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Tag: deforestation

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

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

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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Spillovers from Conservation Programs

Alexander Pfaff, Juan Robalino
Annual Review of Resource Economics 9:299-315

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Conservation programs have increased significantly, as has the evaluation of their impacts. However,the evaluation of their potential impacts beyond program borders has been scarce.Such spillovers can significantly reduce or increase net impacts. In this review, we discuss how conservation programs might affect outcomes beyond their borders and present some evidence of when they have or have not. We focus on five major channels by which spillovers can arise:(1) input reallocation; (2) market prices; (3) learning; (4) nonpecuniary motivations; and (5) ecological-physical links. We highlight evidence for each channel and emphasize that estimates often may reflect multiple channels. Future research could test for spillovers within different contexts and could separate the effects of different channels.

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Heterogeneous Local Spillovers from Protected Areas in Costa Rica

Juan Robalino, Alexander Pfaff, Laura Villalobos
JAERE, volume 4, number 3 http://dx.doi.org/10.1086/692089

Spillovers can significantly reduce or enhance the net effects of land-use policies, yet there exists little rigorous evidence concerning their magnitudes. We examine how Costa Rica’s national parks affect deforestation in nearby areas. We find that average deforestation spillovers are not significant in 0–5 km and 5–10 km rings around the parks. However, this average blends multiple effects that are significant and that vary in magnitude across the landscape, yielding varied net impacts. We distinguish the locations with different net spillovers by their distances to roads and park entrances — both of which are of economic importance, given critical local roles for transport costs and tourism. We find large and statistically significant leakage close to roads but far from park entrances, which are areas with high agricultural returns and less influenced by tourism. We do not find leakage far from roads (lower agriculture returns) or close to park entrances (higher tourism returns). Finally, parks facing greater threats of deforestation show greater leakage.

 

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