Open AccessEnforcement Evasion Highlights Need for Better Satellite‐Based Forest Governance
Author(s) -
Richards Peter,
Cohn Avery S.,
Arima Eugenio,
VanWey Leah,
Bhattarai Nishan
Publication year - 2017
Publication title -
conservation letters
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 3.153
H-Index - 79
ISSN - 1755-263X
DOI - 10.1111/conl.12379
Subject(s) - deforestation (computer science) , enforcement , amazon rainforest , corporate governance , business , government (linguistics) , greenhouse gas , environmental resource management , environmental governance , evasion (ethics) , natural resource economics , political science , economics , ecology , computer science , finance , linguistics , philosophy , immune system , immunology , law , biology , programming language
Our recent article, “Are Brazil's Deforesters Avoiding Detection?” demonstrated that focusing illegal deforestation enforcement on the subset of forest monitored by the flagship PRODES system has caused PRODES to capture a declining share of deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon. Deforesters may be purposively seeking out forests not monitored for enforcement. Addressing the problem would help Brazil maintain a cutting‐edge forest governance model worthy of transfer to other nations. Two commentaries questioned our decision to investigate solely PRODES and not additional government monitoring systems. We focused on PRODES because it is the most salient deforestation monitoring system. Other key deforestation monitoring systems are all either limited to the same monitoring footprint as PRODES, not used for enforcement, or are rarely used for measuring forest loss in the Brazilian Amazon. We do agree with the commentaries that Brazil's new satellite monitoring protocol for greenhouse gas emissions estimation is critical progress of the type we were advocating in our original article.