- Brazil has built one of the world’s most important protected-area systems, but a new study finds that most federal protected areas remain underfunded, with the largest shortfalls in the Amazon.
- The funding gap reflects more than the size of Brazil’s conservation estate: remote Amazon reserves are costly to manage, politically less visible, and often receive far less support than protected areas near cities and institutions.
- Underfunding has practical consequences, limiting staff, patrols, fire response, monitoring, community engagement, and the ability of protected areas to prevent deforestation and other threats.
- Tourism, ARPA, the Amazon Fund, and rising federal environmental budgets can help, but Brazil needs stable, transparent, long-term financing that matches the recurring cost of turning legal protection into management.
For protected areas in the Brazilian Amazon, one of the most basic questions is not where the boundary lies. It is whether anyone has the money to manage what sits inside it.
A reserve may exist in law. It may appear on maps, in international pledges, and in official counts of how much of Brazil is under protection. On the ground, though, management depends on less visible things: staff, fuel, boats, radios, boundary markers, fire brigades, monitoring, community work, and the ability to respond when illegal miners, loggers, poachers, or land-grabbers arrive. A protected area without these things is still protected, but only in a narrow administrative sense.
A gap measured in money
A new paper in Environmental Conservation puts numbers to this gap. The study, by Helenilza Ferreira Albuquerque Cunha and colleagues, examined funding deficits in 300 federal protected areas in Brazil between 2014 and 2023. Together, those areas cover nearly 750,000 square kilometers, representing most of the protected areas managed by ICMBio, Brazil’s federal biodiversity agency. The researchers compared actual spending with evidence-based estimates of the minimum cost of managing each site. In 2023, 72% of the protected areas they studied were underfunded. The combined shortfall was equivalent to about $958 million in purchasing-power terms.
The gap was largest in the Amazon. According to the paper, Amazonian protected areas had an average funding deficit of 79.2% in 2023. In practical terms, they received about one-fifth of what they needed. In the Atlantic Forest, the average deficit was 27.6%. Of the 122 Amazon protected areas in the study, 120 fell below minimum cost thresholds.
This is not a simple story of official neglect. Over the decade studied, investment rose by about 30%. Brazil also has one of the world’s largest protected-area systems, and its federal transparency systems make it possible to study spending patterns in unusual detail. The deeper problem is that Brazil has expanded protection faster than it has built stable mechanisms to pay for management. Its most remote and ecologically important areas are often the least able to attract political attention.
Earlier work had already shown that Brazil’s federal protected areas were badly underfunded. A 2021 study estimated that, in 2016, the federal system received only a small share of the money needed to cover recurrent management costs. Cunha and her colleagues add a decade-long view, showing how those gaps shifted across administrations, fiscal shocks, and regions.
Why the Amazon loses out
The Amazon’s protected areas are expensive to manage. Many are vast. Some are difficult to reach. A field visit can require a river journey, a flight, or both. Enforcement may involve long patrols across forests, rivers, and informal roads. A single manager may be responsible for an area larger than some countries. The costs of fuel, transport, equipment, communications, and safety rise quickly. So do the risks.
The study found that larger protected areas tended to have larger shortfalls. Older protected areas tended to have smaller ones, probably because they have had more time to build administrative routines, support networks, and political visibility. The researchers found no significant difference between strictly protected areas and sustainable-use areas. The broader pattern was geographical and political: protected areas near people and institutions tended to fare better.
That finding matters because it runs against one reasonable expectation. The researchers expected that higher population density around a protected area might increase management costs, and therefore increase deficits. Instead, higher population density was associated with lower deficits. One plausible explanation is visibility. Parks and reserves near urban areas are easier for citizens, journalists, officials, and civil-society groups to notice. They may be easier to visit, easier to defend in budget negotiations, and easier to present as public assets. Remote Amazon reserves can hold immense natural capital, but they often have fewer nearby voters, fewer news cameras, and weaker local tax bases.
The result is a lopsided geography of conservation finance. Places that matter greatly for biodiversity, carbon storage, rainfall regulation, and Indigenous and local livelihoods may have the weakest budgetary constituency. Their value is large, but spread widely. Their costs are local, immediate, and recurring.
What underfunding changes on the ground
Those shortages have consequences beyond administration. A 2024 study of Latin American protected areas found that funding deficits can weaken performance on the ground. In Ecuador, where site-level financial data were available, protected areas with larger deficits were less effective at avoiding deforestation than comparable unprotected landscapes. The evidence does not prove the same relationship for every Amazon reserve, but it supports a practical point: money affects whether managers can enforce rules, maintain field presence, and respond to threats.
Brazil’s political history during the study period adds another layer. The study found that deficits were relatively stable from 2015 to 2019, despite recession and political turmoil. The sharp deterioration came in 2020 and 2021, when COVID-19 fiscal contraction coincided with environmental policy rollbacks. Funding began to recover in 2022 and improved further in 2023, helped by a change in national policy direction under President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. The authors do not claim a single cause for the rebound. Budget cycles, macroeconomic conditions, and political transitions all played a part.
When parks pay, but not for themselves
The picture has since become more complicated. Brazil has increased environmental funding under the current administration. The Ministry of the Environment’s budget rose sharply from its 2022 level, and ICMBio enforcement actions increased. Brazil has also created or expanded new conservation units, adding more territory to the system. Meanwhile, tourism in federal conservation units has strengthened the economic case for investment. A 2026 ICMBio study found that visits to federal conservation units generated substantial sales, GDP, jobs, and tax revenues in 2025. By that measure, protected areas are not only budget items. They are public assets with measurable economic returns.
Yet tourism revenue and national tax receipts do not automatically pay for the reserves that need money most. Tijuca National Park in Rio de Janeiro and Iguaçu National Park in Paraná can attract millions of visitors. A remote extractive reserve or national forest in the Amazon cannot fund itself in the same way. Nor should that be the standard by which it is judged. Many Amazon protected areas produce value by keeping forests standing, maintaining river systems, protecting biodiversity, supporting traditional communities, and reducing the risk of further degradation. These benefits rarely show up in visitor numbers or ticket sales, which makes them easier to overlook in budget decisions.
Tourism, concessions, and private investment can help, but they cannot solve the problem on their own. They may be important for parks with strong visitor demand, infrastructure, and market access. They are less likely to cover the baseline costs of large, remote protected areas whose main value lies in avoided loss.
What adequate funding would require
Programs such as the Amazon Region Protected Areas Program, or ARPA, and the Amazon Fund have helped Brazil move beyond annual appropriations alone. They have supported long-term conservation finance, institutional capacity, and management of Amazon protected areas. The new study treats these efforts as valuable, but far from sufficient. The scale of the deficit is too large, and the distribution of need is too uneven, for project-based or externally supported mechanisms to carry the system by themselves.
The scale of the need is large even under conservative assumptions. A 2022 paper that looked beyond federal protected areas to a broader Amazon conservation system, including conservation units and Indigenous lands, estimated that maintaining about 80% of the Brazilian Amazon within conservation areas would require roughly $1.7 billion to $2.8 billion a year, plus upfront establishment costs. That is a different universe from the federal protected areas studied by Cunha and colleagues, but it points in the same direction: adequacy has a price, and it is recurring.
Protected areas need a financing system that accounts for fixed costs, remoteness, size, and risk. A small urban park and a vast Amazon reserve cannot be budgeted as though their management needs differ only by category. Newly created protected areas need start-up funding for infrastructure, demarcation, staff, and planning. Older areas need predictable operating budgets. Remote areas need transport, field presence, monitoring, and enforcement capacity that reflects their geography.
The researchers recommend a transparent national protected-area financing platform that tracks investment across federal, state, and private protected areas. That would make it easier to see where money is going, where it is missing, and whether commitments match the costs of management. It would also help Brazil report credibly on international biodiversity targets. Area-based targets can encourage governments to create new protected areas. They do less to ensure those areas can function.
There is a development case as well. José Maria Cardoso da Silva, one of the paper’s authors, argues that conservation investment can matter most in places with limited conventional economic output but large natural capital. If money for protected areas is spent locally, it can support jobs, services, and a conservation-based economy in remote regions. That is especially relevant in the Amazon, where many municipalities have few durable economic options that do not depend on forest conversion.
Beyond Brazil
This is not only Brazil’s problem. A 2019 global assessment found that fewer than a quarter of more than 2,100 protected areas reported adequate staffing and budgets. Brazil’s case is unusually well documented, but the gap between designation and management runs through conservation systems worldwide. Countries are being asked to protect more land and sea under the global biodiversity framework. Many will face the same problem: legal designation is faster than institutional funding. Maps can change in a year. Budgets, agencies, staff capacity, and local trust take longer.
For the Amazon, the distinction matters. Brazil has already built a protected-area system of global importance. It has also shown that enforcement, political attention, and public investment can reduce deforestation. The new paper shows that much of the system still rests on a thin financial base. If protected areas are to do the work expected of them, they need more than lines on a map. They need the steady operating funding that turns protection into management.
Banner image: The Javari River separating Peru from Brazil. Photo by Rhett Ayers Butler.
Citations:
- Cunha, H. F. A., Barbosa, L. C. F., Cunha, A. C. d., & Silva, J. M. C. d. (2026). Chronic underfunding of protected areas in a megadiverse country: Spatial, temporal and socioeconomic patterns from Brazil. Environmental Conservation, 1–8. https://doi.org/10.1017/S037689292610040X
- Silva, J. M. C. d., Dias, T. C. A. d. C., Cunha, A. C. d., & Cunha, H. F. A. (2021). Funding deficits of protected areas in Brazil. Land Use Policy, 100, 104926. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.landusepol.2020.104926
- Lessmann, J., Geldmann, J., Fajardo, J., & Marquet, P. A. (2024). The role of funding in the performance of Latin America’s protected areas. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 121(36), e2307521121. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2307521121
- Silva, J. M. C. d., Barbosa, L. C. F., Topf, J., Vieira, I. C. G., & Scarano, F. R. (2022). Minimum costs to conserve 80% of the Brazilian Amazon. Perspectives in Ecology and Conservation, 20(3), 216–222. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pecon.2022.03.007
- Coad, L., Watson, J. E. M., Geldmann, J., Burgess, N. D., Leverington, F., Hockings, M., Knight, A. T., Foden, W., Di Marco, M., Corlett, R. T., Harrison, R. D., Joolia, A., Lacerda, C., Inogwabini, B.-I., Hockings, G., Kingston, N., & Di Fonzo, M. M. I. (2019). Widespread shortfalls in protected area resourcing undermine efforts to conserve biodiversity. Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment, 17(5), 259–264. https://doi.org/10.1002/fee.2042
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