CONSERV: financial mechanisms to avoid legal deforestation and promote sustainable agriculture in Brazil

In the face of growing pressure to increase agricultural production, reducing agriculture-driven legal deforestation requires thoughtful economic interventions that are attractive to individual participating landowners, but also economically viable from a long-term funding perspective. Over the past 5 years, the Amazon Environmental Research Institute (IPAM) has conceptualized, implemented, and validated CONSERV—an experimental compensation mechanism for rural landowners in Brazil who protect their surplus native vegetation. A payment program designed to combat legal deforestation was rigorously evaluated, and demonstrated its effectiveness over a 4-year pilot period. The results of this pilot add new empirical evidence to the literature on the costs of funding conservation on private properties. This paper also illustrates the potential of three business models for scaling up CONSERV, developed through a “bottom-up” approach with the involvement of the participating landowners. CONSERV offers a new development paradigm that harmonizes conservation with production, aiming to achieve truly sustainable agriculture at globally significant scale.