As a strengthening El Niño climate pattern tightens its grip across the vast expanse of the Amazon, a new body of scientific research is drawing urgent attention to a conservation priority that frequently receives less emphasis in global policy debates: protecting the forests that are still standing from the compounding threats of wildfires and logging.
While international conservation programs have traditionally focused heavily on halting outright deforestation and restoring previously cleared lands to their natural state, a landmark study published in the influential journal Science suggests a vital shift in strategy. According to the research, preventing disturbances within existing tropical forests—such as selective logging and destructive wildfires—can frequently deliver the greatest environmental benefits for every dollar spent.
The comprehensive study was carried out by an international research team comprising scientists from the United Kingdom, Brazil, Sweden, and Australia. Led by researchers at Lancaster University, the project represents what the team describes as the first systematic comparison of its kind. The scientists set out to rigorously evaluate various strategies aimed at protecting existing forests versus those focused on restoring forests on agricultural lands.
Comparing Conservation Strategies Across the Amazon
To arrive at their findings, the research team examined more than three million hectares of land across Santarém and Paragominas, two critical and heavily impacted regions located in the Brazilian state of Pará. The investigation spanned a ten-year period from 2010 to 2020, offering a robust historical baseline for analyzing how land-use changes affect local ecosystems over time.
To ensure the highest degree of accuracy, the researchers combined high-resolution satellite imagery with extensive, on-the-ground field observations. Their formidable dataset included 381 survey transects distributed across 38 catchments and 499 rural properties. Furthermore, the team integrated complex ecological models charting the distributions of 160 distinct bird species and 426 unique tree species, providing a comprehensive picture of regional biodiversity.
Using these observed changes in land use, the research team constructed detailed counterfactual scenarios. These sophisticated computer models allowed the scientists to estimate what might have happened to regional biodiversity and forest carbon stocks under alternative conservation approaches, comparing those hypothetical outcomes with what actually occurred on the ground during the study period.
In addition to ecological metrics, the team meticulously calculated the financial costs associated with each specific conservation strategy. This economic dimension made it possible to conduct a direct cost-benefit comparison, revealing precisely how much environmental return each intervention could provide for the financial resources invested.
"These findings highlight the need to put in place policies and resources to prevent and tackle the wildfires that disturb and degrade tropical forests," said Professor Jos Barlow of Lancaster University, who served as the senior author of the study.
Professor Barlow emphasized that this imperative is growing increasingly critical. "This is all the more urgent in this El Niño year," he noted. "These events, combined with ongoing climate change, result in longer, hotter, and more intense dry seasons across the Amazon’s ‘arc of deforestation,’ greatly increasing the extent and severity of forest fires."
Protecting Standing Forests Produced Major Gains
When the economic and ecological data were synthesized, preventing damage to standing forests emerged as an exceptionally vital component of effective environmental stewardship. Measures specifically designed to reduce forest disturbances generated the largest overall benefits for forest biodiversity. Furthermore, these protective measures proved to be nearly as important as preventing outright deforestation when it came to safeguarding vital forest carbon stocks.
"While no one strategy is a silver bullet, our results provide clear evidence that we should begin by prioritizing the forests we have left," said Dr. Leonardo Miranda of Lancaster University, the lead author of the study. "And protection must go beyond avoiding deforestation. Avoiding forest disturbances from wildfires or logging delivered the greatest benefits for forest biodiversity."
At the same time, the research confirmed that forest restoration continues to provide meaningful and necessary benefits, particularly on rural properties where a large majority of the original forest cover has already disappeared.
However, when evaluated across the entire study area, restoring forest on abandoned or active agricultural land was less effective when deployed as a standalone strategy. Crucially, restoration was also found to be the most expensive of all the interventions evaluated by the team. These findings strongly suggest that future conservation funding should be carefully tailored to the specific ecological and economic conditions of individual landscapes, rather than relying on a singular, blanket approach across different regions.
No Single Strategy Was Enough
A key takeaway from the research is that none of the evaluated interventions on its own was capable of reversing the broader, systemic losses of biodiversity and carbon storage across the full study area.
"Net gains in biodiversity and carbon storage were only achieved when both avoidance interventions were implemented. However, combining all three interventions delivered even greater gains," Dr. Miranda explained. He added that such multifaceted approaches will become increasingly indispensable as climate change progresses, noting that forest restoration initiatives can be particularly vulnerable to the ravages of wildfires.
This scientific conclusion carries immense practical relevance at a time when governments and international organizations are placing a heavy emphasis on large-scale forest restoration. Both global environmental commitments and domestic Brazilian federal and state policies feature prominent initiatives aimed at bringing forests back to landscapes where they have historically been lost.
Restoration Works Best Alongside Protection
While the researchers stress that restoration remains entirely necessary—especially in landscapes where widespread clearing has already taken place—they warn that attempting to restore forests while existing tracts continue to suffer damage can severely undermine overall conservation gains.
"Restoration is essential where forests have been lost across large areas. But our study shows that investing in new forests makes little sense if, at the same time, we fail to protect existing forests," said co-author Dr. Joice Ferreira, a senior researcher at Embrapa and the principal investigator of the ‘Capoeira’ research program focused on forest restoration. "Otherwise, we are pouring money into a leaky pot—restoring forests in one place while others are being degraded and lost. What we urgently need to do is integrate these policy agendas, ensuring that forest restoration goes hand in hand with protection of the forests we still have."
Although the scope of the study was concentrated on two specific regions of the Brazilian Amazon, the scientists believe that their core conclusions hold broad relevance. They suggest that the findings may apply equally to other tropical deforestation frontiers around the world, potentially carrying profound implications for conservation policy well beyond tropical ecosystems.
Soy, Beef and Forest Degradation
Beyond government policy and traditional conservation frameworks, the researchers argue that the responsibility for forest preservation extends directly to private industries and global markets. Commercial sectors tightly linked to commodities produced in areas experiencing ongoing forest loss and degradation must also reckon with their environmental footprint.
"There is a need for the companies and markets that benefit from nationally and globally traded commodities like soy and beef to take responsibility not only for deforestation, but also the degradation of remaining forests that is inextricably linked to these production systems," said Dr. Toby Gardner, a co-author of the study, Senior Research Fellow at the Stockholm Environment Institute, and co-founder of Trase, a supply chain sustainability initiative.
The complete findings are detailed in the research paper titled "Protecting tropical forests is more cost-effective for biodiversity and climate than restoration," which was published in Science.
The underlying research was convened by the Sustainable Amazon Network, known locally as Rede Amazonia Sustentavel, and received financial backing from several major institutions, including the United Kingdom’s Global Centre on Biodiversity for Climate and Brazil’s National Council for Scientific and Technological Development.
