D9a: Conservation economics: Prospects and challenges

Payments for forest conservation programs financially compensate forest owners to maintain and increase the provision of ecosystem services. We examined the additionality of the Socio Bosque Program (SPB) in prevented deforestation based on the establishment of field-level plots within the Ecuadorian Amazon basin region. Forest inventories were complemented with face-to-face landowner surveys to elicit preferences for various conservation contractual arrangements. Inventory data suggest that forests within SPB-enrolled areas exhibited less evidence of degradation. The likelihood of finding a tree species at risk of extinction within forests enrolled in the SBP was 1.8 times that of non-enrolled forests. An experiment conducted with 200 forest owners suggests that opportunities for greater conservation impacts remain if participants were allowed to harvest timber under a strict management plan. Moreover, contracts managed by local municipalities or international NGOs showed stronger preferences  over those managed by centralized institutions. Taking risk of deforestation into consideration and based on stated landowner preferences, greater conservation benefits might be attainable if sustainable timber harvesting is allowed along with long-term conservation agreements.

The Brazilian Amazon has over  60 million ha of public forests not allocated for any specific use. These areas have been register by the Brazilian National Cadaster of Public Forest. However, the lack of allocation of these public forest under some protect area category threatens their integrity. The weak enforcement and governance associated with the availability of these undesignated forest leads to land grabbing and illegal deforestation. The deforestation in these areas represents around 25% of the total annual deforestation in the region. Since these areas are key to maintaining ecosystem services and carbon stock, contributing to climate change mitigation, we applied a prioritization methodology considering environmental, social and economic variables, to identify which of these areas should be allocated as integral protection or sustainable use conservation units. Furthermore, we also estimated the cumulative costs over a 12 year period to allocate all of the public forests to conservation units as been BRL 4.49 billion (approximately USD 1.28 billion). On the other hand, this investment may have a financial return of BRL 5.85 billion (approximately USD 1.67 billion) as result of tourism and harvesting of timber and non-timber products. Additionally it can preserve a carbon stock of 0.4 GtCO2, which would be at risk during the period. By allocating these areas as Conservation Units, we could reduce potential deforestation by 88% in the allocated area.

Large-scale afforestation programs have been attempted worldwide to help improve environmental conditions. Most of these attempts have been unsuccessful for social-political, technical, and/or ecological reasons. However, China’s Three-North Protective Forest Program, the World’s Largest Afforestation Program (TNAP), is still ongoing (1978 to 2050). TNAP was designed to improve environmental conditions over an area of ≈4 million km²(42% of China). Although US $35.2 billion were invested in TNAP during its first 40 years (1978~2017), its rationale and success are still being debated among scientists and in the media. To provide an objective evaluation of TNAP, we systematically conducted a range-wide assessment of it based on remote sensing, field surveys, and statistics. TNAP has produced significant ecological and socio-economic benefits: 71.5% increase in forest coverage, 1.4% improvement incrop yield,61.0% and 14.9% reduction in areas ofsoil erosionand desertification, respectively between 1978 and 2017. TNAP helped 15 million persons out of poverty, provided the jobs for 300 million people, and enhanced the people's awareness of ecological protection. Challenges for TNAP include limited success in desertification control (the 14.9% total reduction almost exclusively limited to light desertification areas), and low coverage of shelterbelts (the ratio of shelterbelt area to farmland area was only 2.4%). Overcoming these challenges during the next 32 years will further enhance the contribution of TNAP, and profoundly influence the policy and practice of environmental protection and improvement in China and worldwide.

Protected areas are an important component of Brazilian environmental policy to preserve forests. Protected areas require community support in order to achieve optimal outcomes, which can be facilitated through a number of policy approaches. Pioneered in Paraná in the early 1990s and then adopted by other states, the Ecological ICMS (ICMS-E) is an example of an ecological fiscal transfer (EFT) policy which attempts to address the trade-offs and opportunity costs associated with protected area regulation. In this presentation we examine versions of the ICMS-E from two states; Paraná and São Paulo. In both cases the ICMS-E provides monetary compensation to local governments that host protected areas within their municipal area of jurisdiction, whilst in Paraná the ICMS-E also promotes and rewards local conservation initiatives. We interviewed 51 state and local stakeholders from Brazilian municipalities located within relatively intact areas of Atlantic rainforest. We show the opportunities and obstacles municipalities have encountered in using the ICMS-E to (1) support local economic development that is aligned with environmental restrictions and (2) promote the cultural wellbeing of traditional communities. The results highlight the importance of the institutional arrangement underpinning the implementation of EFTs, and the necessity to engage with local institutions and communities in order for social, economic and environmental benefits to be realised. As the ICMS-E is now being widely adopted within Brazil and EFTs are being implemented elsewhere, the lessons learned in this case study have wider relevance for policy makers internationally.

Wildlife conservation involves various direct and indirect benefits and costs. The benefits of conservation are often shared by both local and global communities, while most of the direct costs are often borne by local communities. Conservation policies and economic instruments intend to balance such benefits and costs to achieve optimal conservation outcomes. Considering the conservation policies used over-time, this paper aims to examine an array of benefits and costs of conserving wildlife at Nepal’s Chitwan National Park. The paper further draws on aspects of policy evolution and conservation status of targeted species in enhancing conservation benefits while minimising conservation costs. It also highlights the prospects and challenges associated with species conservation where private costs and public benefits are involved.

The obligation of an area located in a property is called Legal Reserve (LR) and in Brazil is given by the Law 12.651 / 2012 which provides for the protection of native vegetation to landowners holding areas greater than four fiscal modules. The main purposes of Legal Reserve are the conservation and restoration of the native flora, in addition the sustainable forest management. In this sense, the objective of this study was to value a forest restoration project destined to LR, with phytoecology of Seasonal Semideciduous Forest, through the approach of pricing of discrete time multiplicative binomial options. The forest assets investment project, located in Botucatu city, State of São Paulo, Brazil, included species of native occurrence that generated income from timber and non-timber products. The cash flow planning horizon was 20 years, time required for RL recovery, discounted by CAPM. Due to uncertain commercial prospects, the forest producer may wait two years to realize the investment. Furthermore, if the investment is executed in the fifteenth year, the forest producer may expand the restored area by 30%. The results show that the probability of the investments being executed after two years was 100%. Moreover, the expansion at the end of the fifteenth year has a 7% probability of being exercised. Considering the options jointly exercised, the project added 90.04% of value to the forest producer, resulting in an expanded net present value of USD4,004.95, corroborating the economic feasibility of the restoration of native flora.

Woodland key habitats (WKHs), is a well-used concept in northern Europe, denoting sites in the forest landscape with particularly high nature conservation values. In Sweden WKHs on private forestland have been inventoried by the governmental Forest Agency since the early 1990ies in order to inform forest owners of valuable biotopes.  Recently, various actors have started to question the WKH concept and its policy implications. To investigate how framing of the WKH concept has changed over time we conducted an media analysis based on collective action frames-theories, which states that actors who wants to promote a change often points out (1) who/what is causing a problem?, (2) who/what is solving a problem?, and (3) who/what is suffering from a problem?. In total, the analysis covered the period 1991-2018 and 294 articles in daily newspaper media framing WKHs. Our results showed that over time WKHs have mostly been framed by governmental agencies and by newspaper journalists as suffering from various forestry practices. However, during the most recent period, WKHs have also been framed as causing problems to private forest owners. This indicates a more polarized debate than previously between actors supporting forests’ biodiversity vs economic values. We conclude that the WKH concept has changed from being a tool informing forest owners of their forest’s biodiversity values to a highly politicized concept frequently debated in media. To fully understand the rationale behind this development, further studies are necessary.

Financing the creation and maintenance of biodiversity conservation areas is a major challenge in times of constraints in public spending. In this context, Payment for Ecosystem Services are considered innovative and effective market approaches to conservation finance. 

We analyzed the objectives, the contents of the negotiated agreement, and the main outcomes of a Payment for Biodiversity Conservation Scheme (ECOPAY Connect) in the Lombardy Region in northern Italy, which brings together Regional Park authorities, timber industry, and private poplar growers as partners involved in complying with the requirements connected to an FSC® (Forest Stewardship Council) certification initiative. This scheme represents a win-win solution and transforms a certification compliance requirement, i.e. the set-aside of the 10% of the productive area for ecological restoration, into an opportunity, where a public-private partnership led to reduction of costs for both partners, and more functional restoration interventions within the park. The scheme now runs by its own, making ECOPAY Connect one of the few functioning PES schemes in Italy and in EU. The scheme was launched with a grant from the Bank Foundation and this partnership is now used as a best practice in many EU projects such as Gestire 2020, an integrated LIFE project by Lombardy Region, and Sincere, a Horizon 2020 project.

A conservação da biodiversidade necessita ser ampliada sem prejudicar a economia e o seu crescimento. Isso poderá ser realizado pelos economistas se eles incorporarem indicadores de biodiversidade apropriados em seus modelos. Adicionalmente, os países devem assegurar que tais indicadores sejam metodologicamente robustos, que as necessidades dos diferentes grupos sociais estejam representadas e que os indicadores sejam os instrumentos ideais para avaliar a política à qual estão atrelados.

Este trabalho propôs que a construção de indicadores de diversidade biológica incorpore os aspectos social (stakeholders) e espacial (escala). Foram analisados qualitativamente as metas e indicadores brasileiros de biodiversidade apresentados nos relatórios nacionais para a Convenção sobre Diversidade Biológica (anos 2011 e 2015), e o conjunto nacional de indicadores do PainelBio (2016). 

 Os resultados apontam que o Brasil não adotou uma boa metodologia para as metas de 2011, com mais da metade das 51 metas não cumpridas, mas vem tentando incorporar as metodologias recomendadas pela CDB a partir do relatório de 2015 e do PainelBio. O avanço é frágil e o país ainda pauta o acompanhamento das metas de maneira qualitativa, carecendo de uma abordagem quantitativa. Outro gargalo identificado foi quanto à rastreabilidade das informações apresentadas nos documentos oficiais. Dessa forma, é preciso avançar para que o processo metodológico de elaboração dessas metas e indicadores seja registrado, compartilhado e disponibilizado de maneira mais transparente e acessível para toda a comunidade, para garantir que a metodologia empregada corresponda às expectativas científicas que se desejam alcançar com os instrumentos de avaliação da biodiversidade.