Brazil's ecological intergovernmental fiscal transfer (ICMS-E) is a conservation incentive for protected areas (PAs). It redistributes tax revenues to reward municipalities for hosting PAs. To quantify its impact on the creation of state and municipal PAs, we used panel regressions on a longitudinal municipality dataset that combined information on PA creation and ICMS-E implementation for the 1467 municipalities in 6 Brazilian states in the Atlantic Forest region that never changed borders, from 1987 to 2016. We found that the percent of the municipal area covered with state or municipal PAs increased as a consequence of ICMS-E implementation. However, the magnitude of this effect declined as the ICMS-E revenue is shared more widely due to the expansion of PAs that reduced the gain from new PAs. We also found that ICMS-E policy primarily spurred the creation of PAs with less restrictive rules – similar to IUCN category V reserves – mainly by municipalities. For more restrictive PAs with higher local costs for municipalities, ICMS-E promoted state-proposed PAs but not municipal PAs. Our results suggest that states used ICMS-E to incentivize local implementation of their conservation preferences, including strict conservation, while municipal governments responded mostly with low-cost actions to increase their revenues.

巴西的生态政府间财政转移支付 (ICMS-E) 是对保护区 (PA) 的保护激励措施。它重新分配税收，以奖励托管保护区的市政当局。为了量化其对创建州和市级保护区的影响，我们对纵向市政数据集使用面板回归，该数据集结合了大西洋森林地区巴西 6 个州 1467 个城市的 PA 创建和 ICMS-E 实施信息，这些城市从未改变边界，从 1987 年到 2016 年。我们发现，由于 ICMS-E 的实施，州或市级保护区覆盖的城市面积百分比有所增加。然而，由于 PA 的扩张减少了来自新 PA 的收益，ICMS-E 收入被更广泛地共享，因此这种影响的程度有所下降。我们还发现，ICMS-E 政策主要刺激了限制性较小的保护区的创建——类似于 IUCN 第五类保护区——主要是由市政当局创建的。对于市政当局当地成本更高的限制性更强的保护区，ICMS-E 促进了国家提议的保护区，而不是市政保护区。我们的结果表明，各州使用 ICMS-E 来激励当地实施其保护偏好，包括严格保护，而市政府则主要以低成本行动来增加收入。