What drives deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon? Evidence from satellite and socioeconomic data

This paper analyzes the determinants of deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon. From a model of optimal use, it derives and then estimates a deforestation equation on county-level data for the period 1978 to 1988. The data include a deforestation measure from satellite images, which is a great advance in that it allows improved within-county analysis. Evidence exists that: increased road density in a county leads to more deforestation in that county and in neighboring counties; development projects were associated with deforestation in the 1970s but not in the 1980s; greater distance from markets south of the Amazon leads to less deforestation; and better soil quality leads to more deforestation. The results for government provision of credit are mixed across specifications. The population density, although the primary explanatory variable in most previous empirical work, does not have a significant effect when all the variables motivated within the model are included. However, a quadratic specification yields a more robust population result: the first few people entering an empty county have significantly more impact than the same number of people added to a densely populated county. This result suggests the importance of the spatial distribution of population.Environmental Economics&Policies,Wetlands,Climate Change,Banks&Banking Reform,Water Conservation,Environmental Economics&Policies,Climate Change,Energy and Environment,Forestry,Banks&Banking Reform

How to become an adjective when you're not strong (enough)? Emergence of the weak adjectival inflection in (North) Germanic

This article attempts to put a new spin on (the development of) weakly inflected adjectives, with a partic- ular focus on North Germanic, by recycling some traditional ideas. Point of departure is the observation that the Proto-Norse demonstrative hinn had ended up as a functional element in the extended adjectival projection in Old Norse – not as a definite article in the extended nominal projection (an otherwise well- known grammaticalization process). Following the old idea that weak inflection originally involved nominalization, it is argued that weak “adjectives” maintained their nominal status beyond Proto-Gemanic. Thus the weakening demonstrative originally occurs as a determiner in some nominal projection. At some stage prior to Old Norse, this constellation is reanalyzed at the phrasal level, from noun phrase to adjectival phrase, a process in which the demonstrative gets “trapped” inside the adjectival projection and is reanalyzed as adjectival article. This process termed phrasal reanalysis is operative at three levels, (i) lexical: N0 >> A0; (ii) phrasal: NP >> AP; (iii) functional: demonstrative >> adjectival article

Carbon Dynamics and Land-use Choices: Building a Regional-scale Multidisciplinary Model

Policy enabling tropical forests to approach their potential contribution to global-climate-change mitigation requires forecasts of land use and carbon storage on a large scale over long periods. In this paper, we present an integrated modeling methodology that addresses these needs. We model the dynamics of the human land-use system and of C pools contained in each ecosystem, as well as their interactions. The model is national scale, and is currently applied in a preliminary way to Costa Rica using data spanning a period of over fifty years. It combines an ecological process model, parameterized using field and other data, with an economic model, estimated using historical data to ensure a close link to actual behavior. These two models are linked so that ecological conditions affect land-use choices and vice versa. The integrated model predicts land use and its consequences for C storage for policy scenarios. These predictions can be used to create baselines, reward sequestration, and estimate the value in both environmental and economic terms of including C sequestration in tropical forests as part of the efforts to mitigate global climate change. The model can also be used to assess the benefits from costly activities to increase accuracy and thus reduce errors and their societal costs.carbon, sequestration, climate change, land use, modelling

When reality backfires: Product evaluation context and the effectiveness of augmented reality in e‐commerce

Augmented reality (AR) enables consumers to project product holograms into their surrounding real-world context in real time using their mobile devices. Although AR may improve online consumers' product evaluation, AR-deploying retailers give up control over the context in which their products are evaluated. As a result, AR retailers' products might end up being evaluated in unfavorable contexts, such as disorganized rooms. Negative spillover effects from such unfavorable AR contexts onto the perceptions of evaluated products may lead consumers to refrain from purchasing the products. In two online experiments and a controlled field study with a total of 1000 participants, we find that unfavorable AR contexts negatively affect consumers' product-related purchase intention. This relationship is serially mediated by processing disfluency and deteriorating product quality perceptions of consumers. The negative contextual effects are mitigated if the product under evaluation is of unique design and thus more conceptually fluent or if the AR context becomes less perceptually salient and thus the product more perceptually fluent. We discuss diminished reality and facilitated product comparisons via AR as potential countermeasures for AR retailers and provide suggestions for future research

Tropical Forest Protection, Uncertainty, and the Environmental Integrity of Carbon Mitigation Policies

Tropical forests are estimated to release approximately 1.7 PgC per year as a result of deforestation. Avoiding tropical deforestation could potentially play a significant role in carbon mitigation over the next 50 years if not longer. Many policymakers and negotiators are skeptical of our ability to reduce deforestation effectively. They fear that if credits for avoided deforestation are allowed to replace fossil fuel emission reductions for compliance with Kyoto, the environment will suffer because the credits will not reflect truly additional carbon storage. This paper considers the nature of the uncertainties involved in estimating carbon stocks and predicting deforestation. We build an empirically based stochastic model that combines data from field ecology, geographical information system (GIS) data from satellite imagery, economic analysis and ecological process modeling to simulate the effects of these uncertainties on the environmental integrity of credits for avoided deforestation. We find that land use change, and hence additionality of carbon, is extremely hard to predict accurately and errors in the numbers of credits given for avoiding deforestation are likely to be very large. We also find that errors in estimation of carbon storage could be large and could have significant impacts. We find that in Costa Rica, nearly 42% of all the loss of environmental integrity that would arise from poor carbon estimates arises in one life zone, tropical wet. This suggests that research effort might be focused in this life zone.climate, economics, carbon sequestration, uncertainty, policy, tropics

Tropical Forest Protection, Uncertainty, and the Environmental Integrity of Carbon Mitigation Policies

Tropical forests are estimated to release approximately 1.7 PgC per year as a result of deforestation. Avoiding tropical deforestation could potentially play a significant role in carbon mitigation over the next 50 years if not longer. Many policymakers and negotiators are skeptical of our ability to reduce deforestation effectively. They fear that if credits for avoided deforestation are allowed to replace fossil fuel emission reductions for compliance with Kyoto, the environment will suffer because the credits will not reflect truly additional carbon storage. This paper considers the nature of the uncertainties involved in estimating carbon stocks and predicting deforestation. We build an empirically based stochastic model that combines data from field ecology, geographical information system (GIS) data from satellite imagery, economic analysis and ecological process modeling to simulate the effects of these uncertainties on the environmental integrity of credits for avoided deforestation. We find that land use change, and hence additionality of carbon, is extremely hard to predict accurately and errors in the numbers of credits given for avoiding deforestation are likely to be very large. We also find that errors in estimation of carbon storage could be large and could have significant impacts. We find that in Costa Rica, nearly 42% of all the loss of environmental integrity that would arise from poor carbon estimates arises in one life zone, tropical wet. This suggests that research effort might be focused in this life zone.climate, economics, carbon sequestration, uncertainty, policy, tropics

Economic growth and the environment: What can we learn from household data?

The fuel-use decisions of households in developing economies, because they directly influence the level of indoor air quality that these households enjoy (with its attendant health effects), provide a natural arena for empirically assessing latent preferences towards the environment and how these evolve with increases in income. Such an assessment is critical for a better understanding of the likely effects of aggregate economic growth on the environment. Using household data from Pakistan we estimate Engel curves for traditional (dirty) and modern (clean) fuels. Our results provide empirical support for the household choice framework developed in Pfaff, Chaudhuri and Nye (2002a), which suggests that even if environmental quality is a normal good, non-monotonic environmental Engel curves can arise. Under plausible assumptions about the emissions implied by fuel use, our estimates yield an inverted-U relationship between indoor air pollution and income, mirroring the environmental Kuznets curves that have been documented using aggregate data. We then demonstrate, through a simple voting model, that this household-choice framework can generate aggregate EKCs even in a multi-agent setting with heterogeneous households and purely external environmental effects

Carbon Dynamics and Land-Use Choices: Building a Regional-Scale Multidisciplinary Model

Policy enabling tropical forests to approach their potential contribution to global-climate-change mitigation requires forecasts of land use and carbon storage on a large scale over long periods. In this paper, we present an integrated modeling methodology that addresses these needs. We model the dynamics of the human land-use system and of C pools contained in each ecosystem, as well as their interactions. The model is national scale, and is currently applied in a preliminary way to Costa Rica using data spanning a period of over fifty years. It combines an ecological process model, parameterized using field and other data, with an economic model, estimated using historical data to ensure a close link to actual behavior. These two models are linked so that ecological conditions affect land-use choices and vice versa. The integrated model predicts land use and its consequences for C storage for policy scenarios. These predictions can be used to create baselines, reward sequestration, and estimate the value in both environmental and economic terms of including C sequestration in tropical forests as part of the efforts to mitigate global climate change. The model can also be used to assess the benefits from costly activities to increase accuracy and thus reduce errors and their societal costs.carbon, sequestration, climate change, land use, modelling

A Carbon Sequestration Supply Function and Development of Feasible Clean Development Mechanism Rules for Tropical Forest Carbon Sinks

With the rise in importance of global climate change, society is actively exploring the possibility of using forest ecosystems as a carbon sink. Tropical forests may offer over two-third of such opportunities. The protection of tropical forests could offset global fossil fuel C emissions and reduce the cost of emissions limitations set in Kyoto, and certified emissions credits (CERs) under the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) established in Kyoto will likely incorporate tropical forest sinks within efforts to meet emissions targets. While this could in principle result in significant economic and sequestration benefits, actual evidence on tropical C sinks is sparse. However, society must soon make key decisions concerning tropical forest sinks in the CDM. (Physical and Economic Factors economics land Use choices ecology Carbon Implications). The first major goal of our project is to estimate how much C sequestration will be generated in Costa Rica in response to any given monetary reward for C sequestration. Our advances in the ecological and economic components will be coupled to produce our first integrated output, an estimated supply or, equivalently, cost function for C sequestration (i.e. a relationship between the C reqard and the C sequestration supplied by land users). Our estimated function will itself answer policy questions about the effects of C payments, and will provide a basis for estimating the value that accrues globally and to individual countries from using C trading within the efforts to implement emissions limitations. It can also be plugged into integrated assessment models. Our advances in the economic component start with excellent existing GIS database on land use and land cover, and on the factors expected to affect land use choices. We will extend both of these types of data sets, in particular extending land-cover information back in time, and adding improved data on land returns. Next, we will both apply and extend the frontier of economic, observationally-based modeling of land use to provide a map from key factors to land choices. On the ecological side, our advances start with systematic and comprehensive measurement of above ground and soil C present within the range of forest ecosystems of Costa Rica as well as the C dynamics within land-use gradients of each of those systems (e.g., pastures, croplands, and secondary forests of varying ages). With this and existing data, we will calibrate and verify both process-based and empirically-based ecological models that generate C predictions of varying complexity. This provides a map to C stocks from land use choices within different ecosystem. Our second goal is to contribute to the effective design of the rules that allow C sequestration in tropical locations to replace emissions reductions in developed countries. Our analyses will provide the necessary information for the baselines that permit CERs to be defined, and a C market to function. We will also perform integrated sensitivity analyses to determine whether simplified versions of our disciplinary and integrated models maintain sufficient accuracy. Sufficient accuracy will ensure the sequestration outcomes envisioned, while greater simplicity which translates to lower costs of participation in trading, will stimulate further participation, lowering costs and raising the efficiency of implementation of the Kyoto emissions limitations

Household Production, the Bundling of Services and Degradation, and Non-monotonic Environmental Engel Curves

In this paper, we step back from the literature on "environmental Kuznets curves" (inverted-U relationships at the aggregate level between various indicators of environmental degradation and per-capita income) to consider one possible component of such relationships, i.e. the link between household income and household choices that impact upon the environment. Our approach is distinguished by explicit modeling of a household -level mechanism linking income to changes in environmental quality. Two facts are emphasized: (1) a household can not directly purchase environmental quality; and (2) a household starts with a positive endowment of environmental quality, which is degraded through consumption. We propose a household production model, in which households purchase marketed commodities that bundle a "good", non-environmental services, with a "bad" environmental degradation. We show that even if the environment is a normal good, household substitution towards less environmentally degrading marketed commodities, combined with natural constraints on the household's shifts between household income and environmental quality, i.e. a non-monotonic environmental Engel curve