Optimizing investments in national-scale forest landscape restoration in Uganda to maximize multiple benefits

Forest loss and degradation globally has resulted in declines in multiple ecosystem services and reduced habitat for biodiversity. Forest landscape restoration offers an opportunity to mitigate these losses, conserve biodiversity, and improve human well-being. As part of the Bonn Challenge, a global effort to restore 350 million hectares of deforested and degraded land by 2030, over 30 countries have recently made commitments to national forest landscape restoration. In order to achieve these goals, decision-makers require information on the potential benefits and costs of forest landscape restoration to efficiently target investments. In response to this need, we developed an approach using a suite of ecosystem service mapping tools and a multi-objective spatial optimization technique that enables decision-makers to estimate the potential benefits and opportunity costs of restoration, visualize tradeoffs associated with meeting multiple objectives, and prioritize where restoration could deliver the greatest benefits.Wedemonstrate the potential of this approach in Uganda, one of the nations committed to the Bonn Challenge. Using maps of the potential benefits and costs of restoration and efficiency frontiers for optimal restoration scenarios, we were able to communicate how ecosystem services benefits vary spatially across the country and how different weights on ecosystem services objectives can affect the allocation of restoration across Uganda. This work provides a generalizable approach to improve investments in forest landscape restoration and illuminates the tradeoffs associated with alternative restoration strategies.UKAid from the UK government through the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s KnowFor program as well as by the Natural Capital Project, a partnership between the University of Minnesota, Stanford University, the World Wildlife Fund, and the Nature Conservancy. MG was supported by the National Research Foundation of South Africa (Grant Number 98889).http://http://iopscience.iop.org1748-9326am2017Plant Scienc

In the dedicated pursuit of dedicated capital: restoring an indigenous investment ethic to British capitalism

Tony Blair’s landslide electoral victory on May 1 (New Labour Day?) presents the party in power with a rare, perhaps even unprecedented, opportunity to revitalise and modernise Britain’s ailing and antiquated manufacturing economy.* If it is to do so, it must remain true to its long-standing (indeed, historic) commitment to restore an indigenous investment ethic to British capitalism. In this paper we argue that this in turn requires that the party reject the very neo-liberal orthodoxies which it offered to the electorate as evidence of its competence, moderation and ‘modernisation’, which is has internalised, and which it apparently now views as circumscribing the parameters of the politically and economically possible

Different paths to the modern state in Europe: the interaction between domestic political economy and interstate competition

Theoretical work on state formation and capacity has focused mostly on early modern Europe and on the experience of western European states during this period. While a number of European states monopolized domestic tax collection and achieved gains in state capacity during the early modern era, for others revenues stagnated or even declined, and these variations motivated alternative hypotheses for determinants of fiscal and state capacity. In this study we test the basic hypotheses in the existing literature making use of the large date set we have compiled for all of the leading states across the continent. We find strong empirical support for two prevailing threads in the literature, arguing respectively that interstate wars and changes in economic structure towards an urbanized economy had positive fiscal impact. Regarding the main point of contention in the theoretical literature, whether it was representative or authoritarian political regimes that facilitated the gains in fiscal capacity, we do not find conclusive evidence that one performed better than the other. Instead, the empirical evidence we have gathered lends supports to the hypothesis that when under pressure of war, the fiscal performance of representative regimes was better in the more urbanized-commercial economies and the fiscal performance of authoritarian regimes was better in rural-agrarian economie