Land conflicts from overlapping claims in Brazil's rural environmental registry.

Satellite-based land use monitoring and farm-level traceability offer opportunities for targeted zero-deforestation interventions on private lands. Brazil's Rural Environmental Registry (Cadastro Ambiental Rural, or "CAR"), a land cadaster based on self-declaration of property boundaries, was created to monitor compliance with national forest laws. It has become an important enabling measure for sustainable supply chain initiatives like the Amazon Soy Moratorium. However, CAR enrollment is increasingly used to bolster illegal land claims, putting it at the heart of land grabbing dynamics. Self-declaration of properties in the CAR offers a unique situation to study land conflicts and their impact on land use decisions on a large scale. We quantified competing land claims among 846,420 registrations in the Brazilian Legal Amazon and applied a series of generalized linear mixed-effects models. We determined that CAR overlaps are more prevalent on larger registrations, in more densely settled areas, and in areas with less secure land tenure. We tested how landholders respond to land conflicts, finding significantly more deforestation and declared legal forest reserve on lands with multiple claims. CAR overlap results in an overestimation of forest reserves by up to 9.7 million hectares when considering double-counted and deforested areas of reserves, highlighting an overlooked form of Forest Code noncompliance. While the CAR continues to be used as evidence of land tenure, we conclude that the formalization of land claims through self-declarations is inadequate to decrease conflicts. CAR overlap information provides objective evidence of land conflict that authorities can leverage with field inspection to ensure peaceful occupation before issuing land titles.

Colombian biodiversity is governed by a rich and diverse policy mix.

We lack an understanding of how diverse policymakers interact to govern biodiversity. Taking Colombia as a focal case, we examined six decades of biodiversity governance (1959-2018). Here we analysed the composition of the policy mix, and how it has evolved over time, how policies differ among lead actors and ecosystems, and whether the policy mix addresses the primary threats to biodiversity. We identified 186 biodiversity-related policies that govern multiple ecosystems, use different instruments and address the main threats to biodiversity (that is, agriculture and aquaculture, and biological resource use). We found policy gaps in the governance of invasive species and wildlife trade. Biodiversity policy integration into some sectoral policies, such as climate change, poverty and pollution, has become more common in the past decade. Our results point to an increased need for effective coordination across sectors and actors, as new ones influence and implement the policy mix.

Climate predicts geographic and temporal variation in mosquito-borne disease dynamics on two continents.

Climate drives population dynamics through multiple mechanisms, which can lead to seemingly context-dependent effects of climate on natural populations. For climate-sensitive diseases, such as dengue, chikungunya, and Zika, climate appears to have opposing effects in different contexts. Here we show that a model, parameterized with laboratory measured climate-driven mosquito physiology, captures three key epidemic characteristics across ecologically and culturally distinct settings in Ecuador and Kenya: the number, timing, and duration of outbreaks. The model generates a range of disease dynamics consistent with observed Aedes aegypti abundances and laboratory-confirmed arboviral incidence with variable accuracy (28-85% for vectors, 44-88% for incidence). The model predicted vector dynamics better in sites with a smaller proportion of young children in the population, lower mean temperature, and homes with piped water and made of cement. Models with limited calibration that robustly capture climate-virus relationships can help guide intervention efforts and climate change disease projections.

Land-use policies and corporate investments in agriculture in the Gran Chaco and Chiquitano.

Growing demand for agricultural commodities is causing the expansion of agricultural frontiers onto native vegetation worldwide. Agribusiness companies linking these frontiers to distant spaces of consumption through global commodity chains increasingly make zero-deforestation pledges. However, production and land conversion are often carried out by less-visible local and regional actors that are mobile and responsive to new agricultural expansion opportunities and legal constraints on land use. With more stringent deforestation regulations in some countries, we ask whether their movements are determined partly by differences in land-use policies, resulting in "deforestation havens." We analyze the determinants of investment decisions by agricultural companies in the Gran Chaco and Chiquitano, a region that has become the new deforestation "hot spot" in South America. We test whether companies seek out less-regulated forest areas for new agricultural investments. Based on interviews with 82 companies totaling 2.5 Mha of properties, we show that, in addition to proximity to current investments and the availability of cheap forestland, lower deforestation regulations attract investments by companies that tend to clear more forest, mostly cattle ranching operations, and that lower enforcement attracts all companies. Avoiding deforestation leakage requires harmonizing deforestation regulations across regions and commodities and promoting sustainable intensification in cattle ranching.

Impacts of nonstate, market-driven governance on Chilean forests.

Global markets for agricultural products, timber, and minerals are critically important drivers of deforestation. The supply chains driving land use change may also provide opportunities to halt deforestation. Market campaigns, moratoria, and certification schemes have been promoted as powerful tools to achieve conservation goals. Despite their promise, there have been few opportunities to rigorously quantify the ability of these nonstate, market-driven (NSMD) governance regimes to deliver conservation outcomes. This study analyzes the impacts of three NSMD governance systems that sought to end the conversion of natural forests to plantations in Chile at the start of the 21st century. Using a multilevel, panel dataset of land use changes in Chile, we identify the impact of participation within each of the governance regimes by implementing a series of matched difference-in-differences analyses. Taking advantage of the mosaic of different NSMD regimes adopted in Chile, we explore the relative effectiveness of different policies. NSMD governance regimes reduced deforestation on participating properties by 2-23%. The NSMD governance regimes we studied included collaborative and confrontational strategies between environmental and industry stakeholders. We find that the more collaborative governance systems studied achieved better environmental performance than more confrontational approaches. Whereas many government conservation programs have targeted regions with little likelihood of conversion, we demonstrate that NSMD governance has the potential to alter behavior on high-deforestation properties.