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Collective property rights lead to secondary forest growth in the Brazilian Amazon
Baragwanath, Kathryn Bayi, Ella Shinde, Nilesh
Baragwanath, Kathryn
Bayi, Ella
Shinde, Nilesh
Abstract
Forests serve a crucial role in our fight against climate change. Secondary forests provide important potential for conservation of biodiversity and climate change mitigation. In this paper, we explore whether collective property rights in the form of indigenous territories (ITs) lead to higher rates of secondary forest growth in previously deforested areas. We exploit the timing of granting of property rights, the geographic boundaries of ITs and two different methods, regression discontinuity design and difference-in-difference, to recover causal estimates. We find strong evidence that indigenous territories with secure tenure not only reduce deforestation inside their lands but also lead to higher secondary forest growth on previously deforested areas. After receiving full property rights, land inside ITs displayed higher secondary forest growth than land outside ITs, with an estimated effect of 5% using our main RDD specification, and 2.21% using our difference-in-difference research design. Furthermore, we estimate that the average age of secondary forests was 2.2 y older inside ITs with secure tenure using our main RDD specification, and 2.8 y older when using our difference-indifference research design. Together, these findings provide evidence for the role that collective property rights can play in the push to restore forest ecosystems
Keywords
collective property rights, secondary forest growth, Amazon, indigenous lands, Brazil
Date
2023
Type
Journal article
Journal
Book
Volume
120
Issue
22
Page Range
1-9
Article Number
ACU Department
Institute for Humanities and Social Sciences
Faculty of Education and Arts
Faculty of Education and Arts
Collections
Relation URI
Event URL
Open Access Status
Published as ‘gold’ (paid) open access
License
File Access
Open
Open
Open
Notes
Copyright © 2023 the Author(s). Published by PNAS.
This article is distributed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License 4.0 (CC BY-NC-ND).
This article is distributed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License 4.0 (CC BY-NC-ND).