Forest Figures: Ecosystem Services Valuation and Policy Evaluation in Developing Countries

Ferraro, Paul J.; Lawlor, Kathleen; Mullan, Katrina; Pattanayak, Subhrendu K.

doi:10.1093/reep/rer019

Cited by 118 publications

(89 citation statements)

References 85 publications

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“…For example, roads may reduce ARI and diarrhea because they improve access to healthcare, and sustainable-use PAs may increase malaria because they increase exposure to anopheline mosquitos. We caution that our analysis does not consider the full range of benefits or costs of different types of PAs, mining, or roads (18). However, from the perspectives of malaria, ARI, and diarrhea, our results suggest that the public health benefits of strict PAs may offset some of their local costs.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 82%

“…Discussion Increasingly, the popular media and gray literature assert that human health depends on ecosystem health, despite the limited scientific evidence on the health benefits of ecosystem protection. There is even less evidence on the net effects of conservation policies (e.g., PAs) on human health (2,18). We contribute to this thin literature by compiling a rich panel dataset on key diseases and potential contributing factors in the Brazilian Amazon.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Thus, there is renewed attention to the environmental drivers of health (2,6,14,15), which requires stepping back from a purely biomedical and molecular view of health to examine community and environmental drivers using a landscape epidemiology or ecoepidemiology perspective (16,17). The desire to make the case for conservation has led to broad claims regarding the benefits of nature conservation for human health; these claims must be tested and substantiated with rigorous empirical analysis (3,8,(18)(19)(20).…”

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confidence: 99%

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Public health impacts of ecosystem change in the Brazilian Amazon

Bauch¹,

Birkenbach

Pattanayak

et al. 2015

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

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The claim that nature delivers health benefits rests on a thin empirical evidence base. Even less evidence exists on how specific conservation policies affect multiple health outcomes. We address these gaps in knowledge by combining municipal-level panel data on diseases, public health services, climatic factors, demographics, conservation policies, and other drivers of land-use change in the Brazilian Amazon. To fully exploit this dataset, we estimate random-effects and quantile regression models of disease incidence. We find that malaria, acute respiratory infection (ARI), and diarrhea incidence are significantly and negatively correlated with the area under strict environmental protection. Results vary by disease for other types of protected areas (PAs), roads, and mining. The relationships between diseases and land-use change drivers also vary by quantile of the disease distribution. Conservation scenarios based on estimated regression results suggest that malaria, ARI, and diarrhea incidence would be reduced by expanding strict PAs, and malaria could be further reduced by restricting roads and mining. Although these relationships are complex, we conclude that interventions to preserve natural capital can deliver cobenefits by also increasing human (health) capital.infectious diseases | roads | mining | protected areas | Amazon forest

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Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 82%

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

mentioning

confidence: 99%

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Public health impacts of ecosystem change in the Brazilian Amazon

Bauch¹,

Birkenbach

Pattanayak

et al. 2015

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

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“…These measures and values have in turn been used as conservation planning and resource management decision tools (8)(9)(10)(11). The degree to which policies and programs have affected these services and values in the past remains poorly understood, however (12,13). Without an evidence base for the impacts of real policies and programs on ecosystem services, the insights from modeling and valuation are not as informative to decision makers as they could be.…”

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confidence: 99%

“…Scholars in these two literatures-impact evaluation and ecosystem service modeling and monetization-need to collaborate (12). This paper illustrates how impact evaluators have an intellectual architecture for estimating policy and program impacts on human behaviors like land conversion, and also for explaining how these effects are moderated by time-varying and time-invariant (i.e., fixed) site characteristics.…”

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confidence: 99%

Estimating the impacts of conservation on ecosystem services and poverty by integrating modeling and evaluation

Ferraro

Hanauer

Miteva

et al. 2015

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

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Scholars have made great advances in modeling and mapping ecosystem services, and in assigning economic values to these services. This modeling and valuation scholarship is often disconnected from evidence about how actual conservation programs have affected ecosystem services, however. Without a stronger evidence base, decision makers find it difficult to use the insights from modeling and valuation to design effective policies and programs. To strengthen the evidence base, scholars have advanced our understanding of the causal pathways between conservation actions and environmental outcomes, but their studies measure impacts on imperfect proxies for ecosystem services (e.g., avoidance of deforestation). To be useful to decision makers, these impacts must be translated into changes in ecosystem services and values. To illustrate how this translation can be done, we estimated the impacts of protected areas in Brazil, Costa Rica, Indonesia, and Thailand on carbon storage in forests. We found that protected areas in these conservation hotspots have stored at least an additional 1,000 Mt of CO 2 in forests and have delivered ecosystem services worth at least $5 billion. This aggregate impact masks important spatial heterogeneity, however. Moreover, the spatial variability of impacts on carbon storage is the not the same as the spatial variability of impacts on avoided deforestation. These findings lead us to describe a research program that extends our framework to study other ecosystem services, to uncover the mechanisms by which ecosystem protection benefits humans, and to tie cost-benefit analyses to conservation planning so that we can obtain the greatest return on scarce conservation funds.T o inform decision makers about how they can best allocate resources to maintain and enhance ecosystem services, scholars need to develop a better understanding of how policy interventions actually affect the supply of ecosystem services. In the last two decades, scholars have made important advances in defining, measuring, and valuing ecosystem services across time and space (1-7). These measures and values have in turn been used as conservation planning and resource management decision tools (8-11). The degree to which policies and programs have affected these services and values in the past remains poorly understood, however (12, 13). Without an evidence base for the impacts of real policies and programs on ecosystem services, the insights from modeling and valuation are not as informative to decision makers as they could be.A separate and more recent literature focuses on estimating the impacts of conservation policies and programs on environmental and social outcomes (reviewed in refs. 14 and 15). Scholars working in this impact evaluation literature strive to eliminate rival explanations for the empirical patterns observed, so that any correlations between programs and outcomes can be confidently attributed to causal relationships; however, these studies do not estimate impacts on ecosystem services, but rather estima...

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