Costa Rica's Program of Payments
for Environmental Services (Pago de Servicios Ambientales,
PSA) provides a unique opportunity to evaluate direct
payments as a conservation policy tool. This paper reports
evidence on how much more forest has been conserved in Costa
Rica as a result of PSA contracts with landowners. Such
evidence requires estimating a counterfactual outcome: how
much forest would have been preserved if there had been no

The pattern of global land use has
important implications for the world's food and timber
supplies, bioenergy, biodiversity and other eco-system
services. However, the productivity of this resource is
critically dependent on the world's climate, as well as
investments in, and dissemination of improved technology.
This creates massive uncertainty about future land use
requirements which compound the challenge faced by

The growing use of Payments for
Environmental Services (PES) for conservation has fostered a
debate on its effectiveness, but the few efforts to date to
assess the impact of PES programs have been hampered by lack
of data, leading to very divergent results. This paper uses
data from a PES mechanism implemented in Quindío, Colombia,
to examine the impact of PES on land use change. Alone among
all early PES initiatives, the Silvopastoral Project

The effectiveness of conservation
interventions such as Payments for Environmental Services
(PES) is often evaluated, if it is evaluated at all, only at
the completion of the intervention. Since gains achieved by
the intervention may be lost after it ends, even apparently
successful interventions may not result in long-term
conservation benefits, a problem known as that of
permanence. This paper uses a unique dataset to examine the

This report presents the results of a randomized evaluation larger pool of 452 eligible candidates within the 14 CRP
of the impact of the Community Rangers Program 'treatment' communities, 280 such youths were randomly
(CRP), a community-based forest protection program selected to serve as rangers and 172 were assigned to a
implemented in Aceh, Indonesia, in 2011-14. Fauna and control group. Additional observational analysis and data
Flora International (FFt) implemented the CRP with funding collected in the non-CRP treatment Leuser National Park

The major role tropical forests play in
biodiversity and climate change has led the world to search
for effective ways to slow down deforestation. Community
forest management (CFM) is an example of the broader concept
of community-based natural resources management (CBNRM). As
part of the decentralization policy in many countries,
mainly in Africa and Asia, CFM was expected to promote: (i)
a more effective stewardship of the resources by involving

The country’s forest areas occupy 21.7
million ha (approximately 27.6 percent of its total surface
area), and are inhabited by close to 10 percent of its total
population. The forest sector generates a variety of timber
and non-timber products and eco-services. The Turkish
government has put great effort into reforestation and
forest management, increasing the total area of forests. In
their tenth national development plan (2014-2018), the

Climate change is a core development
challenge in Tanzania, and the potential costs of inaction
are significant. Current climate variability (including
extreme events such as droughts and floods), already leads
to major economic costs in mainland Tanzania and in
Zanzibar. Individual annual events have economic costs in
excess of 1 percent of GDP, and occur regularly, reducing
long-term growth and affecting millions of people and

How much do poor rural households rely
on environmental extraction from natural ecosystems? And how
does climate variability impact their livelihoods? This
paper sheds light on these two questions with household
income data from the Poverty and Environment Network
pantropical data set, combined with climate data for the
past three decades. The study finds that extraction of wild
resources (from natural forests, bushlands, fallows, etc.)

This paper investigates the
effectiveness of protected areas in slowing tropical forest
clearing in 64 countries in Asia/Pacific, Africa, and Latin
America for the period 2001-2012. The investigation compares
deforestation rates inside and within 10 kilometers outside
the boundary of protected areas. Annual time series of these
deforestation rates were constructed from recently published
high-resolution data on forest clearing. For 4,028 parks,

This paper examines whether cooperative
behavior by respondents measured as contributions in a
one-shot public goods game correlates with reported
pro-forest collective action behaviors. All the outcomes
analyzed are costly in terms of time, land, or money. The
study finds significant evidence that more cooperative
individuals (or those who believe their group members will
cooperate) engage in collective action behaviors that

The international development community
is increasingly demanding better evidence on the
effectiveness of policies and programs across different
sectors. The forest sector is no exception. Governments and
donor agencies explicitly seek to link investment to proven
impact. Yet the evidence base necessary to inform
interventions in the forest sector that can successfully
enhance the livelihoods of the forest-dependent poor, foster