Empirical and spatial analysis of tradable permits in private forest conservation

Approximately 40% of the world’s ice-free land has lost its original natural habitat cover to other land uses, such as croplands and pastures, which poses major challenges to conservation. Many conservation strategies have been developed to halt or compensate for past or future natural habitat loss, but the effectiveness of such strategies remains poorly understood. This thesis explores how an emerging conservation scheme can result in effective conservation gains. I use The Environmental Reserve Quota (or CRA; Portuguese acronym) within The Brazilian Forest Code as a case study – the largest forest offset scheme in the world. Under this scheme, landowners must offset past deforestation (buyers) by trading hectares of deforested land with landowners who have standing forest available in their properties (sellers). Alternatively, buyers can offset by allowing forest regrowth. By examining the viewpoints of potential buyers and sellers about CRA (Chapter 2), I find sharp divergences related to programme-specific factors that could potentially affect trade, mostly around price expectations and contract length. Next, I combine policy scenarios with potential spatial scales of scheme implementation, to test how scale affects scheme’s conservation outcomes (e.g. area directed to avoided deforestation and/or regrowth; Chapter 3), as the scale in which conservation strategies are implemented often affect conservation trade-offs. Allowing offsets to occur within large spatial scales results in greater area of avoided deforestation and only a small area allocated to regrowth, whilst at small spatial scales results in the opposite pattern. However, the greatest total area was directed to conservation when the scheme was implemented at small scales. Finally, I compare the potential environmental co-benefits (e.g. aboveground biomass storage and accumulation and beta-diversity) associated with avoided deforestation and regrowth at large and small spatial scales (Chapter 4) and find that trade-offs between biomass and biodiversity co-benefits are dependent on spatial scale. Whilst large scale might protect biomass-rich forests, small scale protects highly threatened beta-diversity. These results are important for understanding important aspects associated to conservation schemes and their conservation outcomes. It is key that conservation polices account for landowners preferences in the design of schemes as well as the landscape scale in which conservation gains are expected to be delivered, in order to improve conservation effectiveness.