Yes, there will be magic in the air at the EfD Annual Meeting. The EfD Director Gunnar Köhlin explains why he and others are looking forward to it so much and what will be on the agenda at the biggest environmental economics conference in the Global South that starts on Friday, November 22 in Bogota.
EfD aims to support a new generation of engaged researchers based in the Global South. In this magazine you will find stories of the work carried out at our EfD centers across the world.
In most of research and development projects there’s a capacity building component, but are these efforts effective? EfD researchers conducted a study that shows that capacity building workshops had no impact on behavior.
This paper analyzed and mapped the impact of built environment (BE) on socio-ecological services along Dar es Salaam metropolitan coastline. In the period of 1995-2016, burgeoning population exacerbated high rate of construction processes and activities. Such anthropic initiatives affect the benefits and values delivered by landscape wetlands, estuaries, beach areas, open space and greenery patches in Dar es Salaam coastline.
This paper examines technical efficiency in farming activities and its implication on forest conservation in Kilosa District. The empirical analysis is based on data collected from 301 households selected randomly from five villages in Kilosa district, of which three villages were under the REDD+ project. Two empirical models were estimated: stochastic frontier Translog production function, and forest resources extraction model.
The Tanzanian component of the VALOR Project (2014-2018) studied quality factors, traits and conditions with potential to increase value of agricultural products in Tanzania through Geographical Indication (GI) protection, by recognizing territory specific (origin) products stewarded by smallholder. This policy brief summarises the key findings on policy option flowing from the research.
Parks and nature reserves created for conservation often become forest islands in a matrix of other land uses. Their species populations often decline due to this forest fragmentation. There is increasing evidence that conservation outside of reserves is required to slow biodiversity loss. This evidence, coupled with the species decline due to fragmentation, implies that conservation policies require a landscape perspective that includes the land in between protected areas. In low-income countries, however, these “matrix” areas often support rural people’s livelihoods.
This study examines the effect of long-term resource scarcity on cooperation, measured by both the irrigation management practices and a lab-in-the-field experiment. We find that greater water scarcity not only leads to better irrigation management practices and outcomes, but also fosters a stronger norm of cooperation among villagers. Our findings imply that, when facing the pressure of increasing scarcity, it is possible for local people to cooperate and provide effective collective action in resource management.
*Accepted by Land Economics
Although field experimental methods are the workhorse of researchers interested in risk preferences, practitioners find surveys easier to implement. This paper compares results from experimental versus survey-based methods to elicit farmers’ risk attitudes, in context-free and context-specific decision settings. We then explore how the different survey estimates of risk preferences relate to real-life farming choices in a population of coffee farmers in Costa Rica.
The overarching purpose of this discussion paper is to provide a starting point for consideration of the implications of changing households’ access to forests and forest products and to changing management of lands outside of reserves. We study five communities located in and around the Amani Nature Reserve and the Nilo Forest Reserve, within the broader landscape of the biodiversity hot spot of Tanzania’s Eastern Arc, the East and West Usambara Mountains.
In the period 2015-2018, the City of Cape Town experienced a sustained drought that eventually reduced the city’s usable reserves to 10% of capacity. Fortunately, there were individual water meters in many homes, and as part of the city’s response to the water crisis, it was able to implement increasingly stringent water restrictions, using both price (higher water tariffs) and quantity (lower water pressure and legislated constraints on daily use by households).
In India, role of women as farm managers has been veiled behind image of men as primary decision makers on farms. Data shows that approximately 8% farm households had women farm managers in India in 2004, and this number increased to 11% in 2011. This rising phenomenon of farm management by women begets an in depth understanding about these farms, including, differentials in productivity levels across men and women managers. This paper uses three measures to capture productivity – production value, profit value and crop specific yields.