected areas in Brazil

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.landusepol.2020.104926Get rights and content

Highlights

  • Brazil invested only 15.5 % of the funds required in its protected areas.

  • 76.5 % of Brazil’s federal protected areas have funding deficits.

  • Funding deficits vary geographically.

  • Protected areas in the Brazilian Amazon are mostly underfunded.

  • The total annual funding deficit in Brazil’s protected areas increased.

Abstract

Protected areas (PAs) are the most effective public policy instruments to protect natural ecosystems and the services these ecosystems provide. Nevertheless, several PAs present a funding deficit because governments allocate fewer financial resources than those required to cover PA management costs. The variation in funding deficits within countries is not well documented because information about PA public investments and management costs are seldom available. We describe the variation in funding deficits across Brazilian federal PAs and propose a model that explains such variation by using PAs' characteristics and their zones of influence as predictors. We estimated that the 282 Brazilian federal PAs needed US$ 468 million to cover their management costs in 2016. However, the Brazilian government allocated only 15.5 % of these costs. Approximately 76.5 % of the PAs had funding deficits. Our model showed that: (1) funding deficit is negatively associated with PA age and the human development index but positively associated with PA size, (2) PAs in the Atlantic Forest and the Savannas and Drylands have lower funding deficits than PAs in the Amazon, and (3) PAs in the Atlantic Forest have lower funding deficits than PAs in the Savannas and Drylands. We found that the proportion of PAs with a funding deficit in Brazil is high and is comparable to the high percentage of PAs (75 %–100 %) with a funding deficit found in sub-Saharan Africa. Moreover, there is evidence that the total annual funding deficit in the Brazilian PAs increased in the last decade. New policies, public-private partnerships, and innovative funding mechanisms need to be set to close the large funding gap in the Brazilian federal PA system.

Introduction

In a world where social and environmental transformations are occurring faster than ever before, and societies are struggling to adapt to such changes (Steffen et al., 2011), setting aside protected areas (PAs) continues to be the most effective public policy instrument to protect biodiversity and provide the ecosystem services that nations need to prosper (Pimm et al., 2014; Watson et al., 2014). In the last three decades, global agreements, such as the United Nations Convention on Biodiversity, and financial mechanisms, such as the Global Environmental Facility, have fostered an unprecedented expansion of PAs worldwide (Lewis et al., 2019; Watson et al., 2014). Currently, there are more than 238,563 PAs covering 20 million km2 of terrestrial ecosystems and 6 million km2 of marine ecosystems (UNEP-WCMC et al., 2018). Most of these PAs are managed by public agencies and have national budgets as their primary source of income (Hein et al., 2013; Silva et al., 2019; Watson et al., 2014). Because governments allocate fewer financial resources than those required to cover PA management costs, PAs frequently present funding deficits.

Funding deficits are considered a major obstacle to the proper management of PAs worldwide (Coad et al., 2019). Without sufficient resources, agencies responsible for PA management cannot hire staff, build necessary PA infrastructure, engage with local stakeholders, design PA management plans, or enforce PA regulations. Without enforcement, PAs can be degraded by illegal human activities (e.g., Kauano et al., 2017), defeating the purpose for which PAs were initially designated. Currently, at least one-third of global protected land is under intense human pressure, and there is no sign that such a burden will be reversed soon (Jones et al., 2018). Thus, reducing or eliminating PA funding deficits is one of the most important topics for the next round of discussions of the Convention on Biological Diversity.

Designing financial mechanisms that secure the current and future global PA estate requires high-resolution PA financial data (Coad et al., 2019; Waldron et al., 2013). Such data would make it possible, for instance, to estimate the actual magnitude of PA funding deficits at different spatial levels (from individual PAs to global PA systems), and to put in place financial instruments that are appropriate to each context (Waldron et al., 2013). However, financial information about PAs is not always available because most governments and agencies that support PAs (including non-profit organizations) do not make their investments in PAs publicly accessible for scrutiny (Lehrer et al., 2019; Silva et al., 2019). Furthermore, information documenting PA management costs is scarce and is not comparable because there are no global standards for collecting it (Iacona et al., 2018).

Studies on PA funding deficits have shown that they are influenced by ecological, social, and political factors (Bruner et al., 2004; Lehrer et al., 2019; Waldron et al., 2013). Such studies have found that although PA funding deficits are found everywhere, they are more pervasive in tropical countries (Coad et al., 2019). Several studies compared PA funding deficits across countries (Bovarnick et al., 2010; Bruner et al., 2004; Lindsey et al., 2018; Waldron et al., 2017), but few analyzed the variation in funding deficits within a country (Lehrer et al., 2019). Therefore, comprehensive studies examining funding deficits within tropical countries are a gap in the literature.

In this paper, we first describe the variation in PA funding deficits in Brazil's terrestrial federal PAs. Then, we propose a model that explains such variation by using the characteristics of PAs and their zones of influence as predictors. We chose Brazil as a study country because it is a large (8.5 million km2) megadiverse country (Mittermeier et al., 1997) with high social-environmental heterogeneity (Théry and Mello-Théry, 2014), and one of the world's largest PA estates (Medeiros et al., 2011). Our results contribute to the emerging field of protected area economics that seeks to understand the spatial distribution of the costs and benefits of land use policies aiming to conserve natural ecosystems (Mayer and Job, 2014). In addition, it provides a framework upon which comparative studies on protected area funding deficits across nation-states can be built.

Section snippets

Protected areas

We studied the funding deficits of 282 Brazilian federal PAs (Fig. 1) that altogether cover 741,782 km2. These PAs represent 93 % of the PA coverage managed by the country's PA agency (Instituto Chico Mendes de Conservação da Biodiversidade, ICMBIO) and 46.7 % of all the country’s terrestrial PAs. We did not include marine PAs or PAs that did not have all of the information required for this analysis.

Information about PA age (in years in 2016), PA size (in km2), and management groups were

Results

We estimated that Brazil’s 282 PAs required US$ 468 million to meet their recurrent management costs in 2016. However, the Brazilian government invested US$ 72.8 million (15.5 %) (Table 1). PA's funding deficit ranged from 0% to 99.9 % (Table 1), with a national average of 58.5 %. Most PAs showed funding deficits (76.5 %), and those that did are found in all three regions (Table 2). In contrast, the 66 PAs with no funding deficit in 2016 are in the Atlantic Forest or Savannas and Drylands (

Discussion

We demonstrated that most (76.6 %) federal PAs in Brazil showed funding deficits in 2016 and that the system's overall funding deficit is substantial (84.4 % of the estimated management costs). Furthermore, we found that the funding deficit varied across PAs and that most of this variation can be explained by a simple linear model that combines attributes of the PAs and characteristics of their zones of influence. In general, our results revealed some general patterns that can be tested by

CRediT authorship contribution statement

José Maria Cardoso da Silva: Conceptualization, Methodology, Investigation, Writing - review & editing. Teresa Cristina Albuquerque de Castro Dias: Conceptualization, Investigation. Alan Cavalcanti da Cunha: Conceptualization, Investigation. Helenilza Ferreira Albuquerque Cunha: Conceptualization, Investigation.

Acknowledgements

We thank Cristina Lemos (CR9) for helping us access the information on public spending, Luis Barbosa for preparing the map, and Julie Topf for reviewing the manuscript. We are grateful to Kym Keive Machado dos Santos (NTI & LQSMA/UNIFAP) for developing the tools that enable us to explore the large database extracted from the Transparency Portal as well as two anonymous reviewers for very insightful suggestions. J.M.C. da Silva is supported by the University of Miami and the Swift Action Fund.

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