Brazil’s under-resourced environmental agencies, especially the Chico Mendes Institute, struggle to manage protected areas in the Amazon rainforest. Gus Greenstein writes that forest loss could be reduced if staff is reallocated from lower-risk areas to those with higher threats. He says these reforms are feasible and cost-effective, without waiting for additional funding or political changes.
The Amazon continues to burn badly. In August, normally the peak of the region’s fire season, an area larger than Costa Rica burned in Brazil alone. Many of these fires scorched pristine rainforest, home to a large share of the world’s biodiversity and enormous carbon stocks, that, when charred, hasten climate change.
Corporations are largely to blame for these fires — and deforestation in Brazil more generally. Responding to domestic and international consumer demand, they are reaching into ever more sensitive ecological areas to produce their products. At the same time, Brazil’s environmental agencies have long been under-resourced in the face of such challenges, and given current national politics, much-needed funds and staff are unlikely to arrive any time soon. It is therefore unsurprising that a large share of advocacy and academic research oriented toward slowing deforestation in Brazil focuses on the corporations that drive deforestation, rather than the public organisations that are the principal means of regulating corporate behaviour.
But neglecting the role of public organisations in the deforestation crisis, even severely under-resourced ones, means leaving opportunities on the table. Take one example: the Chico Mendes Institute for Biodiversity Conservation, Brazil’s federal protected areas agency. (In Portuguese: Instituto Chico Mendes de Conservação da Biodiversidade.) New research (my own) shows that there are major opportunities to get more out of the resources this agency already possesses. By enabling a more effective distribution of existing staff, deforestation could decrease significantly.
Managing protected areas
Brazil’s federal protected areas, of which there are currently 340, cover a swath of land more than twice the area of California (Figure 1). They are some of the most biodiverse places on Earth and have enormous carbon storage and sequestration capabilities.
Figure 1. Brazil’s federal protected areas
Yet many of them are under threat of deforestation, mainly by encroaching cattle ranchers and soy producers. Ranchers clear trees to create grazing land. Soy producers raze forest to plant soy for both animal and human consumption. Mining, grain production and timber harvesting also exert pressure. By elevating fire risk, climate-change induced drier weather is exacerbating all of these pressures.
But since it was created in 2007, the Chico Mendes Institute has arguably been vastly under-resourced to meet this challenge. In 2008, the agency had approximately 1.4 staff per 1,000 km2 of protected area. For comparison, the United States in 1993 had approximately 33. (More recent data are hard to come by.) In 2017, the end of my study period, things had not shifted much: the agency had approximately 1.6 staff per 1,000 km2 of protected area.
“…Brasilia National Park. In 2017, this tourist hotspot, which measures 425 km2 in area and is under little deforestation pressure, was staffed by forty-nine environmental agents. In the same year, the Terra do Meio Ecological Station, approximately 80 times larger and under severe deforestation threat, was staffed by a single agent…”
Unfortunately, there is little reason to expect that the Chico Mendes Institute will receive the additional human resources that it sorely needs any time soon. International pressure on Brazil to reduce deforestation remains high, and both the former president and environment minister responsible for the country’s most significant reduction in deforestation in recent memory are back in their posts. Yet Brazil’s congress, which is key to any large-scale infusion of resources, remains largely hamstrung to address deforestation issues due to the strong presence of agricultural interests.
Opportunity for reform
Still, the Chico Mendes Institute could prevent much more deforestation if it undertakes a particular type of reform. Specifically, the agency needs to reduce the number of agents posted in protected areas that contain less forest and which are not under severe deforestation pressure and reallocate them to protected areas containing larger amounts of forest area under high pressure.
To understand this need, consider Brasilia National Park. In 2017, this tourist hotspot, which measures 425 km2 in area and is under little deforestation pressure, was staffed by forty-nine environmental agents. In the same year, the Terra do Meio Ecological Station, approximately 80 times larger and under severe deforestation threat, was staffed by a single agent.
Very small forest management teams struggle in very large areas for multiple reasons. One is that larger protected areas take more time to monitor. Today, satellites can provide near real-time data on fires, which indicate deforestation risk. But much of the activity that precedes deforestation, such as the entry of encroachers into a protected area and shifting political economies, is more difficult to see, or cannot be seen, from the sky.
Even more important, protected area management requires repeated interaction with local stakeholders and in some cases building relationships. Agency officials must communicate the rules pertaining to a protected area, build the trust with local communities that will lead to compliance, sometimes negotiate exceptions to rules where warranted, and recruit local government agencies to assist with various tasks. Yet very small management teams that are already spending nearly all of their time traveling to and responding to incidents do not have time to invest in the more social aspects of management. Eventually, this neglect only raises the severity of the challenges they face as managers.
The imbalance of personnel goes far beyond Brasilia National Park and the Terra do Meio Ecological Station, implying major potential impacts from organisation-wide reform. Statistical modelling supports the theory that staff reallocation can make the Chico Mendes Institute better at controlling deforestation.
I analysed the 335 federal protected areas that Brazil had in place at the start of my study period (2008) using individual-level staff data and satellite-derived forest cover data, over a period of ten years. The results show that, historically, placing an additional staff member in a relatively large, protected area was associated with a greater deforestation reduction than placing an additional staff member in an average-sized or relatively small area. The same goes for varying deforestation pressure levels (which I define as the amount of deforestation occurring within a 5km buffer zone of a protected area each year): larger deforestation reductions from placing staff in higher-pressure areas.
Worth the effort
The estimated effects of adding a single staff member to a protected area are modest, but simulations indicate that a large-scale reform could have a big impact (Figure 2). Consider three scenarios.
- Had all of the agency’s forest management teams been twice as large over the study period, I estimate that about 450km2 (6.7 per cent) less deforestation would have taken place.
- Now imagine the agency did not receive any additional staff. Instead, it reduced by half the size of management teams operating in protected areas whose pressure levels were below the median and evenly re-allocated those staff to protected areas with pressure levels in the top 20 per cent. Under this scenario, I estimate that about 660km2 (9.7 per cent) less deforestation would have occurred.
- Under the same type of reform but with respect to area instead of pressure, I estimate that approximately 1750km2 (26 per cent) less deforestation would have occurred, albeit with more statistical uncertainty. 1750km2 is larger than greater London.
These findings reflect what I heard in interviews with dozens of agency staff. One long-time protected area manager said about the study period: “we had lots of people in Rio [a relatively lower pressure region with small protected areas] and nobody in Amazonas. It was the worst situation.”
Figure 2. Personnel allocation scenarios
Reallocating many of the 2,000 individuals who work for Brazil’s agency in charge of protected areas will not be easy. Doing so will require increasing support for agents working in remote and sometimes precarious regions, overcoming bureaucratic hurdles related to civil service law, and more. I analyse these barriers in another paper. But compared with other policy proposals for reducing deforestation that are likely to have similar impact, the solution I suggest here is arguably more feasible. It is low-cost and does not require the adoption of politically contentious policies.
To reduce deforestation in Brazil, attention to reforming corporations is important, but it is far from enough. And before taking the public sector seriously, there is no need to wait for more resources to rain down on the agencies that are responsible for enforcing conservation policy. Adjusting the ways in which such agencies structure their workforces may make a substantial difference.
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