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In December 2007, the then Brazilian government passed a law to curb the illegal destruction of the rainforest. A study by researchers from the Insper Research Institute in São Paulo and the University of Bonn now shows an interesting side effect: where the measures were implemented, not only did deforestation decrease, but so did the number of homicides.

The results have been published in the Journal of Institutional Economics.

The rainforest in the Amazon region is considered an extremely important ecosystem. Not only because it is home to a huge variety of animals and plants, many of which only occur there. The forest also stores large quantities of greenhouse gases—at least as long as it remains intact. Illegal deforestation and slash-and-burn agriculture are increasingly endangering this biome and thus its function as a green lung.

Most of the Amazon rainforest is located in Brazil. There it covers an area almost as large as the entire European Union. It is correspondingly difficult for the state to protect the fragile ecosystem from illegal encroachment.

"To tackle this problem, the Brazilian government at the time adopted a list of priority municipalities in 2007," explains Dr. Gustavo Magalhães de Oliveira.

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