Public spending on health care, education, and sanitation is linked to lower deforestation in the Peruvian Amazon: new empirical support for the climate debt framework
研究了秘鲁亚马逊地区公共卫生、教育和环卫支出与森林砍伐的关系，发现高支出地区森林砍伐更少，并通过案例揭示社会服务如何降低砍伐吸引力。
This paper offers the first empirical assessment of the relationship between deforestation and spending on social services centered in the Peruvian Amazon. We use a spatially explicit regression model to analyze the relationship between social spending and deforestation at the district level across the Peruvian Amazon. We find that districts with higher levels of spending on health care, education, and sanitation exhibit less deforestation on average, implying that unconditional funding for social services can serve as the basis for sound ecological policy. We then use further ethnographic, interview, and focus group data from the Amazonian districts of Echarate, Puerto Bermúdez, and Callería to shed light on how funding social services work to reduce deforestation. While Echarate and Puerto Bermúdez are similar in terms of ecology and population density, Echarate has a much higher budget due to natural gas levies. Respondents in Echarate indicated that a more robust social service net made deforestation and cash crop expansion less attractive. By contrast, in Puerto Bermúdez, many people aspired to an agrarian capitalist future with expanded cash crop plantations and hired labor as a means to build a better future for their families. Meanwhile, the case of Callería shows how conventional approaches to conservation have been fundamentally orthogonal to people’s basic needs. We conclude by encouraging political ecologists and scholars of convivial conservation approaches like Conservation Basic Income to critically support unconditional funding for basic services as part of a global just transition, aligned with the climate debt framework.