Combining protection and restoration strategies enables cost-effective compensation with ecological equivalence in Brazil

Ecological compensation and offsets have been used worldwide to repair the residual impacts caused by human activities. Achieving ecological equivalence in them has been challenging, and conflicts between development and environmental sectors commonly arise. We addressed this issue by testing an approach that is cost-effective and includes equivalence in compensation. We used the Brazilian Native Vegetation Protection Law’s Legal Reserve (a native vegetation percentage of every rural property that must be conserved) compensation scheme as a study case.

Time to fix the biodiversity leak

The risk that locally successful nature conservation may be shifting problems elsewhere can no longer be ignored

The EU and UK’s deforestation-free supply chains regulation:Implications for Brazil

This paper analyses the potential implications of the proposed European Union Deforestation Regulation (EUDR) and the recently adopted United Kingdom (UK) legislation on deforestation-free supply chains (henceforth ‘the legislation’) for different stakeholders in Brazil. These regulations intend to address global commodity-driven deforestation and forest degradation by ensuring that targeted commodities and products placed on (or exported from) markets are of minimal risk of being associated with - in the EU - deforestation and forest degradation or - in the UK - illegal deforestation.

Conflicts and opportunities for commercial tree plantation expansion and biodiversity restoration across Brazil

Substantial global restoration commitments are occurring alongside a rapid expansion in land-hungry tropical commodities, including to supply increasing demand for wood products. Future commercial tree plantations may deliver high timber yields, shrinking the footprint of production forestry, but there is an as-yet unquantified risk that plantations may expand into priority restoration areas, with marked environmental costs. Focusing on Brazil—a country of exceptional restoration importance and one of the largest tropical timber producers—we use random forest models and information on the economic, social, and spatial drivers of historic commercial tree plantation expansion to estimate and map the probability of future monoculture tree plantation expansion between 2020 and 2030.

Yield increases mediated by pollination and carbon payments can offset restoration costs in coffee landscapes

Ecological restoration is vital for reversing biodiversity loss and climate change but faces cost-related implementation challenges, hampering global restoration efforts. Identifying when restoration within agricultural landscapes provides financial benefits—either by increasing crop yields or providing carbon credits—is imperative. Here, we developed restoration scenarios and estimated their financial outcomes to understand conditions where coffee yield and carbon-credit-derived restoration benefits compensate restoration costs in the Brazilian Atlantic Forest hotspot. We found that costs can be balanced by yield increases when farms already have >10% forest cover and restoration targets are below 25% forest cover.