The Political Economy of Deforestation in the Tropics*

Burgess, Robin; Hansen, Matthew C.; Olken, Benjamin A.; Potapov, Peter; Sieber, Stefanie

doi:10.1093/qje/qjs034

Cited by 323 publications

(98 citation statements)

References 32 publications

(32 reference statements)

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“…The same phenomenon is also associated with changes in governmental and corporate leadership when concession maps are commonly redrawn and previous harvest plans are disregarded. Furthermore, in anticipation of unfavorable treatment by newly installed governments, logging companies often harvest as much timber as possible prior to or during elections (Burgess et al, 2012). Future climate agreements should include binding agreements that validated projects adopting RIL shall not be interrupted before the end of a harvest cycle.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Sustainable Management of Tropical Forests Can Reduce Carbon Emissions and Stabilize Timber Production

Sasaki

Asner

Pan

et al. 2016

Front. Environ. Sci.

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HIGHLIGHTS• About 500 million hectares of tropical forests have been degraded due primarily to overexploitation • Preventing premature re-entry into harvested areas can retain up to 34% of carbon stocks in the forests • Adoption of reduced-impact logging and wood processing technologies (RIL+) along with financial incentives can reduce forest fires, forest degradation, maintain timber production, and retain carbon stocks • About US$1.8 Mg CO −1 2 or US$2 billion year −1 is needed for the adoption of RIL+ for the whole tropical production forests.The REDD+ scheme of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change has provided opportunities to manage tropical forests for timber production and carbon emission reductions. To determine the appropriate logging techniques, we analyzed potential timber production and carbon emission reductions under two logging techniques over a 40-year period of selective logging. We found that use of reduced-impact logging (RIL) techniques alone in tropical production forests (PdF) could reduce carbon emissions equivalent to 29-50% of net emissions from tropical deforestation and land use change, while also supplying 45% of global round-wood demand. Adopting RIL plus other improvements (RIL+) in forest management (adopting forest certification and DNA timber tracking to prevent illegal logging) and wood conversion practices (adopting technology to increase recovery of sawn wood), would result in increasing long-term carbon storage in sawn-wood and reduce logging-induced fire-prone wood wastes by 14-184%. For this to happen, about US$2 billion or $1.86 per Mg CO 2 in financial Sasaki et al. Sustainable Management of Tropical Forests incentives are needed annually for parties to adopt RIL+ and to prevent premature re-entry logging. Our findings suggest that future climate policies should explicitly include RIL+ to satisfy the "sustainable management of forests" proviso in the REDD+ scheme, and also count carbon in wood products as eligible credits for trading.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Sustainable Management of Tropical Forests Can Reduce Carbon Emissions and Stabilize Timber Production

Sasaki

Asner

Pan

et al. 2016

Front. Environ. Sci.

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“…If such devolution means an end to access to resources outside the district, then local authorities may find it necessary to open up natural resources, such as forests, to exploitation in order to satisfy material needs. Burgess et al (2012) found this to be the case as new districts were formed as part of the decentralization process in Indonesia. A recent example comes with the creation of the new province, North Kalimantan, in Borneo, Indonesia.…”

Section: Unintended Consequences and Moderating Factors For Dfmmentioning

confidence: 99%

Effects of decentralized forest management (DFM) on deforestation and poverty in low‐ and middle‐income countries: a systematic review

Samii

2014

Campbell Systematic Reviews

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Decentralized forest management programs reduce deforestation rates, although the effects may be modest. More research is needed to assess whether such programs reduce the income of poor households. Proponents of decentralized forest management programs suggest that such programs can contribute to both environmental and poverty reduction outcomes. This review showed that little research has been conducted on the poverty reduction benefits of such programs, and no studies have jointly evaluated both conservation and poverty outcomes. Research is also lacking in the countries where decentralised forest management has the most potential, such as Indonesia and Brazil. Abstract We conducted a systematic review of studies on the impact of decentralized forest management (DFM) on deforestation and poverty in developing countries. The review is motivated by debates over whether the pursuits of conservation and poverty reduction in developing countries tend to conflict or whether they might be complementary. A search for rigorous evaluation studies identified eleven quantitative and nine associated qualitative evaluation studies on DFM. The methodological rigor of these studies varied widely, meaning that the evidence base for the impact of DFM policies is limited in both quantity and quality. Given the evidence available, we find little reason for optimism about the potential for current DFM approaches to achieve both conservation and poverty reduction benefits jointly. We call for the production of much better impact studies, employing randomized field experiments when possible, to assess whether the apparent incompatibility of conservation and poverty reduction might be overcome through programming innovations. Executive summary BACKGROUNDNatural forest preservation in the tropics, and thus in developing countries, must be an element of any effective effort to manage climate change. Forests serve as natural carbon sinks, which help to mitigate the effect of other carbon emissions. However, forest cover is being reduced and it is estimated that deforestation is responsible for 10–17 per cent of global carbon emissions. Since 2007, governments have coordinated conservation efforts under the Reducing Emissions through Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD+) initiative, which has led to the implementation of various programs designed to reduce the amount of forested land converted to other purposes. Decentralized forest management (DFM) is one approach to forest management which has been widely implemented to reduce deforestation in developing countries. DFM programs relocate decision‐making authority on forest use in the direction of forest communities, rather than central government actors.While the primary goal of reducing deforestation is clear, the policy and academic literature debates the extent to which DFM programs in developing countries should incorporate goals of poverty reduction. Some argue that the targeting of poverty goals will undermine conservation effectiveness (e.g. because behavioral change among...

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“…For instance, consistent with this paper's findings, Rasul and Rogger (2013) report significant gains from providing Nigerian bureaucrats autonomy in decision-making. Other papers note, to the contrary, bureaucrats and politicians may misuse discretion in environmental regulation (Burgess, Hansen, Olken, Potapov, and Sieber (2012), Jia (2014)). 7 The GPCB follows a government classification for plants based on their reported scale of capital investment, with small scale being investment less than INR 50m ($1 million), medium, INR 50-100m ($1-2 million), plants were inspected at less than the prescribed rate.…”

Section: Context: Regulation Of Industrial Pollution In Indiamentioning

confidence: 99%

The Value of Regulatory Discretion: Estimates From Environmental Inspections in India

Duflo¹,

Greenstone²,

Pande³

et al. 2018

Econometrica

143

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High pollution persists in many developing countries despite strict environmental rules. We use a field experiment and a structural model to study how plant emission standards are enforced. In collaboration with an Indian environmental regulator, we experimentally doubled the rate of inspection for treatment plants and required that the extra inspections be assigned randomly. We find that treatment plants only slightly increased compliance. We hypothesize that this weak effect is due to poor targeting, since the random inspections in the treatment found fewer extreme violators than the regulator's own discretionary inspections. To unbundle the roles of extra inspections and the removal of discretion over what plants to target, we set out a model of environmental regulation where the regulator targets inspections, based on a signal of pollution, to maximize plant abatement. Using the experiment to identify key parameters of the model, we find that the regulator aggressively targets its discretionary inspections, to the degree that half of the plants receive fewer than one inspection per year, while plants expected to be the dirtiest may receive ten. Counterfactual simulations show that discretion in targeting helps enforcement: inspections that the regulator assigns cause three times more abatement than would the same number of randomly assigned inspections. Nonetheless, we find that the regulator's information on plant pollution is poor, and improvements in monitoring would reduce emissions.

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The Political Economy of Deforestation in the Tropics*

Cited by 323 publications

References 32 publications

Sustainable Management of Tropical Forests Can Reduce Carbon Emissions and Stabilize Timber Production

Sustainable Management of Tropical Forests Can Reduce Carbon Emissions and Stabilize Timber Production

Effects of decentralized forest management (DFM) on deforestation and poverty in low‐ and middle‐income countries: a systematic review

The Value of Regulatory Discretion: Estimates From Environmental Inspections in India

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