Payments for Environmental Services Impact Forest Cover? An Evaluation of the Reflorestar Program
Name: ISABELA PASSONI BUCHER
Publication date: 31/01/2025
Examining board:
Name |
Role |
|---|---|
| ANA CAROLINA GIUBERTI | Examinador Interno |
| ARIASTER BAUMGRATZ CHIMELI | Examinador Externo |
| RENATO NUNES DE LIMA SEIXAS | Presidente |
Summary: Studies on Payment for Environmental Services (PES) programs have expanded, yet a gap remains in the literature regarding their impact evaluation, especially in the Brazilian context. This paper aims to fill this gap by evaluating the Reflorestar program, implemented by the government of the state of Espírito Santo, estimating its impact on forest cover and land use. Using data from the Rural Environmental Registry and satellite imagery, we applied Mahalanobis distance matching and difference-in-differences methods, as well as doubly robust estimators (Sant’Anna and Zhao, 2020) to estimate the average treatment effect on the treated. The results indicate that properties participating in the Reflorestar program experienced a significant percentage increase in areas of vegetation cover categories such as Forest (13.1%) and Early Stage Native Forest (10.1%), and land
use categories such as general crops (12.5%), banana plantations (5.2%), and papaya plantations (2.2%). Furthermore, the results pointed to a reduction of approximately 13% in areas allocated to pasture. This study enriches the understanding of PES programs in Brazil, offering a thorough analysis of the impact evaluation of the Reflorestar program, highlighting positive effects in specific land use categories, particularly those aimed at reforestation.
