Implications for Participatory Forest Management and Payments to Communities for Ecosystem Services

• Communities living near Kenya’s forests place a monetary value on conservation.
• Mountain forests are the source of rivers that provide water for agriculture and other “ecosystem services” such as flood control and water purification.
• It is possible for downstream communities that benefit from these ecosystem services to pay the upstream communities to conserve the forests.

Pervasive threats of climate change and land degradation have compounded the inherent low farm productivity problem in sub‐Saharan Africa. Though sustainable agricultural intensification practices have been shown to improve the resilience of farm production in the face of these emerging threats, they suffer low adoption rates typical of any technology adoption in these regions. Recent evidence points to an emergence of large traders in smallholder grain markets of countries in sub‐Saharan Africa.

Based on the household level survey data, the paper makes a projection on China’s household consumption in 2049 with reasonable assumptions of disposable income, demographic structure, urbanization rate and total population in 2049. The results show that at annual income growth rates of 3%, 4% and 5%, China’s total household consumption in 2049 will be 71.0, 97.8 and 133.8 trillion CNY, respectively, 3.1~5.8 times of the total household consumption in 2015.

In urban areas around the world, increasing motorization and growing travel demand make the urban transportation sector an ever-greater contributor to local air pollution and greenhouse gas emissions. The situation is particularly acute in developing countries, where growing metropolitan regions suffer some of the world's highest levels of air pollution.

The significant environmental improvement in China has drawn much research attention in recent years. However, in exploring the factors that lead to pollution reduction, most literature has ignored the slowing economic growth under the ‘New Normal’ of China. This omission could lead to the overestimation of the pollution reduction effects of other factors. In this paper, we estimate the effect of the economic slowdown using a dynamic Computable General Equilibrium model, CHINAGEM. We find that the contribution of the economic slowdown to pollution reduction ranges from 10% to 30%.

An increasing earning gap between rural migrants and urban residents has recently aroused public concern about rising urban poverty asscociated with migration of rural people into Chinese cities. To address the issue, this paper explores the possibility of wage assimilation for rural migrants towards their urban counterparts and its determinants between 1999 and 2009, by applying an economic assimilation model to analyse a repeated cross‐sectional data for seven Chinese cites at the individual level.