Socio-economic and environmental trade-offs in Amazonian protected areas and Indigenous territories revealed by assessing competing land uses

Protected area (PA) assessments rarely evaluate socio-economic and environmental impacts relative to competing land uses, limiting understanding of socio-environmental trade-offs from efforts to protect 30% of the globe by 2030. Here the authors assess deforestation and poverty outcomes (fiscal income, income inequality, sanitation and literacy) between 2000 and 2010 of strict PAs (SPAs), sustainable-use PAs (SUPAs) and Indigenous territories (ITs) compared with different land uses (agriculture and mining concessions) across ~5,500 census tracts in the Brazilian Legal Amazon. ITs reduced deforestation relative to all alternative land uses (48–83%) but had smaller socio-economic benefits compared with other protection types and land uses (18–36% depending on outcome), indicating that Indigenous communities experience socio-economic trade-offs. By contrast, SUPAs, and potentially SPAs, did not reduce deforestation relative to small-scale agriculture (landholdings <10 ha) but did so relative to larger agricultural landholdings (70–82%). Critically, these reductions in deforestation frequently occurred without negative socio-economic outcomes. By contrast, ITs and SUPAs protected against deforestation from mining, but at the cost of smaller improvements in income and inequality. Those results suggest that although PAs in the Brazilian Legal Amazon substantially reduced deforestation without compromising local socio-economic development, efforts to secure Indigenous rights need additional interventions to ensure these communities are not further disadvantaged.