Constraining Forest Certificate's Market to Improve Cost-Effectiveness of Biodiversity Conservation in Sao Paulo State, Brazil.

ABSTRACT: The recently launched Brazilian "forest certificates" market is expected to reduce environmental compliance costs for landowners through an offset mechanism, after a long history of conservation laws based in command-and-control and strict rules. In this paper we assessed potential costs and evaluated the cost-effectiveness of the instrument when introducing to this market constraints that aim to address conservation objectives more specifically. Using the conservation planning software Marxan with Zones we simulated different scopes for the "forest certificates" market, and compared their cost-effectiveness with that of existing command-and-control (C&C), i.e. compliance to the Legal Reserve on own property, in the state of São Paulo. The simulations showed a clear potential of the constr

SUBMITTER: Bernasconi P 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5079756 | biostudies-literature | 2016

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature