Forest conservation approaches must recognise the rights of local people

First paragraph: Until the 1980s, biodiversity conservation in the tropics focused on the “fines and fences” approach: creating protected areas from which local people were forcibly excluded. More recently, conservationists have embraced the notion of “win-win”: a dream world where people and nature thrive side by side

Fair and equitable conservation: do we really want it, and if so, do we know how to achieve it?

No Abstract

A systematic review of the reliability and validity of discrete choice experiments in valuing non-market environmental goods

While discrete choice experiments (DCEs) are increasingly used in the field of environmental valuation, they remain controversial because of their hypothetical nature and the contested reliability and validity of their results. We systematically reviewed evidence on the validity and reliability of environmental DCEs from the past thirteen years (Jan 2003–February 2016). 107 articles met our inclusion criteria. These studies provide limited and mixed evidence of the reliability and validity of DCE. Valuation results were susceptible to small changes in survey design in 45% of outcomes reporting reliability measures. DCE results were generally consistent with those of other stated preference techniques (convergent validity), but hypothetical bias was common. Evidence supporting theoretical validity (consistency with assumptions of rational choice theory) was limited. In content validity tests, 2–90% of respondents protested against a feature of the survey, and a considerable proportion found DCEs to be incomprehensible or inconsequential (17–40% and 10–62% respectively). DCE remains useful for non-market valuation, but its results should be used with caution. Given the sparse and inconclusive evidence base, we recommend that tests of reliability and validity are more routinely integrated into DCE studies and suggest how this might be achieved

Household economy, forest dependency & opportunity costs of conservation in eastern rainforests of Madagascar

The Government of Madagascar is trying to reduce deforestation and conserve biodiversity through creating new protected areas in the eastern rainforests. While this has many benefits, forest use restriction may bring costs to farmers at the forest frontier. We explored this through a series of surveys in five sites around the Corridor Ankeniheny Zahamena new protected area and adjacent national parks. In phase one a stratified random sample of 603 households completed a household survey covering demographic and socio-economic characteristics, and a choice experiment to estimate the opportunity costs of conservation. A stratified sub-sample (n = 171) then completed a detailed agricultural survey (including recording inputs and outputs from 721 plots) and wild-harvested product survey. The data have been archived with ReShare (UK Data Service). Together these allow a deeper understanding of the household economy on the forest frontier in eastern Madagascar and their swidden agricultural system, the benefits households derive from the forests through wild-harvested products, and the costs of conservation restrictions to forest edge communities

Addenda à l’article Revue des textes fonciers et forestiers pour la mise en œuvre de la restauration des paysages forestiers à Madagascar. Madagascar Conservation & Development 16, 1: 32–42

Dans un article récent par Herimino Manoa Rajaonarivelo, O. Sarobidy Rakotonarivo, Stefana Raharijaona, Eric Raparison, Mirindra Rakotoarisoa and Neal Hockley (2021), les remerciements avaient été omis de la version publiée. Nous les corrigeons ci-dessous.Article d'origine: <http://dx.doi.org/10.4314/mcd.v16i1.4>Original article: <http://dx.doi.org/10.4314/mcd.v16i1.4&gt

Resolving land tenure security is essential to deliver forest restoration

Tropical countries are making ambitious commitments to Forest Landscape Restoration with the aim of locking up carbon, conserving biodiversity and benefiting local livelihoods. However, global and national analyses of restoration potential frequently ignore socio-legal complexities which impact both the effectiveness and equitability of restoration. We show that areas with the highest restoration potential are disproportionately found in countries with weak rule of law and frequently in those with substantial areas of unrecognized land tenure. Focusing on Madagascar, at least 67% of the areas with highest restoration potential must be on untitled land, where tenure is often unclear or contested, and we show how unresolved tenure issues are one of the most important limitations on forest restoration. This is likely to be a bigger problem than currently recognized and without important efforts to resolve local tenure issues, opportunities to equitably scale up forest restoration globally are likely to be significantly over-estimated.UK Government’s Foreign, Commonwealth & Development OfficeEuropean Unio

Online multiplayer games as virtual laboratories for collecting data on social-ecological decision making

First paragraph: In the Anthropocene, human actions affect the persistence and abundance of nearly all critical natural resources, including the biodiversity on which indispensable ecosystem services depend (Dirzo et al. 2014; Ellis 2019). Sustaining these resources is of global importance for humanity because all humans rely on them to subsist and thrive. Yet, natural resource management has become a difficult, seemingly intractable, challenge (Defries & Nagendra 2017). This is partly caused by an inability to accurately predict social dynamics within social-ecological systems, especially in systems where conflict exists between the interests of human livelihoods and long-term conservation. In such systems, decisions are made by multiple interacting stakeholders with unique and potentially conflicting values, interests, and objectives (Redpath et al. 2013, 2018). To better predict social dynamics in these systems, new tools are needed that can manage the complexity underlying the causes and consequences of human decision making

Decision Trees for Data Publishing May Exacerbate Conservation Conflict

First paragraph: Tulloch et al. have rightly highlighted the need to increase the accessibility of species occurrence data to better support conservation efforts. They present a tree to aid decisions regarding making data publicly available. Their tree is essentially a visual aid to existing protocols. However, we feel that, owing to its failure to explicitly account for likely disagreements among stakeholders throughout the process, the proposed method may inadvertently fuel conservation conflicts.Output Type: Lette

Financial incentives often fail to reconcile agricultural productivity and pro-conservation behavior.

Paying resource users to preserve features of their environment could in theory better align production and conservation goals. We show, however, that across a range of conservation dilemmas, they might not. We conduct a synthesis of dynamic games experiments built around collective action dilemmas in conservation, played across Europe, Africa, and Asia. We find, across this range of dilemmas, that while payments can encourage pro-conservation behavior, they often fail to capitalize on the potential for jointly improving productive and environmental outcomes, highlighting the more nuanced challenge of reconciling livelihoods with conservation goals. We further find production (yield) and the joint production-environment product (i.e., a measure of agricultural production multiplied by a measure of pro-conservation practice) are better preserved in groups that are more educated, more gender diverse and that better represent women. We discuss how the design of incentive programs can better align livelihood and environment goals

Integrating conflict, lobbying, and compliance to predict the sustainability of natural resource use

Acknowledgments: This study received funding from the European Research Council under the European Union’s H2020/ERC grant agreement no.679651 (ConFooBio) to N.B. A.B.D. is supported by a Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellowship. We are grateful to Tim Coulson and E.J. Milner-Gulland for comments on previous versions of this manuscript. All authors conceived the study, developed the underlying theory and software, discussed the results, and wrote the manuscript. J.J.C. carried out the simulations and analyzed thedata.Peer reviewedPublisher PD