Divergent Landowners' Expectations May Hinder the Uptake of a Forest Certificate Trading Scheme

Abstract

A major challenge to reduce forest loss in the tropics is to incentivize conservation on private land in agricultural settings. Engaging private landowners in conservation schemes is particularly important along deforestation frontiers, such as in the southern Brazilian Amazon. While we know much about what motivates landowners to participate as providers, or sellers, of conservation schemes, understanding what motivates landowners who act as buyers, that is, those who require land to meet conservation obligations, remains lacking. Here we identify viewpoints of sellers and buyers of an emerging forest certificate trading scheme in Brazil and quantify the compatibility of their views to examine potential barriers to trade. Sellers and buyers could be divided into three groups, but only one group in each case was positive about participating in the scheme. A key concern of buyers was the desire for establishing contracts with a long duration; in contrast, price was a key issue for sellers. Addressing these concerns by defining minimum contract lengths and restricting the spatial scale of transactions will be essential if this scheme is to realise its potential to reduce rates of deforestation.

Scale dependency of conservation outcomes in a forest‐offsetting scheme

“…Particularly for sellers, price is related to forgone opportunity costs but that is not the case for buyers, who expect price to be much lower than sellers’ forgone opportunity costs (Giannichi et al. ). Perhaps at smaller scales, where opportunity costs are high, there would be even less averted loss and more restoration because sellers would expect high returns of their surplus, making restoration a less costly offset option for buyers.…”

“…This option allows for a perpetual solution for buyers, which appears to be their preferred option (Giannichi et al. ).…”

“…Offset in PAs appears to be preferred by buyers because, besides being in perpetuity (Giannichi et al. ), they tend to be low cost (Freitas et al. ).…”

Effect of Forest Certification on International Trade in Forest Products

“…Among the economic literature on forest certification, market behaviors are the main focus, such as consumer cognition [12,13], cost and premium [14][15][16], market penetration [17,18], etc. Most studies from the national scope have generally claimed that forest certification has a negative impact on trade, such as Brazil [19], China [20][21][22], Chile [23], etc. From the limited existing evidences from a global perspective, Brenton [24] and Rametsteiner et al [25] identified that forest certification was not conducive to trade for developing countries and was likely to become a trade barrier from the perspective of ethical trade and political factors, respectively [5,19,26].…”

“…Most studies from the national scope have generally claimed that forest certification has a negative impact on trade, such as Brazil [19], China [20][21][22], Chile [23], etc. From the limited existing evidences from a global perspective, Brenton [24] and Rametsteiner et al [25] identified that forest certification was not conducive to trade for developing countries and was likely to become a trade barrier from the perspective of ethical trade and political factors, respectively [5,19,26]. Therefore, the evidence of existing studies on the impact of forest certification on international trade in forest products is scattered and unclear in academia.…”