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Abstract The conversion of tropical forests in the Amazon region for agriculture and other land uses is associated with health risks linked, for example, to air and water pollution from forest fires and agrochemical use. Several conservation policies introduced in the 2000s aimed at reducing deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon. Here we exploit variations in the regional targeting of these policies to measure human health externalities of conservation policy enforcement using a double-difference approach at close distance to the Amazon biome border. We find that the change in deforestation pressure reduces forest fire incidence. As a consequence, fine particulate matter concentrations in the air—a main vector for adverse health effects of fire smoke—also decrease. This leads to a reduction in the hospitalization and death prevalence rate due to respiratory health problems and other health benefits for the local population.

Summary: This perspective explores the multifaceted development challenges related to road network expansion in sub-Saharan Africa, where recent infrastructure investments reflect transformative ambitions but also imply socio-ecological tradeoffs. Roads can boost economic growth by facilitating trade, tourism, and access to essential services, yet they simultaneously contribute to ecosystem fragmentation, biodiversity loss, and human-wildlife conflicts. Looking at the history of Africa’s road development, we find that mega-projects—often funded by international donors—reshape political and economic landscapes while altering rural livelihoods and ecosystems. We synthesize literature and case studies to reveal critical trends and propose solutions, urging for a shift toward sustainable, evidence-based infrastructure strategies that balance development with environmental stewardship. We further advocate for transdisciplinary approaches and community engagement to align road expansion with long-term stakeholder needs so as to minimize adverse impacts on Africa’s socio-ecological systems.

Abstract Grasslands are key for food security and provide important ecosystem services. Intensive management, such as frequent mowing, increases productivity but decreases other ecosystem services as well as plant biodiversity. We here estimate large scale effects of mowing frequency on plant species richness and provide spatial assessments of yield-species richness trade-offs. We use a unique, multisource remote sensing-based dataset covering all permanent agricultural grassland fields across Germany (N = 1,313,073) over four years to estimate the causal impact of mowing frequency, as a proxy of grassland management intensity, on plant species richness. We identify spatially explicit and heterogeneous treatment effects using generalized random forests. We find that more frequent mowing significantly reduces plant species richness, but these effects vary by environmental and socioeconomic context. We quantify the trade-offs between species richness and yield due to changes in mowing frequency, finding an average cost of 126 euros per additional plant species, and demonstrate how spatial targeting can improve the cost-effectiveness of a hypothetical conservation policy, reducing this cost to 51 euros per species. Motivated by the 30 by 30 goal to protect 30% of terrestrial ecosystems by 2030, we further estimate opportunity cost of marginally extensifying 30% of German grasslands to be 131–181 million euros annually, depending on targeting priorities.

Abstract Reduced emissions from deforestation and forest degradation (REDD+) projects and programmes promise to deliver performance-based, cost-effective climate change mitigation. Fifteen years after its conception, we analysed the rigorous counterfactual-based evidence for environmental and welfare effects from such national and subnational initiatives, along with a Theory of Change. Using machine-learning tools for literature review, we compared 32 quantitative studies including 26 primary forest-related and 12 socioeconomic effect sizes. Average environmental impacts were positively significant yet moderately sized, comparable to impacts from other conservation tools, and mostly impermanent over time. Socioeconomic impacts were welfare-neutral to slightly positive. Moderator analysis showed that environmental additionality was likely restricted by project proponents’ adverse spatial targeting of low-threat areas. Scarce funding flows from carbon markets and ill-enforced conditionality probably also limited impacts. Hence, important policy and implementation lessons emerge for boosting effectiveness in the current global transition towards larger-scale, jurisdictional action.

The debate about how external incentives (e.g., payments for ecosystem services) and internal motivations (e.g., intrinsic values) interact in producing conservation outcomes is still unresolved. This paper examines the role of personal values (biospheric and egoistic) as intrinsic motivational drivers for conservation and their potential to affect conditional payments to enhance conservation behavior. We used a lab-in-the-field experiment with rural farmers in two ecological corridors of Tanzania to assess their conservation behavior under two payment modalities, namely a fixed individual payment and a fixed individual payment with an agglomeration bonus. In addition, a post-experiment survey was conducted to determine the levels of personal value endorsement for each individual participant. We consistently found that biospheric values increased conservation behavior, while egoistic values decreased it. The positive effect of biospheric values was higher than the negative effect of egoistic values. Both payments do not seem to affect the conservation behavior of farmers with high biospheric value endorsement. Heterogeneity in personal values thus likely has economic implications for the design of real-world PES schemes. Our results suggest that educational investments in training future generations of farmers with strong pro-environmental values can reduce future pressure on the environment and the costs of associated policy action. Areas for further research are discussed.

Abstract Deforestation in the tropics remains a significant global challenge linked to carbon emissions and biodiversity loss. Agriculture, forestry, wildfires, and urbanization have been repeatedly identified as main drivers of tropical deforestation. Understanding the underlying mechanisms behind these direct causes is crucial to navigate the multiple tradeoffs between competing forest uses, such as food and biomass production (SDG 2), climate action (SDG 13), and life on land (SDG 15). This paper develops and implements a global-scale empirical approach to quantify two key factors affecting land use decisions at tropical forest frontiers: agricultural commodity prices and national governance. It relies on data covering the period 2004–2015 from multiple public sources, aggregated to countries and agro-ecological zones. Our analysis confirms the persistent influence of commodity prices on agricultural land expansion, especially in forest-abundant regions. Economic and environmental governance quality co-determines processes of expansion and contraction of agricultural land in the tropics, yet at much smaller magnitudes than other drivers. We derive land supply elasticities for direct use in standard economic impact assessment models and demonstrate that our results make a difference in a Computable General Equilibrium framework.

Abstract Here, we analyze critical changes in environmental law enforcement in the Brazilian Amazon between 2000 and 2020. Based on a dataset of law enforcement indicators, we discuss how these changes explain recent Amazon deforestation dynamics. Our analysis also covers changes in the legal prosecution process and documents a militarization of enforcement between 2018 and 2022. From 2004 to 2018, 43.6 thousand land-use embargoes and 84.3 thousand fines were issued, targeting 3.3 million ha of land, and totaling USD 9.3 billion in penalties. Nevertheless, enforcement relaxed and became spatially more limited, signaling an increasing lack of commitment by the State to enforcing the law. The number of embargoes and asset confiscations dropped by 59% and 55% in 2019 and 2020, respectively. These changes were accompanied by a marked increase in enforcement expenditure, suggesting a massive efficiency loss. More importantly, the creation of so-called conciliation hearings and the centralization of legal processes in 2019 reduced the number of actual judgments and fines collected by 85% and decreased the ratio between lawsuits resulting in paid fines over filed ones from 17 to 5%. As Brazil gears up to crack-down on illegal deforestation once again, our assessment suggests urgent entry points for policy action.

[This corrects the article DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0159152.].

In an ideal scenario, the bioeconomy creates technology-based opportunities that promote economic growth and social progress while decoupling these development goals from increasing resource consumption and greenhouse gas emissions. Over the last decade, many countries worldwide have adopted comprehensive bioeconomy strategies. However, little is known about the implementation of these strategies. The following article presents and discusses the results of a survey of 282 global bioeconomy experts conducted in 2020 on behalf of the German Bioeconomy Council. We take stock of the implementation of bioeconomy strategies, identify continued governance gaps that constrain transformative shifts towards a sustainable bioeconomy and determine political support measures to overcome these gaps. Most importantly, our results show that even more intergovernmental cooperation and coordination at the international level is needed to create frameworks for sustainable bioeconomy development.

Deforestation in the Amazon region has suggested to influence precipitation in a non-linear way. Here, the authors show that forest loss is associated with decreasing precipitation after a scale-dependent threshold is crossed, which can cause stress on agriculture if deforestation is expanded.

Bioenergy can be part of strategies towards achieving climate and energy-related UN Sustainable Development Goals, especially for land abundant countries. Biofuel advocates argue that such strategies advance at least one-third of the SDGs, whereas opponents claim that they lead to negative trade-offs. Numerous studies have explored the benefits and risks of early bioenergy policies. Here we study the new Brazilian biofuel policy Renovabio, which was designed to increase the share of biofuels in the national energy mix of the world’s second largest biofuel producer to 18%. We use an impact score scheme to assess the potential effects of the policy on the SDGs based on expert opinions and triangulate our findings with a literature review. Our results indicate that these experts entertain high expectations for the policy’s mechanisms to increase bioenergy production and promote the substitution of fossil fuels. The policy is expected to support climate-related, economic and technological SDG targets, while potential impacts in other SDG dimensions, such as environmental, social, and health targets are contradictory. Our results reflect the positions in the debate around biofuels and indicate a need for effective sustainability safeguards to ensure that national policies like Renovabio actually live up to their declared objectives.

Over three-fourths of Brazil's greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions originate from land-use/cover change (LUCC). Alarming rates of forest loss in the Amazon region gained international attention in the past, but deforestation declined substantially since 2004 (although the rate has trended upwards since 2012). This result conforms to the GHG emission reduction targets set by the National Climate Change Plan, originally divided into three phases: 2006–2009; 2010–2013; and 2014–2017. According to the plan, emission reductions are measured against a deforestation baseline, initially corresponding to the average forest loss observed from 1996 to 2005 (reference period). We used an artificial neural network (ANN) model to spatialize the plan's original three-phase baseline and compare (i) the simulated carbon emissions from the baseline scenario to (ii) the emissions from observed deforestation during 2006–2017. Baseline spatialization was performed at the state level and informed by the 2000–2004 deforestation patterns in each state, resulting in nine state-specific calibrated ANNs. Simulated (baseline) and observed deforestation were compared to five biomass-density maps in order to estimate Brazil's GHG emission reductions. Our results indicate that forest loss during the study period was 62,321 km2 lower than the baseline and associated with 1.5 ± 0.4 Pg of avoided CO2 emissions to the atmosphere. Virtually all emission reductions (93%) occurred in the states of Mato Grosso (74%) and Rondônia (19%). In contrast, Roraima, Amazonas, and Amapá states increased GHG emissions by 44.8, 36.7, and 14.7 Tg CO2, respectively. Lastly, we discuss the issue of attribution of deforestation reductions for results-based payments (REDD+) and the emission reduction certificates issued by the Amazon Fund.

Several hydrobiogeochemical research activities have been conducted in the Eastern Amazon, contributing to the understanding of how changes in forests and agro-ecosystems affect the provision of services to ecosystems. The findings have demonstrated that good agricultural practices and the presence of natural secondary vegetation favored by the management of small family farms are important factors for hydrobiogeochemical cycling, aquatic ecosystem conservation, soil conservation, and mitigation of trace gases emissions from biomass burning in Amazonian small catchments. Two challenges for watershed service management arise in this context. First, low population densities and the relatively flat landscape mean that a critical mass of downstream beneficiaries of such services - a prerequisite for public intervention is more difficult to identify than in more densely populated mountainous areas. Second, although watershed service providers (farmers) are also to a considerable extent service beneficiaries, conflicts over land and cultural heterogeneities among settlers inhibit local collective action to safeguard the quality of stream water. Including small landholders in carbon payment schemes that compensate for the maintenance of riverbank vegetation would appear to be a cost-effective means to secure watershed services as additional benefits of forest-based mitigation of climate change.

The Brazilian Amazon and Cerrado biomes have been subject to strong pressure from agricultural expansion over the past two decades. A common claim is that the associated tree cover loss was partly driven by speculative land acquisition. In this paper, we analyze the effects of information on planned road infrastructure improvements and changes in conservation policy implementation on expectations of forest conversion. We use a unique land price dataset covering the period from 2001–2012. Based on land rent and hedonic valuation theory, we argue that forestland prices convey information on expected future land use. We decompose forestland prices into a conventional forestland rent and a speculative part related to forestland conversion and alternative land use rents. Using a fixed-effect panel, we then assess whether, where, and to what extent changes in conservation policy affect forestland prices over time. Our results confirm that forestland prices contain expectations about converting forestland to agricultural or pasture land. We also find indications that the Brazilian land market conveys information about potential conservation policy leakage and explore this conjecture descriptively using dynamic deforestation hotspot maps.

Global change drivers of land-use/cover change (LUCC) like population dynamics, economic development, and climate change are increasingly important to local sustainability studies, and can only be properly analyzed at fine-scales that capture local biophysical and socio-economic conditions. When sufficiently widespread, local feedback to stresses originating from global drivers can have regional, national, and even global impacts. A multiscale, global-to-local-to-global (GLG) framework is thus needed for comprehensive analyses of LUCC and leakage. The number of GLG-LUCC studies has grown substantially over the past years, but no reviews of this literature and their contributions have been completed so far. In fact, the largest body of literature pertains to global-to-local impacts exclusively, whereas research on local feedback to regional, national, and global spheres remain scarce, and are almost solely undertaken within large modeling institutes. As such, those are rarely readily accessible for modification and extension by outside contributors. This review of the recent GLG-LUCC studies calls for more open-source modeling and availability of data, arguing that the latter is the real constraint to more widespread analyses of GLG-LUCC impacts. Progress in this field will require contributions from hundreds of researchers around the world and from a wide variety of disciplines.

Payments for ecosystem services are becoming popular components in strategies to conserve ecosystems and biodiversity, but their effectiveness remains poorly documented. Here we present counterfactual-based evidence on the conservation outcomes of the pilot stage of Peru’s National Forest Conservation Program (NFCP). The NFCP provides direct payments to indigenous communities in the Amazon, conditional on avoided deforestation and the adoption of sustainable production systems. Using a spatially explicit quasi-experimental evaluation design, we show that the payment scheme has achieved only small conservation impacts, in terms of avoided deforestation. Counter-intuitively, these materialized largely on land not enrolled for conservation, due to spillover effects. Conservation effects on contracted land were negligible because communities were not chosen according to high deforestation threats, and they self-enrolled low-pressure forest areas for conservation. Occasional non-sanctioned contract incompliance contributed to these outcomes. We highlight implications for the design and implementation of up-scaled national conservation programs. Methodologically, we demonstrate the important role of choosing the appropriate spatial scale in evaluating area-based conservation measures.

A rapidly growing share of global agricultural areas is devoted to the production of biomass for non-food purposes. The expanding non-food bioeconomy can have far-reaching social and ecological implications; yet, the non-food sector has attained little attention in land footprint studies. This paper provides the first assessment of the global cropland footprint of non-food products of the European Union (EU), a globally important region regarding its expanding bio-based economy. We apply a novel hybrid land flow accounting model, combining the biophysical trade model LANDFLOW with the multi-regional input–output model EXIOBASE. The developed hybrid approach improves the level of product and country detail, while comprehensively covering all global supply chains from agricultural production to final consumption, including highly processed products, such as many non-food products. The results highlight the EU’s role as a major processing and the biggest consuming region of cropland-based non-food products, while at the same time relying heavily on imports. Two thirds of the cropland required to satisfy the EU’s non-food biomass consumption are located in other world regions, particularly in China, the US and Indonesia, giving rise to potential impacts on distant ecosystems. With almost 39% in 2010, oilseeds used to produce for example biofuels, detergents and polymers represented the dominant share of the EU’s non-food cropland demand. Traditional non-food biomass uses, such as fibre crops for textiles and animal hides and skins for leather products, also contributed notably (22%). Our findings suggest that if the EU Bioeconomy Strategy is to support global sustainable development, a detailed monitoring of land use displacement and spillover effects is decisive for targeted and effective EU policy making.

The PLOS ONE Collection "Measuring forest conservation effectiveness" brings together a series of studies that evaluate the effectiveness of tropical forest conservation policies and programs with the goal of measuring conservation success and associated co-benefits. This overview piece describes the geographic and methodological scope of these studies, as well as the policy instruments covered in the Collection as of June 2016. Focusing on forest cover change, we systematically compare the conservation effects estimated by the studies and discuss them in the light of previous findings in the literature. Nine studies estimated that annual conservation impacts on forest cover were below one percent, with two exceptions in Mexico and Indonesia. Differences in effect sizes are not only driven by the choice of conservation measures. One key lesson from the studies is the need to move beyond the current scientific focus of estimating average effects of undifferentiated conservation programs. The specific elements of the program design and the implementation context are equally important factors for understanding the effectiveness of conservation programs. Particularly critical will be a better understanding of the causal mechanisms through which conservation programs have impacts. To achieve this understanding we need advances in both theory and methods.

Bioplastic production is a small but fast growing sector in the global bioeconomy, which may benefit from public support measures in the future as governments seek to promote more sustainable consumption patterns. Here we assess the potential net economy-wide impacts of a 5% bioplastic target relative to current plastic consumption in the main producing regions. We compare two alternative policy strategies to achieve the target in a general equilibrium framework that allows for substitution between conventional and bio-based plastics: a subsidy on bioplastics versus a tax on fossil-based plastic consumption. Our study is the first to quantify global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from an increased demand for bioplastics on a global scale, produced from arable crops, considering both direct and indirect land use change (LUC). The tax provokes a contraction of all sectors that employ plastics, which leads to a drop of 0.07% in global real GDP, whereas the subsidy has no significant effect on the global economy. Both tax and subsidy reduce world demand for petroleum products, by 0.37% and 0.07%, respectively, boosting demand for sugar- and starch-based feedstock in the bioplastic industry. This leads to emissions from LUC globally, which correspond to a carbon payback time of 22 years on average, with the associated annual abatement costs of over US$2000 per tonne of CO _2 -eq. The tax has greater GHG reduction potential in bioplastic producing regions but generates greater economic and environmental spillover effects in countries that do not enforce the target. Results show that promoting bioplastic consumption is not a cost-effective strategy for climate change mitigation if based on conventional feedstock, due to market-mediated GHG emissions from LUC. Bioplastics are not necessarily more sustainable than conventional polymers just because they are bio-based, although further assessment of potential environmental gains associated with biodegradability and recyclability is desirable.

Deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon has dropped substantially after a peak of over 27 thousand square kilometers in 2004. Starting in 2008, the Brazilian Ministry of the Environment has regularly published blacklists of critical districts with high annual forest loss. Farms in blacklisted districts face additional administrative hurdles to obtain authorization for clearing forests. In this paper we add to the existing literature on evaluating the Brazilian anti-deforestation policies by specifically quantifying the impact of blacklisting on deforestation. We first use spatial matching techniques using a set of covariates that includes official blacklisting criteria to identify control districts. We then explore the effect of blacklisting on change in deforestation in double difference regressions with panel data covering the period from 2002 to 2012. Multiple robustness checks are conducted including an analysis of potential causal mechanisms behind the success of the blacklist. We find that the blacklist has considerably reduced deforestation in the affected districts even after controlling for the potential mechanism effects of field-based enforcement, environmental registration campaigns, and rural credit.

Annual forest loss in the Brazilian Amazon had in 2012 declined to less than 5,000 sqkm, from over 27,000 in 2004. Mounting empirical evidence suggests that changes in Brazilian law enforcement strategy and the related governance system may account for a large share of the overall success in curbing deforestation rates. At the same time, Brazil is experimenting with alternative approaches to compensate farmers for conservation actions through economic incentives, such as payments for environmental services, at various administrative levels. We develop a spatially explicit simulation model for deforestation decisions in response to policy incentives and disincentives. The model builds on elements of optimal enforcement theory and introduces the notion of imperfect payment contract enforcement in the context of avoided deforestation. We implement the simulations using official deforestation statistics and data collected from field-based forest law enforcement operations in the Amazon region. We show that a large-scale integration of payments with the existing regulatory enforcement strategy involves a tradeoff between the cost-effectiveness of forest conservation and landholder incomes. Introducing payments as a complementary policy measure increases policy implementation cost, reduces income losses for those hit hardest by law enforcement, and can provide additional income to some land users. The magnitude of the tradeoff varies in space, depending on deforestation patterns, conservation opportunity and enforcement costs. Enforcement effectiveness becomes a key determinant of efficiency in the overall policy mix.

Regulatory enforcement of forest conservation laws is often dismissed as an ineffective approach to reducing tropical forest loss. Yet, effective enforcement is often a precondition for alternative conservation measures, such as payments for environmental services, to achieve desired outcomes. Fair and efficient policies to reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation (REDD) will thus crucially depend on understanding the determinants and requirements of enforcement effectiveness. Among potential REDD candidate countries, Brazil is considered to possess the most advanced deforestation monitoring and enforcement infrastructure. This study explores a unique dataset of over 15 thousand point coordinates of enforcement missions in the Brazilian Amazon during 2009 and 2010, after major reductions of deforestation in the region. We study whether local deforestation patterns have been affected by field-based enforcement and to what extent these effects vary across administrative boundaries. Spatial matching and regression techniques are applied at different spatial resolutions. We find that field-based enforcement operations have not been universally effective in deterring deforestation during our observation period. Inspections have been most effective in reducing large-scale deforestation in the states of Mato Grosso and Pará, where average conservation effects were 4.0 and 9.9 hectares per inspection, respectively. Despite regional and actor-specific heterogeneity in inspection effectiveness, field-based law enforcement is highly cost-effective on average and might be enhanced by closer collaboration between national and state-level authorities.