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Since the late 1970s protected areas have been one of the most widely used regulatory tools
for the conservation of ecosystem services. In this paper, we assess the possible drivers to the
choice of withdrawing protected areas in the Brazilian Amazon. Protected areas are subject to
inefficiencies because of the existence of conflicts over land between conservation and development
activities. Further addititionality is an issue, as protected areas tend to be located in areas
with low opportunity cost of conservation, where forests are not likely to be cleared. This issue is
particularly important in the Brazilian Amazon where growing development must be combined
with the need to avoid deforestation. We first present a simple model of degazettement choice
which leads us to assess how the presence of two agencies having different development and
conservation objectives can lead to implementing this decision. We suggest that the probability
to decide the removal of protected areas is larger in places with low and high development pressures.
Then, we investigate the empirical determinants of protected area withdrawal by taking
advantages of the new PADDDtracker dataset (WWF, 2017b). We confirm that the likelihood
of degazettement is strongly influenced by development pressures, through characteristics of
the land that enable agricultural and infrastructure development, and by variables related to
protected area quality of enforcement. As protected areas located in highest pressure areas are
likely to be more additional, there is a risk that only the most effective protected areas may
loose their protection.
