Combining protection and restoration strategies enables cost-effective compensation with ecological equivalence in Brazil

Abstract

Ecological compensation and offsets have been used worldwide to repair the residual impacts caused by human activities. Achieving ecological equivalence in them has been challenging, and conflicts between development and environmental sectors commonly arise. We addressed this issue by testing an approach that is cost-effective and includes equivalence in compensation. We used the Brazilian Native Vegetation Protection Law's Legal Reserve (a native vegetation percentage of every rural property that must be conserved) compensation scheme as a study case. We created scenarios to test the law's three main compensation strategies (vegetation protection, restoration, and regularization of private lands inside public protected areas) separately and combined. We used a recently developed framework to assess ecological equivalence, including biodiversity, landscape, and ecosystem attributes measured and exchanged in a disaggregated manner. Cost-effectiveness was evaluated regarding deficit resolution (deficit in Legal Reserve needing compensation), economic costs, and native vegetation gained (additionality). The most effective strategy for deficit resolution was restoration (98.99 % of resolution), followed by protection (40.22 %) and regularization (0.15 %). Restoration was the most expensive strategy, but it also had the highest additionality. Combined scenarios resulted in balanced cost-effectiveness. The combination of protection followed by restoration was the best strategy, since its deficit resolution was high (99.47 %), with an intermediate cost and additionality. It is thus possible to make cost-effective compensation exchanges accounting for ecological equivalence adequately. We also used simple calculations in a new spatial optimization automated deficit and compensation prioritization path to generate spatially explicit results. Considering ecological equivalence guarantees additionality and more equitable spatial distribution of ecological benefits. These findings underscore the importance of incorporating equivalence in compensation, offering a promising avenue for bolstering efforts in compensation and offset schemes to address the ongoing climate and environmental global crisis by proposing a new approach to achieve this.