Are poverty alleviation and environmental protection really reconcilable objectives in developing countries? In spite of the increase of environmental conservation programs, only few part of literature focused on the effect of these environmental programs on social outcomes. This paper studies the effect of the creation of a protected area on the poverty rate in the Brazilian Amazon. I first build a unique data set for all the Brazilian Amazon allowing to bridge the gap in the existing literature. This data set combines social data from the Brazilian demographic census and highly remote sensing data at an under-explored level of aggregation for the 2000 and 2010 year. Based on a difference in difference method, preliminaries results show that Brazilian environmental policy, through the settlement of protected areas, is not efficient considering social outcomes. Creation of a protected area increases poverty.  These results are mainly driven by the nature of population itself. Indeed, the restriction of land use brings with it a constraint in job opportunity ; land use being an important part of revenues for people in this remote area.