Two decades of coastal pressure: Assessing the effectiveness of priority conservation areas in Brazil’s Atlantic Forest

Abstract Systematic conservation planning is widely used to guide biodiversity policy, yet evidence that spatial priority setting translates into effective land-use outcomes remains limited. In Brazil, a national initiative established priority areas for conservation, sustainable use, and benefit sharing in 2004 to orient conservation investments. Two decades later, their influence on land-use trajectories remains uncertain. We assessed land-use and land-cover dynamics from 2004 to 2024 within high, very high, and extremely high priority areas in coastal municipalities of the Atlantic Forest biome. Using MapBiomas data, we quantified net and gross changes across five land-use classes and compared patterns among priority levels. Urban expansion occurred across all categories, while extremely high priority areas experienced net losses of natural vegetation and the highest land-cover turnover. These findings show that prioritization alone has limited capacity to constrain land-use pressures in dynamic coastal landscapes and requires integration with enforceable governance frameworks and territorial planning.