Making environmental compensation visible. Biased data transparency and agrobusiness strategies in the Bahianese agricultural frontier of the Cerrado

Although environmental compensation has become a cornerstone of contemporary environmental legislation, its visibility in both landscapes and public debate remains limited. This article provides a geographical analysis of the (re)location of Legal Reserves (RLs) in the agricultural frontier of western Bahia, Brazil. Legal Reserve are portions of rural properties set aside from productive activities to support environmental conservation within agricultural landscapes. They are mandatory and they must cover 20% of each property in western Bahia. Using public datasets from the Rural Environmental Registry (CAR) —Brazil’s public digital platform for monitoring environmental compliance— we developed a novel GIS-based methodology to trace RL compensation linkages across this vast territory. Our findings reveal four key patterns: 1) Compensation is extensively used by agribusiness, often involving long-distance transfers that displace conservation obligations eastward; 2) Compensated RLs frequently overlap with traditional community grazing lands, generating conflicts and constituting forms of green grabbing; 3) The mechanism demonstrates remarkable instability, with compensated areas regularly declassified to accommodate agricultural expansion; 4) Approximately 35% of compensations likely violate the Forest Code by regularizing properties that are not allowed to use this mechanism. We argue that the CAR system embodies “biased transparency” – offering unprecedented synoptic visibility of agribusiness environmental behavior, while obscuring crucial compensation linkages. This selective transparency enables large-scale farmers to use compensation strategically, facilitating legalized deforestation in the Cerrado while projecting an image of environmental compliance to international markets. The study demonstrates how digital environmental governance, while innovative, can be co-opted to serve agribusiness interests rather than conservation goals. We conclude that enhancing CAR’s transparency regarding compensation links is essential for both environmental effectiveness and social justice, particularly as the European Union tries to implement new regulations against deforestation-linked imports.