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Tag: protected areas

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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Heterogeneous Local Spillovers from Protected Areas in Costa Rica

Published August 3, 2017 by Alex Pfaff
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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Evolving Protected-Area Impacts in Mexico: Political Shifts as Suggested by Impact Evaluations

Published January 4, 2016 by Alex Pfaff
Alexander Pfaff, Franciso Santiago-Avila, Lucas Joppa
Forests 2017 8:17 doi:10.3390/f8010017

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For protected areas (PAs), variation in forest impacts over space—including types of PA—are increasingly well documented, while shifts in impacts over time receive less attention. For Mexico, in the 1990s, PAs effectively were ‘paper parks’. Thus, achieving impacts on the forest would require shifts over time in the politics of PA siting and PA implementation. We rigorously analyze the impacts of Mexican PAs on 2000–2005 loss of natural land cover, using matching to reduce location bias caused by typical land-use economics and politics. We find a 3.2% lower loss, on average, due to PAs. Since politics often vary by type of PA, we also show that in Mexico stricter PAs are closer to cities and have greater impact than mixed-use PAs. These shifts in impacts suggest some potential for PAs to conserve forests.

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Scaling up conservation impact in Madagascar

Published January 3, 2016 by Alex Pfaff
Theo Gimenez, Alexander Pfaff, Ranaivo Rasolofoson, Lucas Joppa
Draft working paper, Duke University.

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Ten years ago, Madagascar’s government committed to drastically scale up the nation’s protected-area coverage from ~3% to 10% of its area. We ask how successful this PA expansion is likely to be in terms of reducing deforestation (and, thereby, increasing the conservation of biodiversity). We statistically evaluate the impact of the prior generations of Malagasy PAs and use those results to anticipate the conservation impacts of Madagascar’s newest PAs. We find that deforestation was reduced by the prior PAs, although by less than suggested in simpler comparisons that lack explicit controls for land characteristics. Further, impacts are higher where deforestation pressure is higher, which often is closer to roads and cities (and which also may imply higher costs). We find Madagascar’s newest PAs are sited where, if managed correctly, they can achieve impacts at least as high as prior conservation.

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Protected area types, strategies and impacts in Brazil’s Amazon: public PA strategies do not yield a consistent ranking of PA types by impact

Published November 9, 2015 by Alex Pfaff
Alexander Pfaff, Juan Robalino, Catalina Sandoval, Diego Herrera
Philosophical Transactions B 2015 volume 370 (online http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2014.0273)

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The leading policy to conserve forest is protected areas (PAs). Yet, they are not a single tool: land users and uses vary by PA type; and public PA strategies vary in the extent of each type, as well as in the determinants of impact for each type, i.e. siting and internal deforestation. Further, across regions and time, strategies respond to pressures (deforestation and political).We estimate deforestation impacts of PA types for a critical frontier, the Brazilian Amazon. We separate regions and time periods that differ in their deforestation and political pressures and document considerable variation in PA strategies across regions, time periods and types. The siting of PAs varies across regions. For example, all else being equal, PAs in the arc of deforestation are relatively far from non-forest, while in other states they are relatively near. Internal deforestation varies across time periods, e.g. it is more similar across the PAtypes for PAs after 2000. By contrast, after 2000, PA extent is less similar across PA types with little non-indigenous area created inside the arc. PA strategies generate a range of impacts for PA types—always far higher within the arc—but not a consistent ranking of PA types by impact.

 

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Protected Areas’ Impacts on Brazilian Amazon Deforestation: examining conservation – development interactions to inform planning

Published September 2, 2015 by Alex Pfaff
Alexander Pfaff, Juan Robalino, Diego Herrera, Catalina Sandoval
PLOS ONE 2015 (forthcoming) DOI:10.1371/journal.pone.0129460

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Protected areas are the leading forest conservation policy for species and ecoservices goals and they may feature in climate policy if countries with tropical forest rely on familiar tools. For Brazil’s Legal Amazon, we estimate the average impact of protection upon deforestation and show how protected areas’ forest impacts vary significantly with development pressure.We use matching, i.e., comparisons that are apples-to-apples in observed land characteristics, to address the fact that protected areas (PAs) tend to be located on lands facing less pressure. Correcting for that location bias lowers our estimates of PAs’ forest impacts by roughly half. Further, it reveals significant variation in PA impacts along development-related dimensions: for example, the PAs that are closer to roads and the PAs closer to cities have higher impact. Planners have multiple conservation and development goals, and are constrained by cost, yet still conservation planning should reflect what our results imply about future impacts of PAs.

 

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