Jan Börner

Environmental Income and Rural Livelihoods: A Global-Comparative Analysis

Summary This paper presents results from a comparative analysis of environmental income from approximately 8000 households in 24 developing countries collected by research partners in CIFOR’s Poverty Environment Network (PEN). Environmental income accounts for 28% of total household income, 77% of which comes from natural forests. Environmental income shares are higher for low-income households, but differences across income quintiles are less pronounced than previously thought. The poor rely more heavily on subsistence products such as wood fuels and wild foods, and on products harvested from natural areas other than forests. In absolute terms environmental income is approximately five times higher in the highest income quintile, compared to the two lowest quintiles.

Naming and Shaming for Conservation: Evidence from the Brazilian Amazon

Deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon has dropped substantially after a peak of over 27 thousand square kilometers in 2004. Starting in 2008, the Brazilian Ministry of the Environment has regularly published blacklists of critical districts with high annual forest loss. Farms in blacklisted districts face additional administrative hurdles to obtain authorization for clearing forests. In this paper we add to the existing literature on evaluating the Brazilian anti-deforestation policies by specifically quantifying the impact of blacklisting on deforestation. We first use spatial matching techniques using a set of covariates that includes official blacklisting criteria to identify control districts. We then explore the effect of blacklisting on change in deforestation in double difference regressions with panel data covering the period from 2002 to 2012. Multiple robustness checks are conducted including an analysis of potential causal mechanisms behind the success of the blacklist. We find that the blacklist has considerably reduced deforestation in the affected districts even after controlling for the potential mechanism effects of field-based enforcement, environmental registration campaigns, and rural credit.

Post-Crackdown Effectiveness of Field-Based Forest Law Enforcement in the Brazilian Amazon

Regulatory enforcement of forest conservation laws is often dismissed as an ineffective approach to reducing tropical forest loss. Yet, effective enforcement is often a precondition for alternative conservation measures, such as payments for environmental services, to achieve desired outcomes. Fair and efficient policies to reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation (REDD) will thus crucially depend on understanding the determinants and requirements of enforcement effectiveness. Among potential REDD candidate countries, Brazil is considered to possess the most advanced deforestation monitoring and enforcement infrastructure. This study explores a unique dataset of over 15 thousand point coordinates of enforcement missions in the Brazilian Amazon during 2009 and 2010, after major reductions of deforestation in the region. We study whether local deforestation patterns have been affected by field-based enforcement and to what extent these effects vary across administrative boundaries. Spatial matching and regression techniques are applied at different spatial resolutions. We find that field-based enforcement operations have not been universally effective in deterring deforestation during our observation period. Inspections have been most effective in reducing large-scale deforestation in the states of Mato Grosso and Pará, where average conservation effects were 4.0 and 9.9 hectares per inspection, respectively. Despite regional and actor-specific heterogeneity in inspection effectiveness, field-based law enforcement is highly cost-effective on average and might be enhanced by closer collaboration between national and state-level authorities.

Managing Tropical Forest Ecosystem Services: An Overview of Options

Decision-makers can choose between three broad classes of policy instruments to manage ecosystem services: incentives, disincentives, and enabling measures. This chapter reviews the conceptual and empirical literature on examples from each of these classes in the context of tropical forest ecosystem services management. We propose a conceptual framework for the evaluation of management options that highlights performance measures and potential trade-offs between the environmental and socioeconomic objectives of ecosystem services management. We formulate three interrelated areas of future research needs toward: (1) dealing with uncertain spatiotemporal dynamics of ecosystem services, (2) measuring the costs and benefits of ecosystem services’ provision, and (3) developing rigorous approaches to evaluating ecosystem services management performance for a broad set of measures and implementation settings.

Mixing Carrots and Sticks to Conserve Forests in the Brazilian Amazon: A Spatial Probabilistic Modeling Approach

Annual forest loss in the Brazilian Amazon had in 2012 declined to less than 5,000 sqkm, from over 27,000 in 2004. Mounting empirical evidence suggests that changes in Brazilian law enforcement strategy and the related governance system may account for a large share of the overall success in curbing deforestation rates. At the same time, Brazil is experimenting with alternative approaches to compensate farmers for conservation actions through economic incentives, such as payments for environmental services, at various administrative levels. We develop a spatially explicit simulation model for deforestation decisions in response to policy incentives and disincentives. The model builds on elements of optimal enforcement theory and introduces the notion of imperfect payment contract enforcement in the context of avoided deforestation. We implement the simulations using official deforestation statistics and data collected from field-based forest law enforcement operations in the Amazon region. We show that a large-scale integration of payments with the existing regulatory enforcement strategy involves a tradeoff between the cost-effectiveness of forest conservation and landholder incomes. Introducing payments as a complementary policy measure increases policy implementation cost, reduces income losses for those hit hardest by law enforcement, and can provide additional income to some land users. The magnitude of the tradeoff varies in space, depending on deforestation patterns, conservation opportunity and enforcement costs. Enforcement effectiveness becomes a key determinant of efficiency in the overall policy mix.

Emerging Evidence on the Effectiveness of Tropical Forest Conservation

The PLOS ONE Collection “Measuring forest conservation effectiveness” brings together a series of studies that evaluate the effectiveness of tropical forest conservation policies and programs with the goal of measuring conservation success and associated co-benefits. This overview piece describes the geographic and methodological scope of these studies, as well as the policy instruments covered in the Collection as of June 2016. Focusing on forest cover change, we systematically compare the conservation effects estimated by the studies and discuss them in the light of previous findings in the literature. Nine studies estimated that annual conservation impacts on forest cover were below one percent, with two exceptions in Mexico and Indonesia. Differences in effect sizes are not only driven by the choice of conservation measures. One key lesson from the studies is the need to move beyond the current scientific focus of estimating average effects of undifferentiated conservation programs. The specific elements of the program design and the implementation context are equally important factors for understanding the effectiveness of conservation programs. Particularly critical will be a better understanding of the causal mechanisms through which conservation programs have impacts. To achieve this understanding we need advances in both theory and methods.

Bioenergy, food security and poverty reduction: trade-offs and synergies along the water-energy-food security nexus

This article provides a review of trade-offs and synergies of bioenergy within the water–energy–food security nexus, with emphasis on developing countries. It explores the links of bioenergy with food security, poverty reduction, environmental sustainability, health, and gender equity. It concludes that applying the nexus perspective to analyses of bioenergy widens the scope for achieving multiple-win outcomes along the above aspects.

Bioenergy, Food Security and Poverty Reduction: Mitigating tradeoffs and promoting synergies along the Water- Energy-Food Security Nexus

Modern bioenergy is a core ingredient of sustainable economic development as it plays an important role in poverty reduction and green growth. This makes bioenergy innovations critical, especially in developing countries where many households and rural communities rely on traditional bioenergy. Managing the multiple tradeoffs among bioenergy use, agricultural productivity, and ecosystem functions is a major development challenge. Addressing this challenge requires the identification of the drivers, tradeoffs and impacts of bioenergy production, trade and use in the Water, Energy and Food Security Nexus. The key objective of this paper is to provide an analytical framework and assess the track record of policy actions to stimulate modern bioenergy innovation in order to achieve multiple-win outcomes in terms of poverty alleviation, improved health and gender empowerment and environmental sustainability. We begin by describing the global trends and drivers in bioenergy production, trade and use. Secondly, we review the state of the art on impacts and links of bioenergy with the other Nexus components. Thirdly, we suggest a conceptual framework for evaluating the synergies and tradeoffs of bioenergy with other bioeconomic and economic activities along the Nexus. Follow-up empirical research at household and community levels in several developing countries will be based on this framework. Finally, a discussion on the conceptual framework is enriched by insights on the relevant actors, the tools and mechanisms specific to these actors for catalyzing innovations in the bioenergy for development.

Priority areas for watershed service conservation in the Guapi-Macacu region of Rio de Janeiro, Atlantic Forest, Brazil

IntroductionLand use intensification and urbanisation processes are degrading hydrological ecosystem services in the Guapi-Macacu watershed of Rio de Janeiro. A proposal to pay farmers to restore natural watershed services might be an alternative to securing the water supply in the long-term for the around 2.5 million urban water users in the study region. This study quantifies the costs of changing current land use patterns to enhance watershed services and compares these costs to the avoided costs associated with water treatment for public supply.MethodsWe use farm-household data to estimate the opportunity costs of abandoning current land uses for the recovery of natural vegetation; a process that is very likely to improve water quality in terms of turbidity due to reduced inputs from erosion. Opportunity cost estimates are extrapolated to the watershed scale based on remote sensing land use classifications and vulnerability analysis to identify priority zones for watershed management interventions. To assess the potential demand for watershed services, we analyse water quality and treatment cost data from the main local water treatment plant.ResultsChanging agricultural land uses for watershed services provision generally comes at high opportunity costs in our study area near to the metropolis of Rio de Janeiro. Alternative low cost watershed conservation options do exist in the livestock production sector. These options have the potential to directly reduce the amount of sediments and nutrients reaching the water bodies, and in turn decrease the costs of treatment needed for drinking water. Land cover changes at the scale needed to improve water quality will, nonetheless, likely exceed the cost of additional investments in water treatment.ConclusionsThe state water utility companys willingness to pay for watershed services alone will not be enough to induce provision of additional watershed services. We conclude that monetary incentives conditioned on specific adjustments to existing production systems could still have a complementary role to play in improving watershed services. However, we note that our willingness to pay analysis focusses on only one of the potentially wide range of ecosystem services provided by natural vegetation in the Guapi-Macacu watershed. Factoring these ecosystem services into the willingness to pay equation is likely to change our assessment in favour of additional conservation action, be it through PES or other policy instruments.

Alternatives to slash-and-burn in forest-based fallow systems of the eastern Brazilian Amazon region: Technology and policy options to halt ecological degradation and improve rural welfare

In many smallholder farming systems in the humid tropics, the slash-and-burn practice is used for land preparation. Increasing land-use intensity by shortening fallow periods often contributes to the degradation of the natural resource base of the fallow system, i.e. the fallow vegetation and soil. In the eastern Amazon region of Brazil, we therefore searched for ways to maintain the sustainability of the traditional fallow system and to adapt it to changing agro-ecological and economic conditions.