Sustainable Settlements in the Amazon, Brazil
... Despite poor transportation infrastructure, part of the production was sold (e.g., rice, cassava, cocoa). Secondarily, households depended on forest resources, collected mainly for autoconsumption, such as firewood for cooking, fruits, fish and bushmeat, in addition to monetary income from other sources, especially from government transfers, such as retirement pensions and the Bolsa Família conditional cash transfer program (Cromberg et al., 2014b). ...
... PAS implementation and CIFOR-GCS data collection timeline. Source: own elaboration, based onCromberg et al. (2014b) and IPAM (2016). ...
Rigorous impact evaluations of local REDD+ (reduced emissions from deforestation and forest degradation) initiatives have shown some positive outcomes for forests, while well-being impacts have been mixed. However, will REDD+ outcomes persist over time after interventions have ended? Using quasi-experimental methods, we investigated the effects of one REDD+ project in the Brazilian Amazon on deforestation and people's well-being, including intra-community spillover effects (leakage). We then evaluated to what extent outcomes persisted after the project ended (permanence). This project combined Payments for Environmental Services (PES) with sustainable livelihood alternatives to reduce smallholder deforestation. Data came from face-to-face surveys with 113 households (treatment: 52; non-participant from treatment communities: 35; control: 46) in a three-datapoint panel design (2010, 2014 and 2019). Results indicate the REDD+ project conserved an average of 7.8% to 10.3% of forest cover per household and increased the probability of improving enrollees' well-being by 27–44%. We found no evidence for significant intra-community leakage. After the project ended, forest loss rebounded and perceived well-being declined – yet, importantly, past saved forest was not cleared. Therefore, our results confirm what the theory and stylized evidence envisioned for temporal payments on activity-reducing (‘set-aside’): forest loss was successfully delayed but not permanently eradicated.
... The SSA project is a sub-national REDD+ initiative implemented by the Amazon Environmental Research Institute (IPAM in the Portuguese acronym), a Brazilian non-governmental organization involved in the design and implementation of several forest conservation programs in Brazil Cromberg et al., 2014. The SSA project started in 2012 and was financed by the Amazon Fund until 2017. ...
Ensuring the perpetuity and improvement of REDD+ initiatives requires rigorous impact evaluation of their effectiveness in curbing deforestation. Today, a number of global and regional remote sensing (RS) products that detect changes in forest cover are publicly available. In this study, we assess the suitability of using these datasets to evaluate the impact of local REDD+ projects targeting smallholders in the Brazilian Amazonb] Firstly, we reconstruct the forest loss of 21,492 farms located in the Transamazonian region for the period 2008 to 2018, using data from two RS products: Global Forest Change (GFC) and the Amazon Deforestation Monitoring Project (PRODES). Secondly, we evaluate the consistency between these two data sources and find that the deforestation estimates at the farm level vary considerably between datasets. Despite this difference, using microeconometric techniques that use pre-treatment outcomes to construct counter-factual patterns of REDD+ program participants, we estimate that about two hectares, or about four percent of the forest area, were saved on average on each of the 350 participating farms during the first years of the program, regardless of the data-source used. Moreover, we find that deforestation decreased on plots surrounding participating farms during the very first years of the program, suggesting that the program may have had a positive effect on neighboring farms as well. Finally, we show that participants returned to their business-as-usual pattern of clearing one to three hectares per year at the end of the program. The environmental gain generated by the program, however, was not offset by any catch-up behavior, as the two hectares saved on each farm before 2017 were not cleared in 2018. By calculating the monetary gain of the delayed carbon dioxide emissions, we find that the program’s benefits were ultimately greater than its costs.
... The SSA project is a sub-national REDD+ initiative implemented by the Amazon Environmental Research Institute (IPAM in the Portuguese acronym), a Brazilian non-governmental organization involved in the design and implementation of several forest conservation programs in Brazil Cromberg et al., 2014. The SSA project started in 2012 and was financed by the Amazon Fund until 2017. ...
... 2,700 smallholders from the western part of the Pará state (Brazil) (IPAM, 2016). The main economic activities of target smallholders were slash-and-burn agriculture and extensive cattle ranching (Cromberg et al., 2014). In this study, we focused on 350 smallholders who benefited from the whole package of interventions offered by IPAM, including PES. ...
Understanding why forest conservation initiatives succeed or fail is essential to designing cost-effective programs at scale. In this study, we investigate direct and indirect impact mechanisms of a REDD+ project that was shown to be effective in reducing deforestation during the early years of its implementation in the Transamazon region, an area with historically high deforestation rates. Using counterfactual impact evaluation methods applied to survey and remote-sensing data, we assess the impact of the project over 2013-2019, i.e., from its first year until two years after its end. Based on the Theory of Change, we focus on land use and socioeconomic outcomes likely to have been affected by changes in deforestation brought about by the initiative. Our findings highlight that forest conservation came at the expense of pastures rather than cropland and that the project induced statistically greater agrobiodiversity on participating farms. Moreover, we find that the project encouraged the development of alternative livelihood activities that required less area for production and generated increased income. These results suggest that conservation programs, that combine payments conditional on forest conservation with technical assistance and support to farmers for the adoption of low-impact activities, can manage to slow down deforestation in the short term are likely to induce profound changes in production systems, which can be expected to have lasting effects.
... Investigating their understandings is likely to be useful in thinking about the heterogeneous constructions of subjects, as well as their motivations, interests, and responses to future PES and REDD+ initiatives. We also note that the information we provide in Table 2 on IPAM's efforts is consistent with other studies on the project [4,5]. ...
We welcome the comments of Pinto et al. [1] to our article [2].[...]
Efforts to reduce emissions from deforestation and forest degradation and enhancing forest carbon stocks (REDD+) have evolved over the past decade. Early REDD+ programs and local/subnational projects used various interventions (i.e. enabling measures, disincentives and incentives), implemented by government, the commercial and non-commercial private sector, but are currently understudied vis-à-vis their effectiveness to address site-specific drivers of deforestation and forest degradation (DD). We assess how well REDD+ interventions addressed DD at five project sites in Peru (1), Brazil (1), Vietnam (1) and Indonesia (2). Our study design includes an integrated assessment of remotely sensed, spatially modelled, and locally reported drivers. First, we observe follow-up land use from high resolution imagery as proxy for direct deforestation drivers. Second, spatial Random Forest modelling of DD drivers allows for influence quantification of topographic, climatic and proximity variables at each site. Third, we report direct and indirect DD drivers from pre-intervention surveys and semi-structured interviews with five REDD+ implementers, 40 villages and 1200 households. Data gathered included perceived changes in forest cover and quality, and their causes. We found general agreement between observed, modelled and reported local DD drivers, yet some were inadequately addressed by interventions. Intra-site differences in drivers underscores the importance of analysing micro-level DD drivers. Our interdisciplinary approach reveals the complexities of local direct and indirect DD drivers, and the com-plementarity of remotely sensed, spatially modelled and locally reported methods for driver identification. A better understanding of the alignment between DD drivers and REDD+ interventions is vital for practitioners and policy makers to enhance the effectiveness, efficiency, equity and co-benefits of REDD+ at the local level.
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