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Environmental policies that require native vegetation conservation can be challenging to implement, especially in productive agricultural landscapes. In Brazil, the Brazilian Native Vegetation Protection Law mandates ‘Legal Reserves’, protected native vegetation that landowners must retain on their properties. If landowners do not have the required minimum amount of native vegetation on their properties (the Legal Reserve ‘target’), they must either restore vegetation on the same property to meet the target, or compensate by protecting existing vegetation or restoring it on another property, ideally in ecologically equivalent areas. Here, we evaluate how different strategies (on-site/off-site protection and/or restoration), and different requirements for ecological equivalence when off-site strategies are used, affect the ability to achieve Legal Reserve targets, while minimising the need to restore native vegetation on productive farmland. We used a novel iterative tool to build scenarios that reflect different combinations of strategies to meet the minimum conservation target under different requirements for ecological equivalence, and compared their ability to achieve the target and their likely cost. The Atlantic Forest was the only biome where it was not possible to achieve the Legal Reserve target by protection of existing native vegetation, even when ecological equivalence rules were relaxed. As a consequence, vegetation restoration is required in this biome. Directing this required restoration to pasturelands that are less-suitable for agriculture allowed the target to be achieved in all states of Brazil, as long as only minimal ecological equivalence was required; however, for most states, the need to restore native vegetation on productive areas on farmlands could still be avoided while requiring medium to high ecological equivalence. These findings show the potential for moderate ecological equivalence to be achieved across most of Brazil in a cost-effective way and without impairing productive lands when seeking to meet the Legal Reserve targets.

The current rates of biodiversity loss are amongst the major global environmental problems, especially in the tropics. The creation of Protected Areas (PAs) is the most widespread strategy adopted for the minimization of such problem. However, official studies that guide the creation of PAs frequently do not convert their outcomes into conservation. This problem is not expected in Brazil, because scientific studies for the definition of priority areas for conservation were ordered by the same institutions in charge of the creation and management of PAs. In this paper, we compared the spatial distribution of PAs created in Brazil in the past decade with studies of priority areas for the protection of biodiversity. At a federal level of analysis, 19.44% of federal PAs are located in non-priority sites, which represents 0.47% of the total land area of federal PAs created. At a state level, 71.05% of state PAs are located in non-priority sites, which represents 60.68% of the total land area of state PAs created. In 2015, the total cost for the preservation of PAs in non-priority classes was US$ 17,539.30 (3.28% of the annual budget for federal PAs created after 2007) at federal level and US$ 541,745.02 (55.98% of the annual budget for state PAs created after 2008) at state level. The findings contribute to the development of strategies for the creation of new PAs in Brazil.

Although offsetting schemes may avoid biodiversity loss, the implementation of these schemes can be challenging, given the difficulty of balancing biodiversity benefits with the resulting increase in compensation costs. Here we have developed a novel offsetting methodological approach to balance environmental gains and land availability to support the decision-making process and negotiations among stakeholders. We applied this approach for the compensation of Legal Reserves, a percentage of native vegetation area that landowners have to set apart in their rural properties in Brazil to maintain native vegetation. If landowners do not reach the Legal Reserves requirements on their land according to the law, they may compensate it in other equivalent properties. To balance environmental gains and land availability, we have developed a dynamic tool that allows users to objectively analyze results from multiple offsetting scenarios. These scenarios can combine different levels of abiotic and biotic equivalence requirements, along with the possibility of trading up, i.e. compensating in priority natural vegetation areas and/or priority areas for restoration, even without high equivalence, with the resulting balance on land availability. The proposed approach seeks to find acceptable solutions, balancing stakeholder requirements for ecological equivalence, land availability, and possibilities of trading up. This procedure can enhance the local trade of Legal Reserves compensation, minimizing biodiversity losses, and also reducing costs. Our case study shows that it is possible to apply ecological equivalence in a balanced manner for Legal Reserve compensation. Owing to its flexibility, the proposed approach and tool can be easily adopted by other compensation schemes worldwide, supporting the negotiation and decision-making processes, to reduce biodiversity loss.

Gaining information on the dynamics of land cover changes is a valuable step towards improving practical conservation actions. In recent years, the Brazilian presidential elections in 2018 and the recovery from one of the nation's worst economic recessions defined a political scenario that has been causing shifts in the patterns of land cover change. A variety of national plans for the near-future exist and include the construction of new roads connecting remote Amazonian areas and large dams that could flood up to 10 million hectares. These development plans threaten environmental conservation, but the potential effects on the local or regional land cover are mostly unknown. In this work, we construct a model to evaluate the possible consequences of policy actions on land cover dynamics in the near-future at a high-resolution scale. The regression model extracts the historical relationships between land cover and spatial drivers of change, and its extrapolation for the future enables the simulation of scenarios for the national plans currently discussed in Brazil. We also simulate three scenarios based on the Representative Concentration Pathways of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which makes contrasting management assumptions. The resulting maps indicate that considerable changes in land cover composition and configuration may occur even in a short period. The historical Brazilian economic forces make the decrease in natural vegetation probabilities challenging to stop even in an environmentally oriented scenario, where plans for the construction of new infrastructure are abruptly interrupted. Our results also indicate that environmental degradation cannot be prevented without coordinated efforts between public agencies with a broad diversity of development viewpoints.