Peri-urban expansion is an increasingly important source of tropical deforestation, and a bridge over the Rio Negro in Brazil's state of Amazonas provides an unusual opportunity to quantify these impacts with clear "before" and "after" periods. Inaugurated in 2011, the bridge connects Manaus to forest areas on the right bank of the river, thus opening a new frontier for peri-urban expansion. We used the AGROECO model in the Dinamica-EGO software to simulate "Bridge" and "No-bridge" scenarios to evaluate the spatial dynamics of deforestation in the municipalities (counties) of Iranduba, Manacapuru and Novo Airão. Simulated deforestation between 2011 and 2030 for the study area as a whole was 106% higher with the bridge. The portion of the study area with expansion of roads had four times more deforestation in the Bridge scenario than in the No-bridge scenario. A change in the spatial distribution of the deforested area was detected, with an advance of deforestation in the municipality closest to the bridge. Deforestation also expanded in more distant regions. Peri-urbanization in the Bridge scenario demonstrates the possible increase in the spatial distribution of deforestation activity beyond the already-consolidated frontier, making the deforestation pattern more diffuse and leaving the remaining forest even more vulnerable. Impact of the bridge could further increase due to additional factors, such as the planned opening of a highway (BR-319) connecting Manaus to Brazil's "arc of deforestation."
We explore the potential of incorporating accessibility analysis in addressing the impact of subway expansions on the real estate market. We first demonstrate that by using increases in accessibility to jobs as a continuous treatment variable, rather than adopting a binary station dummy approach, we achieve better goodness-of-fit in a quasi-experimental econometric analysis. Furthermore, accessibility measures allow the exploration of impacts beyond the local effects around new subway stations, shedding light on a network impact that has been largely overlooked to date. To increase the external validity of our findings, we apply the same analysis to the cities of Santiago (Chile), Sao Paulo (Brazil), Singapore, and Barcelona (Spain). and then explore the emergent patterns. We argue that the integration of urban economics and transportation analysis via the use of accessibility measures constitutes an innovation in the empirical approach commonly adopted in the literature. The use of such measures in causal empirical studies on transportation impacts can yield more robust and comprehensive results and capture nuanced spatial heterogeneity effects.
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