Factors influencing the participation to individual and community forest conservation compensation agreements in Bolivia

The existing literature on conservation compensation programs shows that their outcomes depend on whether the project design correctly matches the causes of land-use behaviors as well as succeeds to motivate people to conserve nature in a profound and sustained manner by building on different types of motivations, without crowding-out the intrinsic ones. This study analyzed farmers' motivations to conserve forests or deforest in relation to a regional in-kind compensation program in the Bolivian Chaco. In this program, upstream households can voluntarily engage to protect their forests and water sources in exchange of in-kind compensations. The objective of this study was to test whether the program is indeed targeting the causes of deforestation behaviors and supporting existing motivations from local land users. We used deforestation data quantified on each individual household plot, using Hansen et al. (2013) global forest cover loss dataset, and a household survey conducted prior to start of the program in control communities (to which compensations have not been offered) and treatment communities (to which compensations have been offered). Firstly, we identified the causes of deforestation by ccomparing individual households' deforestation data against households' characteristics using multivariate tobit models, only using the communities to which the program was not proposed. Secondly, we identified the motivations for and barriers to participation in the program by comparing the characteristics of households that decided to participate and those that decided not to participate using multivariate logistic models. We compared the causes of deforestation to the motivations to participate in conservation program, classified into different types: financial and material motivations, social motivations and environmental motivations. We showed that the program is not targeting the socio-economic causes of deforestation through its compensations but that its communication and motivation strategy to align with local intrinsic motivations and social norms may be working. In addition to shedding a nexw light on the roots of farmers' deforestation behaviors in the Bolivian Chaco, these results will allow improving the design of conservation interventions so that they are consistent with sakgolders' motivations and assure the long term success of forest conservation

Economic, pro-social and pro-environmental factors influencing participation in an incentive-based conservation program in Bolivia

The effectiveness of incentive-based conservation programs depends on how they influence and interact with multiple motivations of the participants. Here, we studied an incentive-based program for forest conservation in Bolivia – called “Reciprocal Watershared Agreements” – that mixes material compensations with pro-social and pro-environmental motivations as a way to reduce crowding-out of intrinsic motivations and to increase participation. Based on a sample of 470 households who were offered the program, we studied household characteristics that influenced (i) the probability of participation in the program, (ii) the intensity of the participation, measured as the area allocated in the agreement, and (iii) the modality of participation, measured as the probability of participation in the different types of agreements. We found that owning property titles, having large forested land with low conservation opportunity cost, agricultural equipment and off-farm incomes seem to favour participation. In addition, the probability of participation increases with some pro-social factors, such as a deeper or older integration into social networks, and greater compliance to social norms of reciprocity. We also found that a lack of trust in public institutions can increase both the likelihood and the intensity of participation, as can certain pro-environmental factors, such as awareness of environmental problems, knowledge about potential solutions to solve them and perception of the gains associated with the conservation of ecosystem services. Finally, we found that feeling some individual responsibility for environmental issues and some difficulty in performing pro-environmental options may increase participation into more restrictive agreements. Our results thus highlight the factors that could increase uptake and factors on which programs might focus in order to have a greater impact on pro-environmental behaviours. They also suggest that incentive-based program can be designed to take advantage of pro-social and pro-environmental motivations as strongly as of economic ones. © 2021 Elsevier Lt

Utilisation des drones pour l'évaluation des dégâts de la faune (sanglier - Sus scrofa) à l'agriculture (maïs - Zea mays)

peer reviewedDamage caused by ungulates to agricultural areas are difficult to evaluate because the real extent of the damage remains usually poorly described and potentially arising conflicts. Recent advances in unmanned aerial system (UAS) provide new versatile mapping and quantification possibilities in a wide range of applications. We used crop fields (Zea mays) damaged by wild boar (Sus scrofa) and compared the extent of the damage by means of three methods: i) traditional ground-based assessment ii) UAS orthoimages with operator delineation and iii) UAS Crop Height Model with automatic delineation based on height threshold. We showed for the first time that UAS could be applied for assessing damage of ungulates to agriculture. The two methods using UAS imagery provide coherent and satisfactory results and trended to underestimate the damage area when compared to in-use ground-based field expertise. However we suggest that performance of UAS should further be tested in variable conditions in order to assess the broad application of this tool. Our study describes the potential of UAS as a tool for estimating more accurately the damage area and subsequently the compensation costs for wildlife damage. The proposed approach can come in support of local and regional policies for the definitions of compensation for farmers