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Environmental degradation and economic development are two of the most pressing issues facing the world today, and public policy that aims to address one of these may unintentionally affect the other. I study the effect of an increase in environmental law enforcement on local economic conditions in rural Brazil. In the first part of this paper, I use data on more targeted anti-deforestation law enforcement activities, guided by satellite alerts, and link that to local forest conversion. I then exploit the staggered introduction of a policy that increases monitoring and enforcement in municipalities with a history of high deforestation, and link this to a range of economic development outcomes. I find that more targeted law enforcement reduces conversion rates of forest to farm land. Furthermore, economic conditions in municipalities with stricter monitoring improve, indicating that environmental enforcement and economic development need not be at odds. • Targeted law enforcement in Amazon Biome of Brazil reduces deforestation. • Economic conditions in municipalities with stricter deforestation-monitoring improve. • GDP per capita is higher, and number of recipients of income support lower in targeted municipalities. • Environmental enforcement and economic development need not be at odds. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

International boundaries in the lowland Amazon forest were historically drawn according to the scramble for natural resources. This paper uses a case study from the Peruvian and Brazilian border and the Ucayali and Jurua watersheds to understand the political ecology of a border process from contact to 2004. Results demonstrate how global resource demand and ecological gradients drove boundary formation and the relocation of indigenous labor to the borderlands. Forgotten in the forest after the fall of rubber prices, the borderland Ashaninka emerged to challenge loggers incited by the global demand for high grade timber. The transboundary impacts of this resource boom highlight discrepancies between the Brazilian and Peruvian Ashaninka's ability to mobilize power. A transboundary political ecology framework is necessary to grasp the heterogeneity and dynamism of natural resource management along boundaries and borderlands forged and tempered by historical resource booms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

After forest governance reforms by the Brazilian government, Amazon deforestation rates dropped by almost 80% between 2004 and 2012. Since then, however, deforestation has slowly increased again, casting doubts on the long-term sustainability of past conservation policy achievements. Clearly, deforestation rates and the associated local drivers of land-use and land-cover change differ considerably across the region, and adapting public policies to dynamic local contexts and actor constellations remains a major challenge for decision-makers. This paper seeks to contribute to the related science-policy debate by applying frontier theory insights to map, quantify, and compare land-cover dynamics in the Brazilian Amazon between 2004 and 2015. Our theoretical framework performs well in explaining broad variations in scope, nature, and agents of land-use and land-cover change across different frontier regions. We observe two types of transformative processes at deforestation frontiers in the Amazonian context. First, recent frontier development is characterized by an intensification of cattle ranching, and an increasing share of agricultural activities in the production portfolio, which could be the result of better access to modern technologies and markets, combined with forest governance induced scarcity of land for expansion of historically dominant extensive pasture systems. Second, the share of medium and large-scale deforestation declines at first, but rebounds during the observation period in all frontier types after 2012. Further research is needed to better understand the role of the changing political environment in driving these medium and short-term transformations in land-use and land-cover change. Furthermore, policy-makers, international cooperation, and civil society must seek strong integration between value chain based governance measures and effective environmental law enforcement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Our aim with this paper is to present a novel approach for developing story lines and scenarios by combining qualitative knowledge and quantitative data from different disciplines and discussing the results with relevant decision makers. This research strategy offers a solid foundation for perspectives into the future. The "laboratory" is the Brazilian Amazon, one of the hotspots of land-use change where local and global interests both collide and converge: local livelihoods are affected by regional and global climate change and by the loss of biodiversity caused by local and global economic interests in agro-industrial land use; such use contributes, in turn, to climate change. After decades of diverse policy interventions the question arises: What can we learn from past trajectories for a more sustainable development in the future? To answer this question, we combined qualitative story lines for the region, reviewed by local experts, with quantitative land-use scenarios, to study their regional and local manifestations in space. These results were then discussed again with local and national experts. Our findings suggest that in-depth knowledge of the diverging perspectives at a very local level is a fundamental prerequisite for downscaling global scenarios and upscaling local approaches to sustainable land-use management and thus, to producing communicable and applicable results. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon released approximately 5.7 billion tons of CO 2 to the atmosphere between 2000 and 2010, and 50–80% of this deforestation was for pasture. Most assume that increasing demand for cattle products produced in Brazil caused this deforestation, but the empirical work to-date on cattle documents only correlations between cattle herd size, pasture expansion, cattle prices, and deforestation. This paper uses panel data on deforestation and foot-and-mouth disease (FMD) status—an exogenous demand shifter—to estimate whether changes in FMD status caused new deforestation in municipalities in the Brazilian Amazon and cerrado biomes during the 2000–2010 period. Results suggest that, on average, becoming certified as FMD-free caused a temporary spike in deforestation in the 2 years after a municipality became FMD-free, but caused subsequent deforestation to decline relative to infected municipalities during the 2000–2010 period. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 2012, the Brazilian government revised the federal Forest Code that governs the use of forest resources on rural properties. The revisions included a forest trading mechanism whereby landowners who deforested more than what is legally allowed before 2008 could absolve their deforestation “debts” by purchasing Environmental Reserve Quotas (CRA) from landowners who conserved more forest than legally required. CRA holds promise as a tool to complement command-and-control initiatives to reduce deforestation and incentivize restoration. However, the success of this instrument depends on how its implementation is governed. This study builds on a few recent assessments of the potential of the CRA in Brazil–but that are focused on biophysical potential–by assessing how a few key implementation decisions may influence the CRA market development. Specifically, this study estimates how decisions on who can participate will likely influence the potential forest surplus and forest debt for the CRA market, and takes into account governance characteristics relevant to the State of Pará, eastern Amazonia. In particular, the study evaluates the effects in the CRA market eligibility after simulating a validation of properties in the environmental rural registry (CAR) and assessing different scenarios surrounding land tenure status of properties. Results show how regulatory decisions on CRA market eligibility will determine the extent to which CRA will serve as a tool to support forest conservation or as a low-cost path to help illegal deforesters to comply with legislation, but with limited additional environmental benefits. The study reviews regulatory options that would reduce the risk of forest oversupply, and thereby increase the additionality of the areas eligible for CRA. Overall, the study demonstrates the importance of including governance as well as biophysical characteristics in assessing the potential of forest trading tools to deliver additional environmental conservation and restoration benefits. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Along with other human impacts, climate change is an important driver of biological changes worldwide and is expected to severely affect species distributions. Although dramatic range shifts and contractions are predicted for many taxa occurring at higher latitudes, including bumble bees, the response of widespread tropical species is less clear due in part to scarcity of reliable occurrence data. Newly mobilized specimen records and improved species distribution models facilitate more robust assessment of future climate effects under various scenarios. Here, we predict both current and future distribution of the orchid bee Eulaema nigrita Lepeletier, 1841 (Apidae: Euglossinae), a large-bodied species widely distributed in the Neotropics whose populations within the Amazon region are believed to be controlled by cleptoparasitic Euglossini bees, such as Exaerete smaragdina Guérin-Menéville, 1844 and Aglae caerulea Lepeletier and Serville, 1825. Under both current and future scenarios of climate change, El. nigrita is expected to persist in deforested areas including those that might suffer desertification. While under current climatic conditions this species is not expected to occur in central Amazonia where the forest is still conserved, its range is expected to increase under future scenarios of climate change, especially in areas corresponding to the arc of deforestation in eastern Amazonia. The increase of human-related disturbances in this biome, as well as changes in the relationship of El. nigrita- Ex. smaragdina and El. nigrita- A. caerulea may explain the potential range increase of El. nigrita under future scenarios of climate change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]