Deforestation and forest fragmentation are leading drivers of biodiversity loss. Protected areas have been the leading conservation policy response, yet their scale and scope remain inadequate to meet biodiversity conservation targets. Managed forest concessions increasingly have been recognized as a complement to protected areas in meeting conservation targets.

• Global experience of employment generation in timber plantations shows contrasting outcomes including in terms of rural development, but there are also commonalities such as poor working conditions, seasonality of employment and relatively low labor intensity over large areas compared to other land uses.
• Ethiopia conforms to this pattern, based on a case study of an industrial timber plantation, with low wages and reliance on casual jobs without formal contracts in a rural context of a weak labor market with few employment opportunities.

Migration patterns within tropical forest frontiers are highly complex and multidirectional, with movements to, from, and within these regions likely driven by different macro and micro factors. As such, several different conceptual models have been suggested to explain these dynamics. This paper uses data from a panel survey of households in a frontier region of the western Brazilian Amazon along with “second hand” reports on where people have moved to evaluate these conceptual models.

We use a large unique household panel dataset spanning 16 years to estimate the impacts of three Key Priority Forestry Programs (the KPFPs) in China on household incomes. The programs are the most significant of China's forest policies namely the Sloping Land Conversion Program (the SLCP), the Natural Forest Protection Program (the NFPP), and the Desertification Combating Program around Beijing and Tianjin (the DCBT). A fixed effect model with clustered standard errors is used to identify programs’ impacts based on variation in participation across households and time.

Global ecosystem services are clearly threatened by deforestation associated with human occupation and economic development of the Brazilian Amazon. However, the prognosis for the socioeconomic wellbeing of inhabitants remains unclear. In an empirical regularity that has been termed the boom–bust pattern or the resource curse, the exploitation of natural resources is associated with short-run gains in welfare that dissipate over time.

Agricultural expansion into tropical forests is believed to bring local economic benefits at the expense of global environmental costs. The resulting tension is reflected in Brazilian government policy. The national agrarian reform program has settled farm families in the Amazon region since the 1970s, with the expectation that they will clear forests in order to farm the land. On the other hand, recent Brazilian policy initiatives seek to reduce deforestation to mitigate climate change.

Handbook in Environmental Economics, Volume 4, the latest in this ongoing series, highlights new advances in the field, with this new volume presenting timely chapters on Modeling Ecosystems and Economic Systems, Framing Sustainability Policy Questions: Who Leads – Ecology or Economics?, Valuing Natural Capital Within an Integrated Economic Ecological, Developing Economies, Urbanization, Climate Change and Health, Viewing Environmental Policy Instruments for Domestic and International Perspective, Quasi experimental Estimation of Environmental Policies, Environment Macro, The Rules

We study the impact of Ecuador’s national forest conservation incentives program on reported land conflicts. Data come from a survey of >900 households located within 49 indigenous and Afro-Ecuadorian communities holding communal conservation contracts. We use quasi-experimental methods to test for relationships between program participation and changes in land conflicts. Respondents reported that the program reduced land conflicts when households resided in communities with de facto communal tenure arrangements (vs. de facto semiprivate arrangements).

A number of studies show that payments for ecosystem services (PES) programs contribute to reducing deforestation, but few have measured the impact on ecosystem service provision or compared economic benefits and costs of these programs. We integrate impact evaluation and ecosystem service measurement to examine the effects of PES programs in Veracruz, Mexico. We use quasi-experimental methods to measure the effect of enrolling in PES on forest cover. We link these changes in forest cover to field-calibrated measures of water regulation and carbon storage.