The main command-and-control (C&C) instrument for forest conservation is the Forest Code (FC), which amongst others requires, in the case of the state of São Paulo, a Legal Reserve (LR) encompassing 20% (up to 80% in the Amazon) of the property area covered with natural vegetation. Until recent, direct regulation has been the most important type of policy for biodiversity conservation in Brazil. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.Ĭompeting interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.
įunding: The authors would like to acknowledge funding from the POLICYMIX project ( ) funded by the European Union's Seventh Programme for research, technological development and demonstration under grant agreement No. José Alberto Ângelo ( Other data can be accessed in IEA website. The person to be contacted in order to get the data is Mr. It is available from the Instituto de Economia Agricola (IEA) for researchers who meet the criteria for access to confidential data. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.ĭata Availability: Data from LUPA database is confidential due to the presence of economic and personal data from citizens at the database so it is not publicly available. Received: JAccepted: OctoPublished: October 25, 2016Ĭopyright: © 2016 Bernasconi et al. PLoS ONE 11(10):Įditor: Judi Hewitt, University of Waikato, NEW ZEALAND Although the inclusion of an additional constraint of targeting the BIOTA Conservation Priority Areas doubled the cost (+95%) compared with a “free trade” scenario constrained only by biome, this option was still 50% less costly than the baseline scenario of compliance with Legal Reserve at the property.Ĭitation: Bernasconi P, Blumentrath S, Barton DN, Rusch GM, Romeiro AR (2016) Constraining Forest Certificate’s Market to Improve Cost-Effectiveness of Biodiversity Conservation in São Paulo State, Brazil. The simulations showed a clear potential of the constrained “forest certificates” market to improve conservation effectiveness and increase cost-effectiveness on allocation of Legal Reserves. compliance to the Legal Reserve on own property, in the state of São Paulo.
CHIMERA TOOL PATCH CERT SOFTWARE
Using the conservation planning software Marxan with Zones we simulated different scopes for the “forest certificates” market, and compared their cost-effectiveness with that of existing command-and-control (C&C), i.e. In this paper we assessed potential costs and evaluated the cost-effectiveness of the instrument when introducing to this market constraints that aim to address conservation objectives more specifically. The recently launched Brazilian “forest certificates” market is expected to reduce environmental compliance costs for landowners through an offset mechanism, after a long history of conservation laws based in command-and-control and strict rules.