This article reports the results of a comparative study conducted in China, the Philippines, Thailand and Vietnam to assess households' willingness to pay for marine turtle conservation and the potential to mobilize funds. Results show that imposing even a modest mandatory surcharge on residential electricity bills would not pass a referendum. This suggests that many people place a low priority on marine turtle conservation compared to other public policy issues. Nevertheless, there is some potential for voluntary contributions, though mobilizing these also presents problems.

Participation of local communities in forest management decision-making has been promoted as a mechanism of improving livelihoods and forest conditions, yet the level of participation in many programs remains low. Using data from a cross-sectional survey of 924 forest-dependent households in Western Kenya, we examine the factors that support or constrain forest dependent people's participation in a Participatory Forest Management (PFM) program.

Abstract

Forr a growing number of countries in Africa the discovery and exploitation of natural resources is a great opportunity, but one accompanied by considerable risks. Countries dependent on oil, gas, and mining have tended to have weaker long-run growth, higher rates of poverty, and greater income inequality than less resource-abundant economies. For these resource producing economies relative prices make it more difficult to diversify into activities outside of the resource sector, limiting structural change. 

Droughts and floods are some of the major climatic hazards in the semi-arid areas of Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). Climate change affects the periodicity and severity of such hazards, and eventually the well-being of many rural communities in the region, including semi-arid Ghana. Enhancing the resilience of local communities to droughts and floods would be a necessary step to meet different national development priorities. The aim of this chapter is to assess the perceived community resilience to recurrent floods and droughts induced by climate change.

We investigate the effect of the informal sector and a range of governance indicators on both global and local pollutants for a panel of 58 countries during 1996–2011. The analysis employs a fixed effects-instrumental variable generalized method of moments approach. We find that the size of the informal sector has a significant impact on environmental quality, which is conditional on the level of economic development.

Abstract