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.

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

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

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

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