The growth of traditional crops could be a primary resource for adapting to climate change and strengthening agrosystems’ resilience. However, these crops tend to be replaced by non-traditional crops with higher productivity, higher market values, and higher short-term income. In this context, smallholders face trade-offs between maximizing short-term income and ensuring resilience to face likely future climate adversities. The economic assessment of such trade-offs has been commonly neglected in the literature.

We evaluate the direct and indirect effects of an environmental educational program with value-laded content on children's and parents' knowledge, attitudes and practices regarding the consumption and disposal of plastics. We do this using a randomized field experiment targeting fourth-grade children in Chile. The educational program had a sizeable and a positive impact on children’ knowledge, attitudes, and practices, but no effect on parents' behavior.

Summary. Chile has established unique marine resource user rights to reduce resource over-exploitation and expand economic opportunities in coastal areas. These rights sometimes overlap, so that one household might be involved in more than one activity, and also leave out some people who might want to participate.

Background 

Chile has a 6,345 km long coastline with a productive marine ecosystem. Coastal communities depend heavily on fish resources for their livelihood but resource depletion threatens those livelihoods. Local people have deep roots in their communities and lifestyles, which limits their willingness to change their work to non-marine activities. The development of small-scale aquaculture has been proposed as a means to generate new income opportunities. 

Policy lessons