Opportunity cost of a private reserve of natural heritage, Cerrado biome – Brazil

Maycon Jorge Ulisses Saraiva Farinha, Luciana Virginia Mario Bernardo, Adelsom Soares Filho, André Geraldo Berezuk, Luciana Ferreira da Silva and Clandio Favarini Ruviaro

Land Use Policy, 2019, vol. 81, issue C, 49-57

Abstract: Brazil is widely recognized as a world leader in agricultural production. In order to achieve this status, several agricultural frontiers were sculpted throughout the decades. This was associated to land use change, mainly the substitution of natural vegetation for agricultural crops such as soybean and corn. On the other hand, conservation units were included in the national Brazilian proposal to conserve biodiversity and natural resources. Among these is the Private Natural Heritage Reserve (RPPN), which refers to private property. In this case, the establishment of a conservation unit depends on landowner’s decision making. This may be favoured because the Brazilian legislation allows economic activities (low-impact) to be developed in the RPPN. In this sense, this research was triggered to calculate the opportunity cost of an RPPN compared to the production of soybean and corn. The methodology was designed to define the net benefit of conservation based on the opportunity cost to create the RPPN. To estimate costs and revenues of agricultural production, we used secondary data. Carbon sequestration was estimated from the use of geotechnologies and parametrized equations. As a conclusion, if payments for a set of ecosystem services are accounted for, the estimated monetary values may be higher than the ones addressed to agricultural production.

Keywords: Conservation units; Land use; Environmental assessment; Net primary productivity; Net benefit of conservation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0264837718307543
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:lauspo:v:81:y:2019:i:c:p:49-57

DOI: 10.1016/j.landusepol.2018.08.028

Access Statistics for this article

Land Use Policy is currently edited by Jaap Zevenbergen

More articles in Land Use Policy from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Joice Jiang ().