In many tropical regions, forests have been shrinking; conservation areas have been expanding, and international funding has been increasing. How have these three trends interacted with each other over time and across space in the major deforestation regions of South America?
One way to look at the interaction between decreasing forest cover, increasing conservation areas, and increasing funding is to see conservation efforts as responses to expanding deforestation, and from this angle, we may ask whether conservation actors allocate more funding to areas with high remaining forest to secure, or to target areas with high deforestation rate to slow it down. Another way to look at it is that conservation funding is also a type of investment in lands worthy of protecting. From this angle, we may ask whether money goes to areas already conserved or to areas we’ve already spent more money on.
We tested these assumptions with spatial data of 30 years of forest cover, conservation areas, and international conservation funding in the forest and savanna biomes of Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, and Paraguay. It turns out that money tends to go to places that are already recognized for conservation, like national parks and other conserved areas including Indigenous territories in Brazil, and to areas that have received funding before. This shows that areas recognized as contributing to conservation can be key in attracting financial support to faciliate their delivery of conservation outcomes.
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