We assess the additional forest cover protected by 13 rural communities located in the southern state of Chiapas, Mexico, as a result of the economic incentives received through the country's national program of payments for biodiversity conservation. We use spatially explicit data at the intra-community level to define a credible counterfactual of conservation outcomes. We use covariate-matching specifications associated with spatially explicit variables and difference-in-difference estimators to determine the treatment effect. We estimate that the additional conservation represents between 12 and 14.7 percent of forest area enrolled in the program in comparison to control areas. Despite this high degree of additionality, we also observe lack of compliance in some plots participating in the PES program. This lack of compliance casts doubt on the ability of payments alone to guarantee long-term additionality in context of high deforestation rates, even with an augmented program budget or extension of participation to communities not yet enrolled.
Sanitation remains
a global challenge, both in terms of access to toilet facilities and
resource intensity (e.g., energy consumption) of waste treatment.
Overcoming barriers to universal sanitation coverage and sustainable
resource management requires approaches that manage bodily excreta
within coupled human and natural systems. In recent years, numerous
analytical methods have been developed to understand cross-disciplinary
constraints, opportunities, and trade-offs around sanitation and resource
recovery. However, without a shared language or conceptual framework,
efforts from individual disciplines or geographic contexts may remain
isolated, preventing the accumulation of generalized knowledge. Here,
we develop a version of the social-ecological systems framework modified
for the specific characteristics of bodily excreta. This framework
offers a shared vision for sanitation as a human-derived resource
system, where people are part of the resource cycle. Through sanitation
technologies and management strategies, resources including water,
organics, and nutrients accumulate, transform, and impact human experiences
and natural environments. Within the framework, we establish a multitiered
lexicon of variables, characterized by breadth and depth, to support
harmonized understanding and development of models and analytical
approaches. This framework’s refinement and use will guide
interdisciplinary study around sanitation to identify guiding principles
for sanitation that advance sustainable development at the nature-society
interface.
Panel data are used in almost all subfields of the agricultural economics profession. Furthermore, many research areas have an important spatial dimension. This article discusses some of the recent contributions made in the evolving theoretical and empirical literature on spatial econometric methods for panel data. We then illustrate some of these tools within a climate change application using a hedonic model of farmland values and panel data. Estimates for the model are provided across a range of nonspatial and spatial estimators, including spatial error and spatial lag models with fixed and random effects extensions. Given the importance of location and extensive use of panel data in many subfields of agricultural economics, these recently developed spatial panel methods hold great potential for applied researchers.
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