National borders and conservation: evidence from the Amazon

Abstract

Tropical deforestation is one of the major drivers of climate change. Much of this loss is due to illegal logging. Unlike forests in the Congo basin and South-East Asia, the world’s largest tropical forest - the Amazon - has experienced a dramatic slowing in rates of deforestation over the last decade. The bulk of the Amazon is located in Brazil which has introduced a raft of policies to reduce illegal logging in recent years. We use Brazil’s border with its neighbors to identify the impact of Brazilian policies on deforestation. Because forests are a fixed resource and geography and infrastructure vary continuously over the border we can compare annual forest loss on either side of the border to tease out the impact of national forest policies from other drivers of deforestation. To do this we employ a satellite-derived data set that measures forest cover at a 30 x 30 meter resolution for the entire Amazon area across the 2000-2014 period. Our data reveals a sharp discontinuity at the border – in 2000 Amazonian pixels on the Brazilian side of the border are more likely to have been deforested and between 2001 and 2005 annual forest loss in Brazil was around four times the rate on the other side of the border. However, in 2006, just after the Brazilian government introduced a raft of policies to curtail illegal logging, these differences disappear and Brazilian rates of forest loss fall to those observed across the border. These results demonstrate the power of the state to affect whether or not natural resources are conserved or exploited even in the furthest reaches of the Amazonian jungle.