Who is responsible for deforestation in the Amazon? A spatially explicit analysis along the Transamazon Highway in Brazil

Understanding actor-specific responsibility for deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon is key in adjusting policy and resource allocation in the face of current forest destruction. However, previous research shows that there is great variability in such assessments. To contribute to the ongoing discussions on forest conservation and rural development policies in the Amazon, this paper studies actor-specific deforestation and its environmental effects in four municipalities situated along the Transamazon Highway. We used spatially explicit methods that integrate a database of 8281 georeferenced properties with a time series of remote-sensing data covering four periods between 1986 and 2007. We also included landscape ecology metrics as improved indicators of the complex environmental effects of forest fragmentation. The analysis demonstrates that smallholders (defined as colonists who own less than 100ha of land) were responsible for 23% of total deforestation in the study region while accounting for 55% of the total properties. We also explored the relationship between property size and deforestation at the property level, finding that it closely follows a power distribution. Property deforestation increased with property size, while the percentage of property deforestation decreased. In spite of this, compliance with current legal requirements to maintain 50% of property forest cover was not statistically different between smallholders and largeholders. In comparison to municipalities dominated by medium- and large-scale ranchers, the smallholder-dominated municipality of Medicilândia showed better performance in all applied landscape metrics with well-established relationships with the provision of important environmental goods and services. Although all studied municipalities showed severe accumulated deforestation, Medicilândia experienced an abrupt decrease in municipal deforestation after 1999 to just 0.03%year⁻¹, while municipalities dominated by larger holders maintained or increased their previous deforestation rates to between 0.90% and 1.34%year⁻¹ in the same period. This indicates that the smallholders’ productions schemes in our study area might present potential for agricultural frontier stabilization based on improved land-use efficiency. The policy implications of our findings are discussed, especially with regard to the role of smallholders in productive forest conservation.