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Author: Alex Pfaff

Land-use and land-cover change shape the sustainability and impacts of protected areas

Published September 16, 2018 by Alex Pfaff
Anteneh Tesfaw, Alexander Pfaff, Rachel E. Golden Kroner, Siyu Qin, Rodrigo Medeiros and Michael B. Mascia
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 115(9):2084-2089 www.pnas.org/cgi/doi/10.1073/pnas.1716462115

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Protected areas (PAs) remain the dominant policy to protect biodiversity and ecosystem services but have been shown to have limited impact when development interests force them to locations with lower deforestation pressure. Far less known is that such interests also cause widespread tempering, reduction, or removal of protection [i.e., PA downgrading, downsizing, and degazettement (PADDD)]. We inform responses to PADDD by proposing and testing a bargaining explanation for PADDD risks and deforestation impacts. We examine recent degazettements for hydropower development and rural settlements in the state of Rondônia in the Brazilian Amazon. Results support two hypotheses: (i) ineffective PAs (i.e., those where internal deforestation was similar to nearby rates) were more likely to be degazetted and (ii) degazettement of ineffective PAs caused limited, if any, additional deforestation. We also report on cases in which ineffective portions were upgraded. Overall our results suggest that enhancing PAs’ ecological impacts enhances their legal durability.

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Conservation Impacts of Voluntary Sustainability Standards: how has our understanding changed

Published August 24, 2018 by Alex Pfaff
K.Komives, A.Arton, E.Baker, C.Longo, D.Newsom, A.Pfaff, C.Romero
Meridian Institute (merid.org/content/projects/)

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In 2012, a committee of international experts from academia, business, and civil society published Toward Sustainability: The Roles and Limitations of Certification. In addition to describing the history, key features and actors in voluntary standard systems (VSS), the report summarized the state of knowledge regarding VSS use and their potential to achieve conservation and other goals. It also enumerated existing evidence about VSS impacts, finding few studies and weak study designs. Since then, considerable effort has been made to fill research gaps. In this report, we review new VSS studies in the agricultural, forestry, marine fisheries and aquaculture sectors to revisit the issue of the state of knowledge about their conservation impacts and, going forward, consider how best to advance VSS impacts research.

 

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Roads & SDGs, Tradeoffs and Synergies: learning from Brazil’s Amazon in distinguishing frontiers

Published July 24, 2018 by Alex Pfaff
A.Pfaff, J.Robalino, R.Walker, S.Perz, W.Laurance, C.Bohrer, S.Aldrich, E.Arima, M.Caldas, K.Kirby
Economics Vol. 12, 2018-11 March 05, 2018 http://dx.doi.org/10.5018/economics-ejournal.ja.2018-11

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To reduce SDG tradeoffs in infrastructure provision, and to inform searches for SDG synergies, the authors show that roads’ impacts on Brazilian Amazon forests varied significantly across frontiers. Impacts varied predictably with prior development – prior roads and prior deforestation – and, further, in a pattern that suggests a potential synergy for roads between forests and urban growth. For multiple periods of roads investments, the authors estimate forest impacts for high, medium and low prior roads and deforestation. For each setting, census-tract observations are numerous. Results confirm predictions for this kind of frontier of a pattern not consistent with endogeneity, i.e., short-run forest impacts of new roads are: small for relatively high prior development; larger for medium prior development; and small for low prior development (for the latter setting, impacts in such isolated areas could rise over time, depending on interactions with conservation policies). These Amazonian results suggest ‘SDG strategic’ locations for infrastructure, an idea the authors note for other frontiers while highlighting major differences across frontiers and their SDG opportunities.

 

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Upstream watershed condition predicts rural children’s health across 35 developing countries

Published December 24, 2017 by Alex Pfaff
Diego Herrera, Alicia Ellis, Brendan Fisher, Christopher D. Golden, Kiersten Johnson, Mark Mulligan, Alexander Pfaff, Timothy Treuer, Taylor H. Ricketts
Nature Communications 8:811 DOI: 10.1038/s41467-017-00775-2

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Diarrheal disease (DD) due to contaminated water is a major cause of child mortality globally. Forests and wetlands can provide ecosystem services that help maintain water quality. To understand the connections between land cover and childhood DD, we compiled a database of 293,362 children in 35 countries with information on health, socioeconomic factors, climate, and watershed condition. Using hierarchical models, here we find that higher upstream tree cover is associated with lower probability of DD downstream. This effect is significant for rural households but not for urban households, suggesting differing dependence on watershed conditions. In rural areas, the effect of a 30% increase in upstream tree cover is similar to the effect of improved sanitation, but smaller than the effect of improved water source, wealth or education. We conclude that maintaining natural capital within watersheds can be an important public health investment, especially for populations with low levels of built capital.

 

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Increasing the Impact of Collective Incentives in Payments for Ecosystem Services

Published November 24, 2017 by Alex Pfaff
David A. Kaczan, Alexander Pfaff, Luz A. Rodriguez, Elizabeth Shapiro-Garza
Journal of Environmental Economics and Management http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jeem.2017.06.007

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Collective payments for ecosystem services (PES )programs make payments to groups, conditional on specified aggregate land-management outcomes.Such collective contracting may be well suited to settings with communal land tenure or decision-making. Given that collective contracting does not require costly individual-level information on outcomes, it may also facilitate conditioning on additionality (i.e., conditioning payments upon clearly improved outcomes relative to baseline). Yet collective contracting often suffers from free-riding, which undermines group outcomes and may be exacerbated or ameliorated by PES designs. We study impacts of conditioning on additionality within a number of collective PES
designs. We use a framed field-laboratory experiment with participants from a new PES program in Mexico. Because social interactions are critical within collective processes, we assess the impacts from conditioning on additionality given: (1) group participation in contract design, and (2) a group coordination mechanism. Conditioning on above-baseline outcomes raised contributions, particularly among initially lower contributors. Group participation in contract design increased impact, as did the coordination mechanism.

 

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Spillovers from Targeting of Incentives: exploring responses to being excluded

Published October 2, 2017 by Alex Pfaff
Francisco Alpizar, Anna Norden, Alexander Pfaff, Juan Robalino
Journal of Economic Psychology 59:87-98 http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.joep.2017.02.007

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A growing set of policies involve transfers conditioned upon socially desired actions, such as attending school or conserving forest. However, given a desire to maximize the impact of limited funds by avoiding transfers that do not change behavior, typically some potential recipients are excluded on the basis of their characteristics, their actions or at random. This paper uses a laboratory experiment to study the behavior of individuals excluded on different bases from a new incentive that encourages real monetary donations to a public environmental conservation program. We show that the donations from the individuals who were excluded based on prior high contributions fell significantly. Yet the rationale used for exclusion mattered, in that none of the other selection criteria used as the basis for exclusion resulted in negative effects on contributions.

 

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