Press "Enter" to skip to content

Category: Comparative

Reassessing the forest impacts of protection: The challenge of nonrandom location and a corrective method

Published January 1, 2010 by Alex Pfaff
Lucas Joppa, Alexander Pfaff
Ann. N.Y. Acad. Sci. 1185 (2010) 135–149

PDF link iconProtected areas are leading tools in efforts to slow global species loss and appear also to have a role in climate change policy. Understanding their impacts on deforestation informs environmental policies. We review several approaches to evaluating protection’s impact on deforestation, given three hurdles to empirical evaluation, and note that “matching” techniques fromeconomic impact evaluation address those hurdles. The central hurdle derives from the fact that protected areas are distributed nonrandomly across landscapes.Nonrandom location can be intentional, and for good reasons, including biological and political ones. Yet even so, when protected areas are biased in their locations toward less-threatened areas, many methods for impact evaluationwill overestimate protection’s effect. The use ofmatching techniques allows one to control for known landscape biases when inferring the impact of protection. Applications of matching have revealed considerably lower impact estimates of forest protection than produced by other methods. A reduction in the estimated impact from existing parks does not suggest, however, that protection is unable to lower clearing. Rather, it indicates the importance of variation across locations in how much impact protection could possibly have on rates of deforestation.Matching, then, bundles improved estimates of the average impact of protection with guidance on where new parks’ impacts will be highest.While many factors will determine where new protected areas will be sited in the future, we claim that the variation across space in protection’s impact on deforestation rates should inform site choice.

 

Comments closed

High and Far: Biases in the Location of Protected Areas

Published January 2, 2009 by Alex Pfaff
Lucas N. Joppa, Alexander Pfaff
PLoS ONE 2009 4(12): e8273. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0008273

PDF link iconBackground: About an eighth of the earth’s land surface is in protected areas (hereafter ‘‘PAs’’), most created during the 20th century. Natural landscapes are critical for species persistence and PAs can play a major role in conservation and in climate policy. Such contributions may be harder than expected to implement if new PAs are constrained to the same kinds of locations that PAs currently occupy.

Methodology/Principal Findings: Quantitatively extending the perception that PAs occupy ‘‘rock and ice’’, we show that across 147 nations PA networks are biased towards places that are unlikely to face land conversion pressures even in the absence of protection. We test each country’s PA network for bias in elevation, slope, distances to roads and cities, and suitability for agriculture. Further, within each country’s set of PAs, we also ask if the level of protection is biased in these ways. We find that the significant majority of national PA networks are biased to higher elevations, steeper slopes and greater distances to roads and cities. Also, within a country, PAs with higher protection status are more biased than are the PAs with lower protection statuses.

Conclusions/Significance: In sum, PAs are biased towards where they can least prevent land conversion (even if they offer perfect protection). These globally comprehensive results extend findings from nation-level analyses. They imply that siting rules such as the Convention on Biological Diversity’s 2010 Target [to protect 10% of all ecoregions] might raise PA impacts if applied at the country level. In light of the potential for global carbon-based payments for avoided deforestation or REDD, these results suggest that attention to threat could improve outcomes from the creation and management of PAs.

 

Comments closed

Behavior, Environment, and Health in Developing Countries: evaluation and valuation

Published January 1, 2009 by Alex Pfaff
Subhrendu Pattanayak, Alexander Pfaff
Annual Review of Resource Economics (2009) 1:183–217

PDF link iconWe consider health and environmental quality in developing countries, where limited resources constrain behaviors that combat enormously burdensome health challenges. We focus on four huge challenges that are preventable (i.e., are resolved in rich countries). We distinguish them as special cases in a general model of household behavior, which is critical and depends on risk information. Simply informing households may achieve a lot in the simplest challenge (groundwater arsenic); yet, for the three infectious situations discussed (respiratory, diarrhea, and malaria), community coordination and public provision may also be necessary. More generally, social interactions may justify additional policies. For each situation, we discuss the valuation of private spillovers (i.e., externalities) and evaluation of public policies to reduce environmental risks and spillovers. Finally, we reflect on open questions in our model and knowledge gaps in the empirical literature including the challenges of scaling up and climate change.

 

Comments closed