CONSERV — Twice-Yearly Payments for Legally Clearable Forest, Brazilian Amazon and Cerrado

Brazil's Forest Code allows landowners in the Amazon and Cerrado to legally clear a substantial share of native vegetation on private land for agriculture. CONSERV, an initiative of the Amazon Environmental Research Institute (IPAM) with the Woodwell Climate Research Center and the Environmental Defense Fund, instead pays landowners not to clear that legally clearable forest, betting that direct compensation can beat the returns from conversion to pasture or cropland.
Under the mechanism, IPAM verifies through twice-yearly site visits and satellite monitoring that enrolled forest remains undisturbed before releasing payment; one participating landowner reported receiving between R$250 and R$400 (about US$50-79) per hectare, with amounts set by estimated deforestation risk, ecosystem-service value and local land cost. The pilot ran from 2020 to 2024 across 23 properties in Mato Grosso, Pará and Maranhão, protecting 20,707 hectares, and ongoing contracts have since added roughly 7,000 more hectares, bringing total avoided legal deforestation to over 30,000 hectares.
IPAM reports that 14,843 hectares of native forest kept intact on private Amazon properties store 540,635 tonnes of carbon, verified through its monitoring process with Woodwell. Fire incidents have been measurably lower on CONSERV properties than on comparable nearby land, and enrolled landowners have self-reported more wildlife sightings and rainfall, though those specific observations are anecdotal rather than independently measured. The pilot was funded by donations from the governments of Norway and the Netherlands, with ongoing contracts now funded by members of the Soft Commodities Forum.
IPAM is candid that the pilot's donor-funded model is not built to scale: it is now evaluating carbon-credit sales, commodity price premiums and discounted-credit access as ways to fund payments long-term, while acknowledging that 'carbon credits alone would not cover opportunity costs' for landowners and that Cerrado carbon accounting is more methodologically complex than in the Amazon, meaning wider rollout will likely need regulatory standardisation of how payments are calculated.

Read the full analysis: https://ipam.org.br/conserv-protects-another-8000-hectares-of-private-property/