Land Encroachment: India’s Disappearing Common Lands

Opportunistic land encroachment, resulting from costly and incomplete enforcement of common land boundaries, is a problem in many less-developed countries. A multi-period model of such encroachment is presented in this paper. The model accounts explicitly for the cumulative effects of non-compliance of regulations designed to protect a finite, non-renewable resource . in this case common land . from private expropriation. Gradual evolution of property rights from common to private . the consequence of encroachment . is demonstrated to be an equilibrium. To prevent the complete loss of common land, full enforcement must be the rule rather than the exception.enforcement, encroachment, dynamic optimisation, India,

Wanted dead and alive: Are hunting and protection of endangered species compatible?

The paper shows that civil war in Burundi in the 1990s has provoked an unprecedented decline in government revenue. Both foreign aid transfers and revenue from domestic sources dried up, inducing the government to rely more on inflation tax. Using quarterly data covering the period from 1980:1 to 2002:4 to measure the sensitivity of money demand to inflation we find that the long-run semi-elasticity of inflation to real money in circulation trebled between the pre-war to the war period. The remarkable increase of the semi-elasticity translates what is known in the literature as economic agents. .flight from domestic currency., a strategy that limits the governments capacity to use inflation tax to compensate for the loss in more traditional revenue sources. Shedding light on the behaviour of the demand for real money amidst persistent political and economic instability, illustrates the limits of using inflation and money creation as a dependable source of government revenue.

Parks, Buffer Zones, and Costly Enforcement

The reality of protected area management is that enforcing forest and park boundaries is costly and so most likely incomplete, due in part to the pressures exerted on the boundaries by local people who often have traditionally relied on the park resources. Buffer zones are increasingly being proposed and implemented to protect both forest resources and livelihoods. Developing a spatially-explicit optimal enforcement model, this paper demonstrates that there is a trade-off between the amount spent on enforcement, the size of a formal buffer zone, and the extent to which a forest can be protected from illegal extraction. Indeed, given the reality of limited enforcement budgets, a forest manager with a mandate to protect a whole forest may in fact end up doing a worse job than one who is able to incorporate an appropriately sized buffer zone into their management plans that, combined with more effective enforcement of a smaller exclusion zone, provide the appropriate incentives for villagers to extract only in the periphery of the forest, rather than venture further into the forest.

Analyzing the Impact of Excluding Rural People from Protected Forests: Spatial Resource Degradation and Rural Welfare

This paper examines how forest-dependent villagers meet a resource requirement when they are excluded from some area of a forest. Forest managers who value both pristine and degraded forest should take into account a .displacement effect. resulting in more intensive villager extraction elsewhere, and a .replacement effect. in which villagers purchase more of the resource from the market. Similarly, forest managers who have poverty concerns should recognize that exclusion zones tend to be more costly to villagers without market access and those with low opportunity costs of labour- typically the poorest villagers.

Spatial and Temporal Modeling of Community Non-Timber Forest Extraction

This paper examines the interaction of spatial and dynamic aspects of resource extraction from forests by local people. Highly cyclical and varied across both space and time, the patterns of resource extraction resulting from the spatial-temporal model bear little resemblance to the patterns drawn from focusing either on spatial or temporal aspects of extraction, as is typical in both the modeling and empirical literature to date. Combining the spatial-temporal model with a measure of success in community forest management.the ability to avoid open-access resource degradation.characterizes the impact of incomplete property rights on patterns of resource extraction and stocks. Key words: Spatial and temporal modeling; renewable resources; non-timber forest products; common property resources

Exploring agricultural intensification: a case study of Nigerian government rice and cassava initiatives

Food security is a major challenge in sub-Saharan Africa. In Nigeria, the most populous country in the region, the rate of food production lags behind the rate of population growth, resulting in high incidences of hunger, with more than half the population living below the poverty line. In response to this, the Nigerian government has introduced a number of agricultural initiatives designed to increase food production and move the country closer to self-sufficiency. The objective of this paper is to determine the extent to which these initiatives have resulted in sustainable improvements in productivity. This is done through the development of a simple analytical framework that deconstructs increases in production into yield increases and area expansion. Rice and cassava are used as case studies. The paper demonstrates that three key government initiatives have had little impact on yields, with increases in production driven largely by area increases, most likely at the expense of forested areas and the ecosystem services they provide. The findings suggest that Nigeria has not achieved sustainable intensification of its agriculture for the two case study crops of cassava and rice. Moreover, some of the government initiatives assessed here have coincided with periods of falling yield

Deforestation, leakage and avoided deforestation policies: a spatial analysis

This paper analyses the impact of several avoided deforestation policies within a patchy forested landscape. Central is the idea that deforestation choices in one area influence deforestation decisions in nearby patches. We explore the interplay between forest landscapes comprising heterogeneous patches, localised spatial displacement, and avoided deforestation policies. Avoided deforestation policies at a landscape level are respectively: two Payments for Environmental Services (PES) policies, one focused on deforestation hotspots, the second being equally available to all agents; a conservation area; and, an agglomeration bonus. We demonstrate how the "best" policy, in terms of reduced leakage, depends on landscape heterogeneity. Agglomeration bonuses are shown to be more effective where there is less landscape heterogeneity, whilst conservation areas are most effective where there is more spatial heterogeneity

Allocating group-level payments for ecosystem services: experiences from a REDD+ pilot in Tanzania

Payments for ecosystem services (PES) typically reward landowners for managing their land to provide ecosystem services that would not otherwise be provided. REDD+—Reduced Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation—is a form of PES aimed at decreasing carbon emissions from forest conversion and extraction in lower-income countries. A key challenge for REDD+ occurs when it is implemented at a group, rather than an individual landowner, level. Whilst achieving a group-level reduction relies on individuals changing their interaction with the forest, incentives are not aligned explicitly at the individual level. Rather, payments are made to a defined group as a single entity in exchange for verified reduced forest loss, as per a PES scheme. In this paper, we explore how REDD+ has been implemented in one multiple-village pilot in Tanzania with the village defining the group. Our findings suggest that considerable attention has been paid towards monitoring, reporting, verification (MRV), and equity. No explicit mechanism ensures individual compliance with the village-level PES, and few villages allocate funds for explicit enforcement efforts to protect the forest from illegal activities undertaken by individual group members or by outsiders. However, the development of village-level institutions, “social fencing,” and a shared future through equal REDD+ payments, factor into decisions that influence the level of compliance at the village level that the program will eventually achieve

Location choice for renewable resource extraction with multiple non-cooperative extractors: a spatial Nash equilibrium model and numerical implementation

Especially in lower-income countries, the distribution of renewable resources in open access settings often reflects the non-cooperative spatial extraction decisions of many individuals who spread out across a landscape. These individuals recognize tradeoffs between distance to the resource, density, and competition amongst extractors. In this paper we present a game theoretic model that explicitly accommodates such explicitly spatial non-cooperative behavior with respect to the extraction of a stationary renewable natural resource, such as a non-timber forest products or bivalvia (for example, oysters, clams), that is located in a two dimensional landscape. Villagers that have identical labor allocations and preferences are shown to undertake very different extraction pathways in equilibrium. For example, some may extract in more congested patches closer to the village while others may extract in less crowded but more distant patches. For many parameterizations, we find multiple spatial Nash equilibria that differ with respect to the number of villagers at each resource location, whether individual villagers extract from one or multiple locations, and the extent and spatial pattern of resource degradation. In addition to finding equilibria with widely different actions taken by identical extractors, the analysis here demonstrates the impact of simplifying assumptions for spatial decisions on predictions of policy impact, resource distributions, and conflict

Preservation and recovery of mangrove ecosystem carbon stocks in abandoned shrimp ponds

Mangrove forests capture and store exceptionally large amounts of carbon and are increasingly recognised as an important ecosystem for carbon sequestration. Yet land-use change in the tropics threatens this ecosystem and its critical ‘blue carbon’ (carbon stored in marine and coastal habitats) stores. The expansion of shrimp aquaculture is among the major causes of mangrove loss globally. Here, we assess the impact of mangrove to shrimp pond conversion on ecosystem carbon stocks, and carbon losses and gains over time after ponds are abandoned. Our assessment is based on an intensive field inventory of carbon stocks at a coastal setting in Thailand. We show that although up to 70% of ecosystem carbon is lost when mangroves are converted to shrimp ponds, some abandoned ponds contain deep mangrove soils (>2.5 m) and large carbon reservoirs exceeding 865 t carbon per hectare. We also found a positive recovery trajectory for carbon stocks in the upper soil layer (0-15 cm) of a chronosequence of abandoned ponds, associated with natural mangrove regeneration. Our data suggest that mangrove carbon pools can rebuild in abandoned ponds over time in areas exposed to tidal flushing