Financing the Sustainable Management of Rwanda’s Protected Areas

Rwanda’s Nyungwe National Park is a biodiversity hotspot with the most endemic species in the ecoregion as well as the highest number of threatened species internationally. In addition to great biological diversity, Nyungwe National Park supplies significant ecosystem services to the Rwandan population including water provisioning and tourism services. Tourism in the Park has strong potential for improving the sustainable management of the Park for continued provision of natural habitat and critical ecosystem services. This paper explores quantitatively the economic impacts of adjustment in Park visitation fees and tourism demand as a source of revenues to improve Park tourism opportunities and ongoing operations and maintenance where budgetary restrictions are particularly acute. The methods developed in this paper are novel in integrating the results of stated preference techniques with regional economy-wide modelling approaches to capture multi-sectoral, direct, indirect and induced impacts. Such methods have strong potential for assessing revenue generation alternatives in other contexts where Park Managers are faced with the need to generate additional revenue for sustainable park management while facing diminishing budget allocations.Centro de Estudios Distributivos, Laborales y Sociales (CEDLAS

Financing the Sustainable Management of Rwanda’s Protected Areas

Rwanda’s Nyungwe National Park is a biodiversity hotspot with the most endemic species in the ecoregion as well as the highest number of threatened species internationally. In addition to great biological diversity, Nyungwe National Park supplies significant ecosystem services to the Rwandan population including water provisioning and tourism services. Tourism in the Park has strong potential for improving the sustainable management of the Park for continued provision of natural habitat and critical ecosystem services. This paper explores quantitatively the economic impacts of adjustment in Park visitation fees and tourism demand as a source of revenues to improve Park tourism opportunities and ongoing operations and maintenance where budgetary restrictions are particularly acute. The methods developed in this paper are novel in integrating the results of stated preference techniques with regional economy-wide modelling approaches to capture multi-sectoral, direct, indirect and induced impacts. Such methods have strong potential for assessing revenue generation alternatives in other contexts where Park Managers are faced with the need to generate additional revenue for sustainable park management while facing diminishing budget allocations.Centro de Estudios Distributivos, Laborales y Sociales (CEDLAS

Financing the Sustainable Management of Rwanda’s Protected Areas

Rwanda’s Nyungwe National Park is a biodiversity hotspot with the most endemic species in the ecoregion as well as the highest number of threatened species internationally. In addition to great biological diversity, Nyungwe National Park supplies significant ecosystem services to the Rwandan population including water provisioning and tourism services. Tourism in the Park has strong potential for improving the sustainable management of the Park for continued provision of natural habitat and critical ecosystem services. This paper explores quantitatively the economic impacts of adjustment in Park visitation fees and tourism demand as a source of revenues to improve Park tourism opportunities and ongoing operations and maintenance where budgetary restrictions are particularly acute. The methods developed in this paper are novel in integrating the results of stated preference techniques with regional economy-wide modelling approaches to capture multi-sectoral, direct, indirect and induced impacts. Such methods have strong potential for assessing revenue generation alternatives in other contexts where Park Managers are faced with the need to generate additional revenue for sustainable park management while facing diminishing budget allocations.Centro de Estudios Distributivos, Laborales y Sociales (CEDLAS

Annual cycles are the most common reproductive strategy in African tropical tree communities

We present the first cross continental comparison of the flowering and fruiting phenology of tropical forests across Africa. Flowering events of 5,446 trees from 196 species across 12 sites, and fruiting events of 4,595 trees from 191 species, across 11 sites were monitored over periods of 6 to 29 years, and analysed to describe phenology at the continental level. To study phenology we used Fourier analysis to identify the dominant cycles of flowering and fruiting for each individual tree and we identified the time of year African trees bloom and bear fruit and their relationship to local seasonality. Reproductive strategies were diverse and no single regular cycle was found in >50% of individuals across all 12 sites. Additionally, we found annual flowering and fruiting cycles to be the most common. Sub-annual cycles were the next most common for flowering whereas supra-annual patterns were the next most common for fruiting. We also identify variation in different subsets of species, with species exhibiting mainly annual cycles most common in West and West-Central African tropical forests, while more species at sites in East-Central and Eastern African forests showed cycles ranging from sub-annual to supra-annual. Despite many trees showing strong seasonality, at most sites some flowering and fruiting occurred all year round. Environmental factors with annual cycles are likely to be important drivers of seasonal periodicity in trees across Africa, but proximate triggers are unlikely to be constant across the continen

Distribution of impacts of natural disasters across income groups: A case study of New Orleans.”

This paper explores elements of vulnerability to natural disasters in the context of Hurricane Katrina. We examine whether neighborhoods in New Orleans were impacted differently by Hurricane Katrina based on pre-existing social, physical and economic vulnerabilities. We evaluate the degree to which the initial impacts of Hurricane Katrina were distributed among the New Orleans' residents. Geographic Information System (GIS) technology was used to perform analyses using household income, housing values, and elevation and flood levels. Next, we investigate whether particular socio-economic groups in the city were more vulnerable during the response and recovery phases. However, findings do suggest that pre-existing socio-economic conditions play a significant role in the ability for particular economic classes to respond immediately to the disaster and to cope with the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. The paper concludes with policy recommendations to reduce social and economic vulnerabilities to natural disasters, as well as suggestions for future research

Economic and Land Use Impacts of Rwanda’s Green Growth Strategy: An Application of the Integrated Economic-Environmental Modelling Platform

This paper evaluates the wealth and land use impacts of Rwanda's Green Growth Strategy with the Integrated Economic-Environmental Modelling (IEEM) platform. IEEM enables the estimation of impacts on economic indicators including measures of wealth, which includes stocks of natural capital and environmental quality. The IEEM for Rwanda (IEEM-RWA) is calibrated with Rwanda's new land and water environmental accounts organized according to the System of Environmental-Economic Accounting Central Framework (SEEA CF). With a geographic information system (GIS) developed for Rwanda, IEEM-RWA simulation results in terms of land use change are made spatially explicit. IEEM-RWA results and the mapping of policy scenarios can be an important contribution to stimulating multi-stakeholder dialogue and the analysis of options to meeting Green Growth targets

Spatiotemporal patterns in an Afrotropical montane forest bird community

Understanding how species richness and diversity patterns vary across time and space is essential for predicting how biodiversity will respond to anthropogenic threats and for effective conservation planning. Tropical montane forests are among the most biodiverse places in the world, yet high rates of endemism and narrow physiological tolerances place tropical montane species among the most vulnerable to anthropogenic impacts. Therefore, it is of the utmost importance to understand how ecological communities are structured along elevational and spatial gradients, particularly in the Afrotropics, which are historically understudied despite their unique climate and rich biodiversity. Here we examine how the Afrotropical montane bird community of Nyungwe National Park in Rwanda is spatially and temporally structured with respect to elevation and geography. We show that despite the absence of geographic barriers, avian communities are spatially structured across the elevational gradient with significant regional differences in both species composition and richness, and that high elevation assemblages are comprised of fewer species compared to lower and middle elevations. We find evidence for overall stability in species richness during this study period (2001–2011) yet differing season-specific trends across the elevational range of the study. Specifically, the high elevation assemblage exhibited a wet season-specific increase in richness, congruent with predicted upslope elevational shifts for low and middle elevation species. Our findings suggest that anthropogenic factors may have different effects on richness patterns depending on elevation and region, and that protected areas large enough to encompass the full range of geographic and elevation gradients are required to effectively conserve Afromontane bird communities