Journal
PROCEEDINGS OF THE NATIONAL ACADEMY OF SCIENCES OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
Volume 118, Issue 40, Pages -Publisher
NATL ACAD SCIENCES
DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2105480118
Keywords
community-based conservation; conservation bright spots; rural economics; sustainable development; tropical forest
Categories
Funding
- Darwin Initiative for the Survival of Species grant (Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs, UK) [20-001]
- CAPES (Coordenacao de Aperfeicoamento de Pessoal de Nivel Superior) [1144985, 1666302]
- Research Council of Norway [295650, 288086]
- French National Research Agency
- Sao Paulo Research Foundation
- NSF
- Research Council of Norway
- German Federal Ministry of Education and Research
- Mulago Foundation
- Rolex Award for Enterprise
- Brazilian National Council for Scientific and Technological Development productivity grant [301515/2019-0]
- Belmont Forum
- BiodivERsA
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The research found that communities living inside sustainable-use protected areas in the Brazilian Amazon have better access to healthcare, education, and infrastructure compared to those outside. The community co-management of fisheries and wildlife recovery within PAs have led to significant social welfare improvements.
Finding new pathways for reconciling socioeconomic well-being and nature sustainability is critically important for contemporary societies, especially in tropical developing countries where sustaining local livelihoods often clashes with biodiversity conservation. Many projects aimed at reconciling the goals of biodiversity conservation and social aspirations within protected areas (PAs) have failed on one or both counts. Here, we investigate the social consequences of living either inside or outside sustainable-use PAs in the Brazilian Amazon, using data from more than 100 local communities along a 2,000-km section of a major Amazonian river. The PAs in this region are now widely viewed as conservation triumphs, having implemented com-munity comanagement of fisheries and recovery of overexploited wildlife populations. We document clear differences in social welfare in communities inside and outside PAs. Specifically, communities in-side PAs enjoy better access to health care, education, electricity, basic sanitation, and communication infrastructure. Moreover, living within a PA was the strongest predictor of household wealth, followed by cash-transfer programs and the number of people per household. These collective cobenefits clearly influence life satisfaction, with only 5% of all adult residents inside PAs aspiring to move to urban centers, compared with 58% of adults in unprotected areas. Our results clearly demonstrate that large-scale win-win conservation solutions are possible in tropical countries with limited financial and human re-sources and reinforce the need to genuinely empower local people in integrated conservation-development programs.
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