Implications of heterogeneous impacts of protected areas on deforestation and poverty

Abstract

Protected areas are a popular policy instrument in the global fight against loss of biodiversity and ecosystem services. However, the effectiveness of protected areas in preventing deforestation, and their impacts on poverty, are not well understood. Recent studies have found that Bolivia's protected-area system, on average, reduced deforestation and poverty. We implement several non-parametric and semi-parametric econometric estimators to characterize the heterogeneity in Bolivia's protected-area impacts on joint deforestation and poverty outcomes across a number of socioeconomic and biophysical moderators. Like previous studies from Costa Rica and Thailand, we find that Bolivia's protected areas are not associated with poverty traps. Our results also indicate that protection did not have a differential impact on indigenous populations. However, results from new multidimensional non-parametric estimators provide evidence that the biophysical characteristics associated with the greatest avoided deforestation are the characteristics associated with the potential for poverty exacerbation from protection. We demonstrate that these results would not be identified using the methods implemented in previous studies. Thus, this study provides valuable practical information on the impacts of Bolivia's protected areas for conservation practitioners and demonstrates methods that are likely to be valuable to researchers interested in better understanding the heterogeneity in conservation impacts.

Impact of protected areas on poverty, extreme poverty, and inequality in Nepal

“…We assessed if PA impacts were moderated by travel time to the nearest tourism hub (PA entrance, major and minor trekking route) and elevation, which affects livelihood choices (greater range of options in the lowlands, including commercial agriculture) and tourism options (safaris in the lowlands, trekking in the mountains). We used partial linear modeling (PLM; Hanauer, 2015;Yatchew, 1998) to assess heterogeneous impacts along the gradients of our moderating factors following methods described in Ferraro et al (2011) and Hanauer and Canavire-Bacarreza (2015). In a first step, we controlled for confounding factors using a linear regression.…”

“…Conservation Letters published by Wiley Periodicals, Inc. that control for this non-random allocation of PAs. Such studies provide increasing evidence that PAs can reduce poverty, albeit with much heterogeneity in effect sizes (Andam, Ferraro, Sims, Healy, & Holland, 2010;Hanauer & Canavire-Bacarreza, 2015;Miranda, Corral, Blackman, Asner, & Lima, 2014;Sims & Alix-Garcia, 2017;Yergeau, Boccanfuso, & Goyette, 2017).…”

Projecting the performance of conservation interventions

“…taxa, matrix permeability and habitability). These variables can mean similar 'treatments', such as the establishment of protected areas, can have substantially different effects in different contexts (Ferraro et al, 2011;Hanauer and Canavire-Bacarreza, 2015). While not all of these variables will be important in any specific context, the basic model implies that there is no variation in mechanisms, moderators, or rival explanations across different proposed conservation interventions or contexts ( Figure B2).…”

Measuring the difference made by conservation initiatives: protected areas and their environmental and social impacts

“…Although the science of protected area mechanisms is in its infancy [23], progress is being made on elucidating the factors that moderate protected area impacts. 1 Several of the studies in this issue show how one can go beyond simply estimating the magnitude of protected area impacts towards characterizing how impacts vary conditional on observable, contextual characteristics such as the habitat's slope and distance to cities or the local communities' gender and religion composition [15,17,19].…”

“…When we attempt to isolate the effects of protected areas on ecological indicators, we must disentangle the effects caused by protected areas from the effects caused by the productivity of the landscapes or seascapes that are typically protected. In both retrospective and prospective studies, the answers to the question about selection identify moderators and mechanisms of protected area impacts (see [17,[19][20][21]23]). The ways in which these factors shape impacts must be elucidated if we are to have a sound evidence base for guiding protected area management.…”