Across 3 million hectares of the Brazilian Amazon, protecting forests from disturbance delivered greater biodiversity benefits than restoring already-cleared land, according to new research comparing conservation strategies.
Conservation policy has long debated where limited funding should go: preventing deforestation outright, protecting standing forests from degradation, or restoring land already cleared. A study published in Science this September provides the clearest answer yet, using counterfactual scenarios built from observed land-use changes across three million hectares of the Brazilian Amazon’s deforestation frontier.
Led by Leonardo S. Miranda of Lancaster University alongside researchers including Joice Ferreira of Embrapa, the team compared three intervention types against what actually happened on the ground. Protecting forests from disturbance, meaning avoiding fire and selective logging within standing forest, reduced biodiversity loss by 68.5% and carbon loss by 46.8% compared with the baseline scenario. Avoiding deforestation entirely mitigated 60.8% of carbon loss and 28.0% of biodiversity loss. Restoration of already-cleared land delivered the smallest gains for both outcomes.
These findings challenge a common assumption in conservation funding, where restoration often receives outsized attention and investment despite standing forests requiring protection first. Protecting forests from disturbance proved nearly as effective as preventing deforestation for carbon storage, while substantially outperforming it for biodiversity outcomes, a distinction with direct implications for how governments and conservation organizations allocate resources.
Neither single intervention alone reversed losses across the landscape. Combining avoided deforestation with protection from disturbance was necessary to achieve net-positive outcomes, increasing biodiversity by 12% and carbon by 18% above 2010 baseline levels. This combined approach proved essential precisely because deforestation and forest degradation operate through different mechanisms, requiring complementary rather than substitutable responses.
Restoration still carries genuine value, particularly in landscapes where deforestation has already progressed extensively. The research team found that restoration delivered meaningful benefits, particularly on properties where much of the original forest cover had already disappeared, suggesting it works best as a complement to protection rather than a replacement.
Protecting forests from disturbance addresses threats that often receive less policy attention than outright deforestation. Selective logging removes valuable timber species while leaving forest canopy nominally intact, and wildfires increasingly penetrate forest edges weakened by fragmentation and drought. Both processes degrade forest structure, reduce habitat quality for forest-dependent species, and release stored carbon, yet they generate far less public attention than visible clear-cutting.
Protecting forests from disturbance targets fire and selective logging, threats that degrade forest structure without clear-cutting, with researchers finding that combined deforestation and disturbance avoidance are necessary to achieve net-positive biodiversity and carbon outcomes above 2010 baseline levels. Photo by Bill Salazar on Pexels.
The study’s timing is especially urgent as climate change intensifies. The research team noted that combined interventions become increasingly important as warming progresses, since forest restoration efforts prove particularly vulnerable to wildfire risk. Newly planted or naturally regenerating young forests lack the structural resilience of mature canopies, making restoration investments vulnerable to being undone by the same fire disturbances the study identifies as critical to prevent.
This vulnerability creates a policy challenge extending well beyond Brazil. As governments and international organizations increasingly emphasize forest restoration within climate commitments and biodiversity frameworks, protecting forests from disturbance offers a complementary message: restoration investments achieve far less impact when the remaining standing forest around them continues degrading from fire and logging.
Joice Ferreira, principal investigator of the Capoeira restoration research program at Embrapa, emphasized that restoration remains essential precisely where forests have been lost across large areas, reinforcing that the study’s findings don’t diminish restoration’s role but rather clarify where and when it delivers the strongest returns. Restoration works best as part of integrated strategies rather than as a primary tool used independently of forest protection efforts.
The research methodology itself offers a template for conservation planning elsewhere. By using observed land-use changes to construct counterfactual scenarios, the team measured what would have happened under different intervention choices and quantified trade-offs that previous studies could only estimate qualitatively. This approach allows policymakers to weigh cost-effectiveness directly rather than relying on intuition about which conservation strategy delivers the greatest return per dollar invested.
As tropical deforestation frontiers worldwide face similar pressures from fire, logging, and agricultural expansion, protecting forests from disturbance provides an evidence-based framework extending beyond the Brazilian Amazon alone. The findings suggest that conservation funding achieves maximum impact not through any single strategy in isolation, but through carefully sequenced combinations addressing deforestation, degradation, and restoration simultaneously, each targeting the specific threats most relevant to a given landscape’s current condition.
