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.

Wildfire Risk Management on a Landscape with Public and Private Ownership: Who Pays?

Resource /Energy Economics and Policy,

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

Spatial Endogenous Fire Risk and Efficient Fuel Management and Timber Harvest

This paper integrates a spatial fire behavior model and a stochastic dynamic optimization model to determine the optimal spatial pattern of fuel management and timber harvest. Each years fire season causes the loss of forest values and lives in the western US. This paper uses a multi-plot analysis and incorporates uncertainty about fire ignition locations and weather conditions to inform policy by examining the role of spatial endogenous risk - where management actions on one stand affect fire risk in that and adjacent stands. The results support two current strategies, but question two other strategies, for managing forests with fire risk.Resource /Energy Economics and Policy,

Land Cover in a Managed Forest Ecosystem: Mexican Shade Coffee

Managed forest ecosystems—agroforestry systems in which crops such as coffee and bananas are planted side-by-side with woody perennials—are being touted as a means of safeguarding forests along with the ecological services they provide. Yet we know little about the determinants of land cover in such systems, information needed to design effective forest conservation policies. This paper presents a spatial regression analysis of land cover in a managed forest ecosystem—a shade coffee region of coastal Mexico. Using high-resolution land cover data derived from aerial photographs along with data on the geophysical and institutional characteristics of the study area, we find that plots in close proximity to urban centers are less likely to be cleared, all other things equal. This result contrasts sharply with the literature on natural forests. In addition, we find that membership in coffee-marketing cooperatives, farm size, and certain soil types are associated with forest cover, while proximity to small town centers is associated with forest clearing.deforestation, managed forest ecosystem, agroforestry, shade-grown coffee, Mexico, spatial econometrics, land cover

The impact of buffer zone size and management on illegal extraction, park protection and enforcement

Many protected areas or parks in developing countries have buffer zones at their boundaries to achieve the dual goals of protecting park resources and providing resource benefits to neighbouring people. Despite the prevalence of these zoning policies, few behavioural models of people’s buffer zone use inform the sizing and management of those zones. This paper uses a spatially explicit resource extraction model to examine the impact of buffer zone size and management on extraction by local people, both legal and illegal, and the impact of that extraction on forest quality in the park’s core and buffer zone. The results demonstrate trade-offs between the level of enforcement, the size of a buffer zone, and the amount of illegal extraction in the park; and describe implications for “enrichment” of buffer zones and evaluating patterns of forest degradation

The economics of REDD through an incidence of burdens and benefits lens

Forests in lower-income countries provide a global public good, carbon sequestration. REDD, "reduced emissions from deforestation and forest degradation" is a performance-based payment designed to align private incentives at the country level with the socially optimal level of forest loss. This review article focuses on the distributional implications of REDD, specifically on whom the burdens and benefits fall. First, REDD implementation has proven more difficult and costly than originally anticipated. The literature highlights many costs of REDD over and above the opportunity cost, including readiness, enforcement and monitoring, which initially were underestimated or ignored. Second, ensuring additionality, minimising leakage, and spatial targeting of carbon rich locations, are difficult and costly, and shown in the literature to sometimes be at odds with pro-poor efforts. Third, benefit sharing has emerged in the literature as a central element of REDD implementation. Rural households may use nearby forests yet have no rights, and REDD may bring no benefits whilst imposing costs on these communities. Where REDD is implemented at the community level, incentives may not be aligned at the level of the individual, reducing REDD's impact and increasing conflict. Finally, funding sources are closely linked to the incidence of benefits and burdens. Our review suggests that, over a decade on from the Paris Agreement, REDD continues to be controversial, with equity-efficiency trade-offs often difficult to avoid. However, the literature provides considerable theoretical and empirical evidence as to how and where REDD can have a positive impact on both carbon sequestration and livelihoods

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

Opportunities and challenges for small-scale aquaculture: The stakeholders’ perspective in Los Lagos Region-Chile

We identify and explore the potential opportunities and challenges for promoting and expanding small-scale aquaculture (SSA) as an additional income-generating activity for coastal communities in southern Chile. Based on a conceptual model of SSA adoption decisions, we conducted field key informant semistructured interviews with stakeholders in the Los Lagos region and in the regional capital city, Puerto Montt. We conducted a qualitative analysis of the interviews to identify potential resource users’ perceptions of current SSA opportunities. Interpreting the content analysis results through the lens of economic decisions in the conceptual model, we find that weak monitoring and enforcement, difficulties in adapting to new jobs, limited recent spatial planning, constraints on access to marine user rights, and insufficient market development for marine products are among the main obstacles to the adoption of SSA. The stakeholders view SSA as an opportunity to expand marine-based productive activities under the continuous decline in wild fisheries. SSA adoption is perceived as a gradual transition process that requires cultural capital and knowledge, given the lack of familiarity with management and the legal and economic aspects of aquaculture. In contrast to the concerns of potential SSA adopters, government stakeholders emphasize concern over the lack of definitions for SSA, norms, and regulations. We discuss how public policy to promote SSA in Chile could target the key concerns of potential SSA adopters