The assessment of whether protected areas (PAs) inhibit environmentally damaging fires is challenged by three sources of bias: (i) non-random site protection, (ii) influence of simultaneous land use ...and environmental changes, and (iii) unobservable time-invariant fire predictors. These biases were mitigated here with a quasi-experimental approach combining matching, differences-and-differences and the fixed-effects estimator. An extensive pixel-level dataset covering the 6 million km2 of the Amazon region across 18 years was analyzed. The five types of PAs considered differed on governmental level (national or subnational) and protection stringency (permitting either indirect or direct use of resources, or only indigenous inhabitants). Results attested PAs' effectiveness in containing fires on average, although in a degree 1.4 orders of magnitude smaller than in biased estimation. Still, the effect was considerable, with fire likelihood reduced, depending on the fire measure, in 7% or 12% in the average pixel-year. Also, the effect was heterogeneous, being larger in subnational PAs, albeit not with indirect use permitted, whereas national direct use PAs did not avoid fires. Results were robust to clustered standard errors and, in a reasonable degree, to Rosenbaum's hidden bias test. Consequently, expanding subnational PAs and enforcing all PA types could curb fires' environmental damages.
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Consider both water and land
When designing terrestrial reserves, it is common to consider the needs of species and systems from a terrestrial perspective, with an assumption that any freshwater ...systems will benefit as well. Leal
et al.
tested this assumption by analyzing data from two locations in the Brazilian Amazon and found that it is far from accurate: Terrestrial systems confer little benefit to freshwater systems (see the Perspective by Abell and Harrison). However, the authors also found that integrating the needs of freshwater species into overall reserve planning increased freshwater benefits by 600% while only decreasing terrestrial outcomes by 1%. They argue that reserve planning must take freshwater systems into account if they are to protect across both realms.
Science
, this issue p.
117
; see also p.
38
A study of terrestrial and freshwater species in the Amazon suggests that the conservation needs of freshwater species need to be actively considered.
Conservation initiatives overwhelmingly focus on terrestrial biodiversity, and little is known about the freshwater cobenefits of terrestrial conservation actions. We sampled more than 1500 terrestrial and freshwater species in the Amazon and simulated conservation for species from both realms. Prioritizations based on terrestrial species yielded on average just 22% of the freshwater benefits achieved through freshwater-focused conservation. However, by using integrated cross-realm planning, freshwater benefits could be increased by up to 600% for a 1% reduction in terrestrial benefits. Where freshwater biodiversity data are unavailable but aquatic connectivity is accounted for, freshwater benefits could still be doubled for negligible losses of terrestrial coverage. Conservation actions are urgently needed to improve the status of freshwater species globally. Our results suggest that such gains can be achieved without compromising terrestrial conservation goals.
•The effect of forest degradation induced by fires on rainfall is estimated.•Causal inference is combined with a rich biophysical and agricultural dataset.•Effects on forest fires and rainfall are ...comparable to those of seasonal changes.•Impact on agriculture was observed only in two Amazonian states.
Forest degradation by fires is growing in a fast pace in the Brazilian portion of the Amazonian rainforest, damaging the regional environment and economy. Seeking to measure the impact of such process on rainfall, the paper analyses a wide diversity of fine-grained satellite measurements with causal inference techniques. Results show that agricultural fires increase forest fires in 40 % of the usual rise in forest fires due to seasonal warming. Rainfall is reduced in 25 % of the rainfall decay normally caused by seasonal drying. Impacts on agricultural production were detected, but the evidence was not strong. These findings considerably expand the hitherto available evidence, which is not only scarce and biased by confounders, but essentially uni-disciplinary and thus partial in terms of the acknowledged consequences.
Carbon (C) emissions from forest fires in the Amazon during extreme droughts may correspond to more than half of the global emissions resulting from land cover changes. Despite their relevant ...contribution, forest fire-related C emissions are not directly accounted for within national-level inventories or carbon budgets. A fundamental condition for quantifying these emissions is to have a reliable estimation of the extent and location of land cover types affected by fires. Here, we evaluated the relative performance of four burned area products (TREES, MCD64A1 c6, GABAM, and Fire_cci v5.0), contrasting their estimates of total burned area, and their influence on the fire-related C emissions in the Amazon biome for the year 2015. In addition, we distinguished the burned areas occurring in forests from non-forest areas. The four products presented great divergence in the total burned area and, consequently, total related C emissions. Globally, the TREES product detected the largest amount of burned area (35,559 km2), and consequently it presented the largest estimate of committed carbon emission (45 Tg), followed by MCD64A1, with only 3% less burned area detected, GABAM (28,193 km2) and Fire_cci (14,924 km2). The use of Fire_cci may result in an underestimation of 29.54 ± 3.36 Tg of C emissions in relation to the TREES product. The same pattern was found for non-forest areas. Considering only forest burned areas, GABAM was the product that detected the largest area (8994 km2), followed by TREES (7985 km2), MCD64A1 (7181 km2) and Fire_cci (1745 km2). Regionally, Fire_cci detected 98% less burned area in Acre state in southwest Amazonia than TREES, and approximately 160 times less burned area in forests than GABAM. Thus, we show that global products used interchangeably on a regional scale could significantly underestimate the impacts caused by fire and, consequently, their related carbon emissions.
Pollution from agricultural fires is a global health issue that is particularly challenging where smallholders depend on burnings for subsistence. In Acre state, Western Amazon, a partial ban on ...fire, enforced with fines, is coupled with subsidized tractors. To evaluate this policy, a discrete choice experiment and contingent valuation were merged into a novel statistical variant of the Hicks-Kaldor test that is robust to preference heterogeneity. Among 27 ways to extend the ban, 5 could improve both respiratory health and smallholders' welfare, when compensated with tractors that are available for longer hours and at the right time of the year.
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