Börner Jan, Kis-Katos Krisztina, Hargrave Jorge, König Konstantin
Center for Development Research, University of Bonn, Bonn, Germany; Center for International Forestry Research, Bogor, Indonesia.
Institute for Economic Research, University of Freiburg, Freiburg, Germany.
PLoS One. 2015 Apr 15;10(4):e0121544. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0121544. eCollection 2015.
Regulatory enforcement of forest conservation laws is often dismissed as an ineffective approach to reducing tropical forest loss. Yet, effective enforcement is often a precondition for alternative conservation measures, such as payments for environmental services, to achieve desired outcomes. Fair and efficient policies to reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation (REDD) will thus crucially depend on understanding the determinants and requirements of enforcement effectiveness. Among potential REDD candidate countries, Brazil is considered to possess the most advanced deforestation monitoring and enforcement infrastructure. This study explores a unique dataset of over 15 thousand point coordinates of enforcement missions in the Brazilian Amazon during 2009 and 2010, after major reductions of deforestation in the region. We study whether local deforestation patterns have been affected by field-based enforcement and to what extent these effects vary across administrative boundaries. Spatial matching and regression techniques are applied at different spatial resolutions. We find that field-based enforcement operations have not been universally effective in deterring deforestation during our observation period. Inspections have been most effective in reducing large-scale deforestation in the states of Mato Grosso and Pará, where average conservation effects were 4.0 and 9.9 hectares per inspection, respectively. Despite regional and actor-specific heterogeneity in inspection effectiveness, field-based law enforcement is highly cost-effective on average and might be enhanced by closer collaboration between national and state-level authorities.
森林保护法的监管执法常常被认为是减少热带森林损失的一种无效方法。然而，有效的执法往往是诸如环境服务付费等替代性保护措施取得预期成果的前提条件。因此，公平且高效的减少森林砍伐和森林退化所致排放量（REDD）政策将至关重要地取决于对执法有效性的决定因素和要求的理解。在潜在的REDD候选国家中，巴西被认为拥有最先进的森林砍伐监测和执法基础设施。本研究探讨了一个独特的数据集，该数据集包含2009年和2010年巴西亚马逊地区超过15000个执法任务点坐标，这是在该地区森林砍伐大幅减少之后。我们研究了当地的森林砍伐模式是否受到实地执法的影响，以及这些影响在不同行政边界之间的差异程度。在不同空间分辨率下应用了空间匹配和回归技术。我们发现，在我们的观察期内，实地执法行动在遏制森林砍伐方面并非普遍有效。检查在减少马托格罗索州和帕拉州的大规模森林砍伐方面最为有效，在这两个州，每次检查的平均保护效果分别为4.0公顷和9.9公顷。尽管检查效果存在区域和行为体特定的异质性，但实地执法平均而言具有很高的成本效益，国家和州级当局之间更紧密的合作可能会增强这种效果。
