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

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

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

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,

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

Where the Deer and The Antelope Play:Conserving Big Game Migrations As an Endangered Phenomena

In the American West, high-profile big game species including mule deer, antelope, elk, moose, bison and bighorn sheep use large landscapes to migrate between winter and summer habitats to obtain the resources they need to survive. The big game species are a vital part of the West’s ecology, economy, and culture and are valued by local, national, and international stakeholders. Thanks to large parcels of private and public land and a low human population, many parts of the American West still provide some of the best big game habitats in the world. But these vast, intact landscapes are under threat by ongoing habitat loss and disturbances to seasonal and migratory habitats that result in declines in big game population and the disappearance of migrations. Addressing the challenge of conserving big game populations and the endangered phenomena of seasonal migration across large landscapes in the American West will require dynamic, innovative, and flexible legal approaches. Those legal approaches should recognize the biological needs of the species themselves and reflect economic policy analysis of conservation in landscapes with multiple land managers. Considering both integrated biological and economic decision frameworks and incentive-based tools to define and implement legal and policy structures can produce migratory species conservation more efficiently than less integrated approaches. Conservation of big game migrations is now a growing priority and initial conservation efforts are beginning to emerge, including the Department of Interior Secretarial Order 3362 “Improving Habitat Quality in Western Big-Game Winter Range and Migration Corridors” and state policies including the Wyoming Game and Fish Department Ungulate Migration Corridor Strategy. This interdisciplinary paper evaluates those emerging policies and finds that the policies miss opportunities to provide higher levels of conservation of migratory species by failing to address key ecological characteristics of migratory species and to incorporate economically efficient hierarchies of management and policy. We conclude by offering thoughts on how future conservation polices might be designed to incorporate both ecology and economics to better conserve migrations

Near-term ecological forecasting for dynamic aeroconservation of migratory birds

Near-term ecological forecasting has the potential to mitigate negative impacts of human modifications on wildlife by directing efficient action through relevant and timely predictions. We used the U.S. avian migration system to highlight ecological forecasting applications for aeroconservation. We used millions of observations from 143 weather surveillance radars to construct and evaluate a migration forecasting system for nocturnal bird migration over the contiguous United States. We identified the number of nights of mitigation required to reduce the risk of aerial hazards to 50% of avian migrants passing a given area in spring and autumn based on dynamic forecasts of migration activity. We also investigated an alternative approach, that is, employing a fixed conservation strategy based on time windows that historically capture 50% of migratory passage. In practice, during both spring and autumn, dynamic forecasts required fewer action nights compared with fixed window selection at all locations (spring: mean of 7.3 more alert days; fall: mean of 12.8 more alert days). This pattern resulted in part from the pulsed nature of bird migration captured in the radar data, where the majority (54.3%) of birds move on 10% of a migration season\u27s nights. Our results highlight the benefits of near-term ecological forecasting and the potential advantages of dynamic mitigation strategies over static ones, especially in the face of increasing risks to migrating birds from light pollution, wind energy infrastructure, and collisions with structures