Are there trade-offs between conservation and development caused by Mexican protected areas?

Protected areas (PAs) are essential for biodiversity conservation, but their restrictive policies could accentuate poverty. Such a possibility may occur with the more restrictive PAs (e.g., national parks), which prioritize conservation while limiting the use of natural resources. However, less restrictive PAs, such as biosphere reserves, which allow the sustainable use of natural resources, may be better at alleviating poverty. However, such permissibility may reduce the effectiveness of preventing deforestation. Here, we assessed this conservation-development tradeoff by testing changes in marginalization (an indicator of poverty) and forest loss between two contrasting PAs management scheme types (MST, national parks and biosphere reserves) in Mexico. We quantified forest loss inside PAs and unprotected areas during the 2000–2019 period. Also, we contrasted marginalization changes during the 2000–2020 period between municipalities included in PAs (n = 288) and municipalities not directly influenced by PAs (n = 1615). Using a matching analysis approach, we tested for differences in forest loss and marginalization between protected and unprotected areas and between MST, in all cases controlling for the potential effects of confounding factors (e.g., slope, altitude, distance to cities, economic sector). We also evaluated potential conservation-development trade-offs resulting from the interaction of MST with the biophysical-socioeconomic context. PAs did not accentuate marginalization comparing unprotected areas. After matching, both national parks and biosphere reserves showed similar average changes in marginalization and forest loss probability. However, national parks showed higher marginalization than biosphere reserves in areas far from cities and sites with poor agriculture suitability, probably because restrictive policies in such adverse contexts might work against the development of the local communities. Also, national parks showed higher forest loss than biosphere reserves in areas suitable for agriculture. Our results suggest that, in the Mexican protected areas system, the interaction between MST and biophysical-socioeconomic contexts may lead to conservation-development tradeoffs. The more restrictive MST does not provide greater protection to the forest than the less restrictive MST and, under certain biophysical conditions, may reduce the capability of communities to cope with poverty.