The effectiveness of environmental policies on reducing deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon

Preserving forests is important in the fight against climate change. Indigenous peoples tend to be good stewards of forests so that they can be preserved for future generations. This research covers whether the policy of providing indigenous communities with land titles saves forests, using impact evaluation to compare 150 indigenous communities living on 400,000 km2 of rainforest (or 8 percent of the Legal Amazon) with and without land titles. When comparing indigenous communities with and without land titles, the difference between both groups is small. The reason for this finding is that remote indigenous territories are not yet threatened by deforestation and therefore do not show a significant difference between both groups. However, satellite images clearly show that some indigenous territories can act as a buffer against deforestation.