Do protected areas hamper economic development of the Amazon region? An analysis of the relationship between protected areas and the economic growth of Brazilian Amazon municipalities
Introduction
Set aside protected areas (PAs) is considered one of the most effective policies for ensuring biodiversity conservation across the world (Dudley et al., 2014; Johnson et al., 2017; Rodrigues et al., 2004). Recent assessments have concluded that when well-managed, PAs reduce habitat loss and maintain species populations (Watson et al., 2014). PAs also provide livelihoods for millions of people and maintain land carbon stocks, which helps to mitigate and regulate climate changes (Bertzky et al., 2012).
Brazil is one of the countries that most contributed with the recent expansion of PAs coverage around the world. Indeed, 74 % of the worldwide area spared for new terrestrial PAs during 2003–2009 was in Brazil (Jenkins and Joppa, 2009). Many of these new PAs were gazetted in the Brazilian Amazon. They had as goal to control the regional deforestation, which had reached its second highest rate in history in 2003 (Silva, 2005; Walker et al., 2009; Fearnside, 2005; Kirby et al., 2006). From 2004–2014, 845,000 km2 of PAs were established in the region, including 315,000 km2 of indigenous lands. The expansion of the regional PA system together with the intensification of law enforcement, improvement of monitoring systems, interventions in the soy and cattle supply chains, as well as support for forest-based economic activities, were major drivers of the regional decline in deforestation from 2004 to 2014 (Arima et al., 2014; Assunção et al., 2015; Le Tourneau, 2016; Nepstad et al., 2014, 2009; Pfaff et al., 2015).
Although political actions seeking the protection of the biodiversity in the Brazilian Amazon receive broad public support (MMA, 2012), certain groups of interest have been orchestrating a systematic campaign to change the country’s advanced environmental legislation, including the way by which the country sets aside and maintains PAs (Abessa et al., 2019; Veríssimo et al., 2011). One of the most visible outcomes of these actions has been the high number of the PAs that have been degazetted, downsized, or downgraded in the country during the last years (Bernard et al., 2014; Marques and Peres, 2015; Pack et al., 2016). Currently, there are several legislative proposals under evaluation by the national parliament to allow mining and commercial agriculture within the PAs, where any such activity is currently prohibited. In parallel, anti-conservation movements are proposing new bills that seek to undermine the national PA system (Ferreira et al., 2014; Rocha, 2015; Villén-Pérez et al., 2018). Besides, the new Brazilian government is currently weakening the country’s policies against deforestation, thereby threatening the rights of indigenous and extractive populations, and the conservation of the country's natural resources (Artaxo, 2019; Begotti and Peres, 2019; Kehoe et al., 2019). The major argument behind this political movement is that the Brazilian PAs constrain the local economic development because the space they take could be allocated for large-scale agriculture, mining, and power plants (Ferreira et al., 2010; de Miranda, 2009; Rodrigues, 2014).
The economic impacts of PAs on local economies have been widely discussed in the literature and they can be positive, negative, or neutral (Andam et al., 2010; Brockington and Wilkie, 2015; Hanauer and Canavire-Bacarreza, 2015; Oldekop et al., 2016; Sims, 2010; Upton et al., 2007; West et al., 2006). Positive impacts have been reported from several countries. For instance, in Costa Rica, PAs with tourism activities reduced rural poverty (Ferraro and Hanauer, 2014). In the western United States, non-metropolitan areas with national parks, wilderness, and other forms of protected public lands improved their economic performance (Rasker et al., 2012). In southwestern Australia, protected areas stimulated the local housing development sector, encouraged the local business growth, and received local government finances (Heagney et al., 2015). In Brazil, PAs ensured land use rights for the local communities, protecting them against the negative impacts of the expansion of the economic frontier (Silva et al., 2017; Veríssimo et al., 2011). On the other hand, negative impacts have also been reported, mostly from the sub-Saharan Africa. In this region, the governments that used a top-down approach to set aside PAs disrupted the local economies by imposing land uses that were not compatible with the traditional practices of the local communities (Derman, 1995; Fairhead and Leach, 2012; Gibson and Marks, 1995; Neumann, 1997). Finally, there are a few studies reporting a neutral relationship between PAs and local development. For example, Castillo-Eguskitza et al. (2017) showed that in Biscay, Spain, communities living inside a PA had better conservation features (native forest) and rural systems (forestry and primary economic sector) than those in the regions outside the PAs while maintaining similar socioeconomic and cultural conditions.
Differences on how PAs influence local development across countries are expected to be context-specific because countries have different laws on how PAs can be used and how they can be set aside. PAs can be classified in at least six categories, each one with its own set of goals and restrictions of use (IUCN et al., 2008; Jenkins and Joppa, 2009). Overall, PAs with many restrictions of usage are not always expected to produce direct economic gains, whereas PAs with fewer restrictions are expected to contribute directly to the local economic growth because they can attract and maintain a diverse set of economic activities over time (Cardoso, 2018). Regarding how PAs are set aside, some countries use a top-down approach with almost no feasibility studies and public consultation whereas others use a bottom-up approach in which detailed feasibility studies and broad stakeholder engagement are both mandatory. In general, PAs established by a bottom-up approach are more likely to minimize conflicts and produce local economic gains compared with PAs established using a top-down approach. Because conservation of biodiversity, and economic prosperity are two important goals for the sustainable development of a region (Sachs, 2015), national or sub-national studies documenting the synergies and trade-offs between these two societal goals are important for both researchers and land use policy-makers.
In this study we analysed the relationship between local economic growth and PA coverage in 516 municipalities in the Brazilian Amazon from 2004 to 2014. Because Brazilian PAs were established with different management goals, we modelled the independent impacts of three PA groups (strictly-protected, multiple-use, and indigenous lands) on municipal economic growth, as measured by the compound annual growth rate of the gross domestic product per capita (CAGR of the GDP per capita) and of the gross value added per capita (CAGR of the GVA per capita) of the agriculture, industry, services, and government sectors. We examined these relationships at the municipals while controlling for the following variables: (a) municipality’s area, (b) municipality’s age, (c) GDP (or sectorial GVA) per capita in 2004, (d) estimated population growth between 2004 and 2014, (e) education index, (f) deforested area outside PA per capita, (g) deforested area inside PA per capita, (h) degraded area outside PA per capita, (i) degraded area inside PA per capita, and (j) presence of illegal mining within PA.
Section snippets
Study area
We analysed a total of 516 municipalities in the Brazilian Amazon and 571 PAs designated by 2014 (Fig. 1). The Brazilian Amazon was delimited according to the boundaries of the Amazonia biome, as defined by the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics [IBGE, Instituto Brasileiro de Geografia e Estatística] (IBGE, 2004b). This region includes the states of Amazonas, Acre, Roraima, Amapá, Pará and Rondônia, and parts of Mato Grosso, Maranhão, and Tocantins. The Brazilian Amazon covers 4.3
Results
The GDP per capita across the municipalities ranged from R$ 1,910 to R$ 94,820 (mean of R$ = 8,170) in 2004 and from R$ 3,770 to R$ 86,600 (mean of R$ = 13,400) in 2014 (Table A.20). The estimated regional population was 17,962,134 in 2004 and 21,282,131 in 2014 (Table A.20). Over the entire study period, the annual CAGR of the GDP ranged from -5.51 % to 23.66 % (mean = 5.56 %) (Table A.21, Fig. 2b). The CAGR of the GVA per capita of the agriculture ranged from –16.84 % to 30.31 % (mean = 4.40
Discussion
By using the best data available, reliable spatial econometric methods, and considering key control variables, we demonstrated that the economic growth of the municipalities in the Brazilian Amazon have overall neither increased nor decreased with changes in the coverage of strictly-protected PAs, multiple-use PAs, and indigenous lands from 2004 to 2014. The same general pattern was found when the economic growth was analysed by sectors, albeit with the following one exception: The growth of
Research data for this article
All information used in this analysis was obtained from available public sources and the sources are cited on the paper. All the information was organized in a final database for the analyses and will be made available on request.
Funding
Érico Emed Kauano was supported by Instituto Chico Mendes de Conservação da Biodiversidade. José Alexandre Felizola Diniz-Filho was supported by CNPq productivity scholarship and the INCT in Ecology, Evolution and Biodiversity Conservation. Fernanda Michalski received a productivity scholarship from CNPq (Process 302806/2018-0) and was funded by CNPq (Process 403679/2016-8). José Maria Cardoso da Silva was supported by the University of Miami and Swift Action Fund.
Declaration of Competing Interest
None.
Acknowledgements
We would like to thank Karen Mustin for some of the initial ideas about the work and for help on the assessment of spatial autocorrelation; Luis Barbosa, for help with some GIS-related issues; and Steve Redpath, for considerations and suggestions on an early version of the manuscript. We are grateful to Jaap Zevenbergen and two anonymous referees for comments on the manuscript.
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