Kenneth Broad, Alexander Pfaff, Renzo Taddei, Sankar Arumugam, Upmanu Lall, Francisco Assis de Souza Filho
Climatic Change (2007) 84:217–239
We assess the potential benefits from innovative forecasts of the stream flows that replenish reservoirs in the semi-arid state of Ceará, Brazil. Such forecasts have many potential applications. In Ceará, they matter for both water-allocation and participatory-governance issues that echo global debates. Our qualitative analysis, based upon extensive fieldwork with farmers, agencies, politicians and other key actors in the water sector, stresses that forecast value changes as a society shifts. In the case of Ceará, current constraints on the use of these forecasts are likely to be reduced by shifts in water demand, water allocation in the agricultural Jaguaribe Valley, participatory processes for water allocation between this valley and the capital city of Fortaleza, and risk perception. Such changes in the water sector can also have major distributional impacts.
Alexander Pfaff, Suzi Kerr, Leslie Lipper, Romina Cavatassi, Benjamin Davis, Joanna Hendy, G. Arturo Sanchez-Azofeifa
Land Use Policy 24 (2007) 600–610
We review claims linking both payments for carbon and poverty to deforestation. We examine these effects empirically for Costa Rica during the late 20th century using an econometric approach that addresses the irreversibilities in deforestation. We find significant effects of the relative returns to forest on deforestation rates. Thus, carbon payments would induce conservation and also carbon sequestration, and if land users were poor could conserve forest while addressing rural poverty. We note that the poor appear to be marginalized in the sense of living where land profitability is lower. Those areas also have more forest. We find that poorer areas may have a higher supply response to payments, but even without this effect poor areas might be included and benefit more due to higher (per capita) forest area. They might be included less due to transactions costs, though. Unless the Clean Development Mechanism of the Kyoto Protocol is modified in its implementation to allow credits from avoided deforestation, such benefits are likely to be limited.
Francisco Alpizar, Allen Blackman, Alexander Pfaff
Resources 2007 volume 165:20-22
Even a perfect measure of the ecosystem services provided by each parcel enrolled in a PES program would be insufficient to measure the overall effectiveness of the program. The simple reason is that if a PES program does not lead to an increase in the provision of ecosystem services compared to what would have happened in the absence of the program—that is, the baseline or “counterfactual”—then it has not accomplished anything. Imagine a PES program focused on forest conservation that makes payments to managers of ecologically rich forest land, who have no incentive to clear the land because it is illsuited for logging, agriculture, or urbanization. Payments to these managers would have little impact on deforestation because the risk of clearing was minimal to begin with. In contrast, payments to managers who have incentives to clear their land would be much more likely to have an impact.
Juan Robalino, Alexander Pfaff, G. Arturo Sanchez-Azofeifa
Frontiers of Biodiversity Economics, Cambridge University Press
This chapter is structured as follows. Section 2 describes a simple model of interactions in the context of deforestation, based on an equilibrium in beliefs about the neighbours’ actions. Section 3 discusses empirical issues in measurement of interactions and the benefits of using an instrumental variable approach. Data requirements for analysing neighbours’ interactions in deforestation decisions are discussed in section 4. Finally, results for two regions within Costa Rica, as well as discussion of how to obtain the equilibria once the parameters of the model are estimated, are presented in section 5.
Yu Chen, Alexander van Geen, Joseph H. Graziano, Alexander Pfaff, Malgosia Madajewicz, Faruque Parvez, A.Z.M Iftehkar Hussain, Vesna Slavkovich, Tariqul Islam, Habibul Ahsan
Environmental Health Perspectives, Vol. 115, No. 6 (Jun., 2007), pp. 917-923
BACKGROUND: There is a need to identify and evaluate an effective mitigation program for arsenic exposure from drinking water in Bangladesh. OBJECTIVE: We evaluated the effectiveness of a multifaceted mitigation program to reduce As exposure among 11,746 individuals in a prospective cohort study initiated in 2000 in Araihazar, Bangladesh, by interviewing participants and measuring changes in urinary As levels. METHODS: The interventions included a) person-to-person reporting of well test results and health education; b) well labeling and village-level health education; and c) installations of fifty deep, low-As community wells in villages with the highest As exposure. RESULTS: Two years after these interventions, 58% of the 6,512 participants with unsafe wells (As >=50 micrograms/L) at baseline had responded by switching to other wells. Well labeling and village-level health education was positively related to switching to safe wells (As < 50 micrograms/L) among participants with unsafe wells [rate ratio(RR)= 1.84; 95% confidence interval(CI), 1.60-2.11] and inversely related to any well switching among those with safe wells (RR = 0.80; 95% CI, 0.66-0.98). The urinary As level in participants who switched to a well identified as safe (< 50 micrograms As/L) dropped from an average of 375 micrograms As/g creatinine to 200 micrograms As/g creatinine, a 46% reduction toward the average urinary As content of 136 micrograms As/g creatinine for participants that used safe wells throughout. Urinary As reduction was positively related to educational attainment, body mass index, never-smoking, absence of skin lesions, and time since switching (p for trend< 0.05). CONCLUSIONS: Our study shows that testing of wells and informing households of the consequences of As exposure, combined with installation of deep community wells where most needed, can effectively address the continuing public health emergency from arsenic in drinking water in Bangladesh.
M.F. Ahmed, S. Ahuha, M. Alauddin, S.J. Hug, J.R. Lloyd, A. Pfaff, T. Pichler, C. Saltikov, M. Stute, A. van Geen
Science volume 314 (December 15, 2006): 1687-1688
Excessive levels of arsenic in drinking water is a vast health problem in Southeast Asia. Several viable approaches to mitigation could drastically reduce arsenic exposure, but they all require periodic testing.
We assess the potential benefits from innovative forecasts of the stream flows that replenish reservoirs in the semi-arid state of Ceará, Brazil. Such forecasts have many potential applications. In Ceará, they matter for both water-allocation and participatory-governance issues that echo global debates. Our qualitative analysis, based upon extensive fieldwork with farmers, agencies, politicians and other key actors in the water sector, stresses that forecast value changes as a society shifts. In the case of Ceará, current constraints on the use of these forecasts are likely to be reduced by shifts in water demand, water allocation in the agricultural Jaguaribe Valley, participatory processes for water allocation between this valley and the capital city of Fortaleza, and risk perception. Such changes in the water sector can also have major distributional impacts.