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Category: Land Use & Climate Mitigation

Tackling debt, biodiversity loss, and climate change

Published February 1, 2024 by Alex Pfaff
Elizabeth C. Losos, Alexander Pfaff, and Stuart L. Pimm
Science volume 343 issue 6696 (2024) 10.1126/science. ado7418

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A “Task Force on Sustainability-Linked Sovereign Financing for Nature and Climate” will convene to establish a framework to ameliorate the debt, biodiversity, and climate crises by reforming debt-for-nature swaps, i.e., voluntary transactions in which creditors reduce or cancel debt in exchange for debtor-country commitments to fund specific environmental activities. We identify four reforms that should underpin the new framework: (i) Offer debt relief at a nationally consequential scale; (ii) defer to debtors on implementation to reduce transaction costs and raise debtors’ benefits; (iii) employ performance-linked instruments based on reliable metrics to ensure global gains; and (iv) integrate all of those metrics across biodiversity conservation, emissions reduction, and climate adaptation to allocate funds most efficiently.

 

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No crowding out among those terminated from an ongoing PES program in Colombia

Published March 1, 2023 by Alex Pfaff
Esther Blanco, Lina Moros, Alexander Pfaff, Ivo Steimanis, Maria Alejandra Velez, Bjorn Vollan
Journal of Environmental Economics and Management 120 (2023) https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jeem.2023.102826

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This paper presents novel evidence of no crowding out, of either motivations or donations, among those terminated from an ongoing program of payments for ecosystem services (PES) in Colombia. PES programs have risen in number. However, claims about perverse impacts after programs end could inhibit their growth. PES end for different reasons (planned duration, budget reduction, issues in implementation) and in different ways (some participants or all). An expressed concern for PES is that receiving payments lowers conservation, after PES end, if participants’ intrinsic motivations for conservation are ‘crowded out’ by financial incentives. We test for crowding out by an ongoing program in which some but not all contracts were terminated. We see no evidence of crowding out, since neither the motivations nor the donations for the terminated farmers are significantly different than for non-PES land owners (and this is robust to matching on levels of assets, residence on farm past donation behavior, main economic activity, and participation in collective activities). Our results add evidence from an actual PES to literature questioning the relevance, importance and even sign of crowding effects.

 

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Forest Concessions and Eco-Certifications in the Peruvian Amazon: deforestation impacts of logging rights and logging restrictions

Published February 1, 2023 by Alex Pfaff
Jimena Rico-Straffon, Zhenhua Wang, Stephanie Panlasigui, Colby J. Loucks, Jennifer Swenson, Alexander Pfaff
Journal of Environmental Economics and Management 118 (2023) https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jeem.2022.102780

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Concessions that grant logging rights to firms support economic development based on forest resources. Eco-certifications put sustainability restrictions on the operations of those concessions. For spatially detailed data, including many pre-treatment years, we use new difference-indifferences estimators to estimate 2002–2018 impacts upon Peruvian Amazon forests from both logging concessions and their eco-certifications. We find that the concessions — which in theory could raise or reduce forest loss — did not raise loss, if anything reducing it slightly by warding off spikes in deforestation pressure. Eco-certifications could reduce or raise forest loss, yet we find no significant impacts.

 

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Temporary PES do not crowd out and may crowd in lab-in-the-field forest conservation in Colombia

Published January 1, 2023 by Alex Pfaff
Lina Moros, Maria Alejandra Velez, Daniela Quintero, Danny Tobin, Alexander Pfaff
Ecological Economics 204 (2023) https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecolecon.2022.107652

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Payments for ecosystem services (PES) programs exist globally and at times shift behaviors. Unlike protected areas, PES compensate land users, raising local acceptance of conservation. Yet some worry that if payments are temporary, as is often the case, conservation behaviors can be reduced by PES, ‘crowded out’ to be lower after PES than if no PES had existed. We conducted lab-in-the-field experiments in Colombia, where PES policies are expanding, offering either individual or collective conditional payments to 676 farmers who are potential PES participants. Those payments end, within each experimental session, for all or only for some participants. We consistently find that conservation is not lower after PES than before. Also, conservation contributions tend to fall over time without PES, in keeping with public-goods literatures. Taken together, these results imply that even after our payments end, conservation is above the baseline defined by our controls, suggesting some form of (at least short-run) crowding in.

 

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Does the Selective Erasure of Protected Areas Raise Deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon?

Published February 1, 2022 by Alex Pfaff
Derya Keles, Alexander Pfaff, Michael B. Mascia
Journal of the Association of Environmental and Resource Economists (2022) https://doi.org/10.1086/723543

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Protected areas (PAs) are the leading policy to lower deforestation. Yet resistance by land users leads PAs to be created in remote sites, lowering impact. Resistance continues after PA creation, with both illegal deforestation and advocacy for PADDD, that is, reducing PA status (downgrading) or PA size (partial or full erasure, downsizing or degazettement). For the Brazilian Amazon, we estimate 2010–15 forest impacts of 2009–12 PA erasures, on average and for distinct states. Before panel-DID regression, to find similar controls we matched using static characteristics and 8–10 years of pretreatment deforestation. PA erasures should raise deforestation if erased PAs faced and blocked pressures. Consistent with this, three conditions for “environmental selection” yielded little short-run impact from PADDD: low pressures, unblocked higher pressures, and pressures blocked less by those PAs selected for erasures. Yet for “development selection,” with PA erasures in sites with pressures plus enforcement, PADDD yielded increased deforestation.

 

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Environmental Policies Benefit Economic Development: Implications of Economic Geography

Published January 1, 2022 by Alex Pfaff
Seth Morgan, Alexander Pfaff, Julien Wolfersberger
Annual Review of Resource Economists (2022) https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-resource-111920-
022804

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For over a century, starting with the work of Alfred Marshall (and also in resource economics), economic geography has emphasized the productivity of dense urban agglomerations. Yet little attention is paid to one key policy implication of economic geography’s core mechanisms: Environmental policies can aid economic development, per se—not hurting the economy to help the environment but advancing both objectives.We review mechanisms from economic geography that imply that environmental policies can deliver such win-wins: influences upon agglomeration of long-tanding natural conditions, like usable bays, which long were perceived as fixed yet now are being shifted by global environmental quality; agglomeration’s effects on other influential conditions, like urban environmental quality; and the effects of rural environmental quality on the flows to cities of people and environmental quality. Finally, we consider a geographic policy typology in asking why society leaves money on the table by failing to promote environmental policies despite the potential win-wins that we highlight.

 

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