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Category: Secondary Data

Reducing Environmental Risks from Belt and Road Initiative Investments in Transportation Infrastructure

Elizabeth Losos, Alexander Pfaff, Lydia Olander, Sara Mason, Seth Morgan
World Bank Policy Research Working Paper 8718

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The Belt and Road Initiative, due to its diverse and extensive infrastructure investments, poses a wide range of environmental risks. Some projects have easily identifiable and measurable impacts, such as energy projects’ greenhouse gas emissions. Others, such as transportation infrastructure, due to their vast geographic reach, generate more complex and potentially more extensive environmental risks. The proposed Belt and Road Initiative rail and road investments have stimulated concerns because of the history of significant negative environmental impacts from large-scaletransportation projects across the globe. This paper studies environmental risks—direct and indirect—from Belt and Road Initiative transportation projects and the mitigation strategies and policies to address them. The paper concludes with a recommendation on how to take advantage of the scale of the Belt and Road Initiative to address these concerns in a way not typically available to stand-alone projects. In short, this scale motivates and permits early integrated development and conservation planning.

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Collective Local Payments for Ecosystem Services: new local PES between groups, sanctions, and prior watershed trust in Mexico

Alexander Pfaff, Luz Angela Rodriguez, Elizabeth Shapiro-Garza
Water Resources and Economics 28 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.wre.2019.01.002

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Payments for ecosystem services (PES) programs are now high in number, if not always in impact. When groups of users pay groups of service providers, establishing PES involves collective action. We study the creation of collective PES institutions, and their continuation, as group coordination. We use framed lab-in-field experiments with hydroservices users and providers within watersheds participating in Mexico’s Matching Funds program in Veracruz, Yucatan and Quintana Roo states. We explore the coordination of contributions between downstream users and upstream providers, plus effects of different types of sanctions that can affect expectations for both users and providers. Both information alone and sanctions raise contributions overall, although outcomes varied by site in line with our rankings of ‘watershed trust’. For instance, monetary sanctions raise contributions in the watershed we ranked high in trust, yet initially lowered them for the lowest-trust watershed. This suggests that upstream-downstream social capital will be central to new collective local PES, while our overall trends suggest social capital can be raised by successful coordination over time.

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Evaluating the impacts of protected areas on human well-being across the developing world

Robin Naidoo, Drew Gerkey, David Hole, Alexander Pfaff, Alicia Ellis, Chris Golden, Diego Herrera, Kiersten Johnson, Mark Mulligan, Taylor Ricketts, Brendan Fisher
Science Advances 5:eaav3006

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Protected areas (PAs) are fundamental for biodiversity conservation, yet their impacts on nearby residents are contested. We synthesized environmental and socioeconomic conditions of >87,000 children in >60,000 households situated either near or far from >600 PAs within 34 developing countries. We used quasi-experimental hierarchical regression to isolate the impact of living near a PA on several aspects of human well-being. Households near PAs with tourism also had higher wealth levels (by 17%) and a lower likelihood of poverty (by 16%) than similar households living far from PAs. Children under 5 years old living nearmultiple-use PAs with tourism also had higher height-for-age scores (by 10%) and were less likely to be stunted (by 13%) than similar children living far from PAs. For the largest and most comprehensive socioeconomic-environmental dataset yet assembled, we found no evidence of negative PA impacts and consistent statistical evidence to suggest PAs can positively affect human well-being.

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Impacts of Certification, Uncertified Concessions, Hunting Zones and Protected Areas on Forest Loss in Cameroon, 2000 to 2013

Stephanie Panlasigui, Jimena Rico-Straffon, Alexander Pfaff, Jennifer Swenson, Colby Loucks
Biological Conservation 227:160-166 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.biocon.2018.09.013

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Deforestation and forest fragmentation are leading drivers of biodiversity loss. Protected areas have been the leading conservation policy response, yet their scale and scope remain inadequate to meet biodiversity conservation targets. Managed forest concessions increasingly have been recognized as a complement to protected areas in meeting conservation targets. Similarly, programs for voluntary third-party certification of concession management aim to create incentives for logging companies to manage forests more sustainably. Rigorous evidence on the impacts from large-scale certification programs is thereby critical, yet detailed field observations are limited, temporally and spatially. Remotely-sensed data, in contrast, can provide repeated observations over time and at a fine spatial scale, albeit with less detail. Using the Global Forest Change dataset, we examine annual forest loss in Cameroon during 2000–2013 to assess the impact of Forest Stewardship Council certification, as well as uncertified logging concessions and national parks. We use panel regressions that control for the effects of unobserved factors that vary across space or time. We find low forest loss inside the boundaries of each management intervention, with < 1% lost over the study period. Yet those low levels of loss appear to be influenced more by a site’s proximity to drivers of deforestation, such as distances to population centers or roads, than by national parks, uncertified concessions, or certification. The exception is that if a site faces high deforestation pressure, uncertified logging concessions appear to reduce forest loss. This may reflect private companies’ incentives to protect rights to forest use. Such an influence of private logging companies could provide a foundation for future impacts from certification upon rates of forest loss, at least within areas that are facing elevated deforestation pressures.

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Nature can deliver on the SDGs

Brendan Fisher, Diego Herrera, Diane Adams, Helen E. Fox, Louise Gallagher, Drew Gerkey, David Gill, Christopher D. Golden, David Hole, Kiersten Johnson, Mark Mulligan, Samuel S. Myers, Robin Naidoo, Alexander Pfaff, Ranaivo Rasolofoson, Elizabeth Selig, David Tickner, Timothy Treuer, Taylor Ricketts
Lancet Planetary Health

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The increasing availability of data and improved analytic techniques now enable us to better understand when and where investing in nature can deliver net benefits for people − especially with respect to the most vulnerable populations in developing countries. These advances open the door for efficient interventions that can advance multiple SDGs at once. Recently, we harmonized a suite of global datasets to explore the critical nexus of forests, poverty and human health – an overlap of SDGs 1, 2, 3, 6 and 15. Our approach combined demographic and health surveys for 297,112 children in 35 developing countries with data describing the local environmental conditions for each child4 (Fig. 1a; see online materials for details). This allowed us to estimate the effect forests may play in supporting human health, while controlling for the influence of important socio-economic differences. We extended this work to look at how forests affect three childhood health concerns of global significance – stunting, anemia, and diarrheal disease.

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

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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