Kenneth M. Chomitz

Effectiveness of Strict vs. Multiple Use Protected Areas in Reducing Tropical Forest Fires: A Global Analysis Using Matching Methods

Protected areas (PAs) cover a quarter of the tropical forest estate. Yet there is debate over the effectiveness of PAs in reducing deforestation, especially when local people have rights to use the forest. A key analytic problem is the likely placement of PAs on marginal lands with low pressure for deforestation, biasing comparisons between protected and unprotected areas. Using matching techniques to control for this bias, this paper analyzes the global tropical forest biome using forest fires as a high resolution proxy for deforestation; disaggregates impacts by remoteness, a proxy for deforestation pressure; and compares strictly protected vs. multiple use PAs vs indigenous areas. Fire activity was overlaid on a 1 km map of tropical forest extent in 2000; land use change was inferred for any point experiencing one or more fires. Sampled points in pre-2000 PAs were matched with randomly selected never-protected points in the same country. Matching criteria included distance to road network, distance to major cities, elevation and slope, and rainfall. In Latin America and Asia, strict PAs substantially reduced fire incidence, but multi-use PAs were even more effective. In Latin America, where there is data on indigenous areas, these areas reduce forest fire incidence by 16 percentage points, over two and a half times as much as naïve (unmatched) comparison with unprotected areas would suggest. In Africa, more recently established strict PAs appear to be effective, but multi-use tropical forest protected areas yield few sample points, and their impacts are not robustly estimated. These results suggest that forest protection can contribute both to biodiversity conservation and CO2 mitigation goals, with particular relevance to the REDD agenda. Encouragingly, indigenous areas and multi-use protected areas can help to accomplish these goals, suggesting some compatibility between global environmental goals and support for local livelihoods.

Financing Environmental Services: The Costa Rican Experience and its Implications

Costa Rica’s pioneering environmental services program seeks to maintain socially optimal forest cover by compensating landowners for the external benefits provided by their forests. The National Forestry Fund proposes to sell carbon sequestration services to the world market and hydrological services to the domestic market. Revenues from these sales, together with tax revenue, is used to finance environmental service provision through landholder incentives for forest maintenance. The mechanics of these programs are discussed, along with implications for the design and implementation of similar programs.

Determinants of Land Use in Amazônia: A Fine-Scale Spatial Analysis

Wetter areas of the Amazon basin exhibit lower rates of agricultural conversion. Previous analyses, using relatively aggregate data on land cover, have been unable to determine the extent to which this reflects limited access versus unfavorable agroclimatic conditions. This article uses census-tract level data for the Brazilian Amazon to relate forest conversion and pasture productivity to precipitation, soil quality, infrastructure and market access, proximity to past conversion, and protection status. The probability that land is used for agriculture or intensively stocked with cattle declines markedly with increasing rainfall, other things equal.

Baseline, leakage and measurement issues: how do forestry and energy projects compare?

This paper examines three issues in quantifying project-level emissions reductions (ERs): baseline and additionality determination, leakage assessment, and measurement of net emissions. It finds no systematic differences between land use change and forestry (LUCF) and energy projects in addressing these issues. Rather, the ease of quantification depends on the following: •The level and distribution of direct financial benefits that result from the project, since this is a key determinant of additionality. •The degree to which the project is integrated with a broader physical and economic system, since this determines the amount of leakage. •The internal homogeneity and geographic dispersion of the project components-a key determinant of measurement costs. These dimensions cut across the energy versus LUCF distinction.

What do doctors want? developing incentives for doctors to serve in Indonesia's rural and remote areas

Like many large countries, Indonesia has difficulty attracting doctors to service in rural and remote areas. To guide the creation of incentives for service in these areas, the authors analyze two sets of data about physicians: 1) the locations chosen by graduating medical students before and after a major change in the incentive system, and 2) survey data on choices among hypothetical assignments differing in compensation, career prospects, and amenities at various locations. Their findings suggest that: a) The current policy of offering specialist training is incentive enough to make doctors from Java willing to serve in remote areas. (It is not necessary to also offer a civil service appointment.) But providing specialist training as an incentive to work in remote areas is not only expensive, but potentially inefficient, since specialist practice and rural public health management require different skills and attitudes. b) Moderately (but not extremely) remote areas can be staffed using modest cash incentives. c) Doctors from the Outer Islands are far more willing to serve in remote areas than their counterparts from Java. So, it may be worthwhile increasing the representation of Outer Island students in medical schools (perhaps through scholarships and assistance in pre-university preparation).

Transferable Development Rights and Forest Protection: An Exploratory Analysis

As agricultural frontiers expand, and habitats contract, potential conflicts between conservation and development goals increase. Transferable development rights (TDR) programs offer a means of minimizingthe opportunitycosts (in foregoneagricultural rents) of protectinga desired quantity of habitat. These programs may be particularly applicable to Brazil, where long-standing regulations require a fixed proportion of each property to be set aside as a forest reserve. The article develops a simple, geographically explicit simulation model to examine the economic and environmental impact of a hypothetical TDR program under alternative implementation scenarios. Dataonlandcover and land productivity from the Brazilianstate of Minas Gerais are used to calibrate the model. The model shows substantial reductions in conservation cost from widening the geographical scope of trading. Restricting the program to large landholders drastically reduces transactions costs while only mildly reducing the amount of forest placed under protection.

Viable Reserve Networks Arise From Individual Landholder Responses To Conservation Incentives

Conservation in densely settled biodiversity hotspots often requires setting up reserve networks that maintain sufficient contiguous habitat to support viable species populations. Because it is difficult to secure landholder compliance with a tightly constrained reserve network design, attention has shifted to voluntary incentive mechanisms, such as purchase of conservation easements by reverse auction or through a fixed-price offer. These mechanisms carry potential advantages of transparency, simplicity, and low cost. However, uncoordinated individual response to these incentives has been assumed incompatible with the conservation goal of viability, which depends on contiguous habitat and biodiversity representation. We model such incentives for southern Bahia in the Brazilian Atlantic Forest, one of the biologically richest and most threatened global biodiversity hotspots. Here, forest cover is spatially autocorrelated and associated with depressed land values, a situation that may be characteristic of long- settled areas with forests fragmented by agriculture. We find that in this situation, a voluntary incentive system can yield a reserve network characterized by large, viable patches of contiguous forest, and representation of subregions with distinct vegetation types and biotic assemblages, without explicit planning for those outcomes.

Opportunity costs of conservation in a biodiversity hotspot: the case of southern Bahia

Biodiversity ‘hotspot’ areas, which are characterized by concentrations of endemic species and severe anthropogenic loss of natural habitat, might be thought to present steep opportunity costs for maintaining forest cover against pressures of agricultural conversion. We examine this proposition for the southern part of the state of Bahia, a center of endemism within the Brazilian Atlantic Forest, which has less than 8 per cent of its original primary forest cover remaining. Using data from a survey of property values, we relate land price to land characteristics, including land cover, soil quality, slope, climate, and road proximity. We find median land values of R

TAMARIN: a landscape framework for evaluating economic incentives for rainforest restoration

725/hectare, or about US

Exploring the Association Between People and Deforestation in Madagascar

400/hectare at recently prevailing exchange rates. Remaining land under forest has a market value 70 per cent below comparable cleared land.