Achieving private conservation targets in Brazil through restoration and compensation schemes without impairing productive lands

In Brazil, the Brazilian Native Vegetation Protection Law mandates ‘Legal Reserves’, protected native vegetation that landowners must retain on their properties. If landowners do not have the required minimum amount of native vegetation on their properties (the Legal Reserve ‘target’), they must either restore vegetation on the same property to meet the target, or compensate by protecting existing vegetation or restoring it on another property, ideally in ecologically equivalent areas.

Here, we evaluate how different strategies (on-site/off-site protection and/or restoration), and different requirements for ecological equivalence when off-site strategies are used, affect the ability to achieve Legal Reserve targets, while minimising the need to restore native vegetation on productive farmland. We used a novel iterative tool to build scenarios that reflect different combinations of strategies to meet the minimum conservation target under different requirements for ecological equivalence, and compared their ability to achieve the target and their likely cost.