Highlights:
We analyze deforestation outcomes and equity implications of a two-year interruption in forest PES in Ecuador’s Amazon.
Quasi-exp. tests show that without payment, deforestation resumed on enrolled properties situated near high defor pressure.
Where deforestation pressures were low, enrolled properties continued to conserve more than non-enrolled properties.
Focus groups and interviews revealed enrolled landowners lacked information and their contract terms were imbalanced.
Equity, transparency, funding, and trust are essential for the long-term viability of incentive-based conservation.
In this paper, we present some experience of using the concurrent functional language Erlang to implement a distributed video-on-demand server. For performance reasons, the server is deployed in a cheap cluster made from off-the-shelf components. The demanding system requirements, in addition to the complex and ever-changing domain, suggested a highly flexible and scalable architecture as well as a quite sophisticated control software. Functional programming played a key role in the development, allowing us to identify functional abstractions throughout the system. Using these building blocks, large configurations can be defined using functional and process composition, reducing the effort spent on adapting the system to the frequent changes in requirements. The server evolved from a prototype that was the result of a project supported by a regional cable company, and it is currently being used to provide services for real-world users. Despite our initial concerns, efficiency has not been a major issue.
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