During the mid-1990s, one of the most ambitious land reforms in recent decades took place in Colombia. The reform recognized collective land rights of 5 million hectares by Afro-Colombian groups, with the dual goals of improving livelihoods and preserving valuable ecosystems. We estimate the impact of this collective land titling program on forest cover using panel data and a difference-in-difference empirical strategy. We find that overall, collective titling significantly reduces deforestation rates, but the effect varies substantially by sub-region.

Empirical assessment of relationships between land use and land cover (LULC) and drinking water chemical treatment cost is lacking in developing countries. This study is conducted to assess the impact of forest and non-forest land cover on water purification chemical costs using panel data collected from eight drinking water treatment plants in Ethiopia for the period of 2002-2014. Forest cover and LULC data were extracted from Global Forest Change and GlobeLand30 datasets, respectively.

Visual artists and graphic designers have rarely communicated with economists. Yet much of applied economics involves comparisons of states of the world that ought to be imagined. Through a simple case study, we discuss methods used in economics to value individual preferences over the environment, and the use of visualizations in these exercises. We pinpoint that it is time for economists to start a constructive dialogue with artists in general and visual artists in particular.

A model of two regions with a common wood market is introduced. Regions may be of two types, according to their forest management regime, namely managed forest plantations (M) and unmanaged open access forests (U). It is found that when regions are of the same type, unilateral climate policy in the forestry sector leads to (positive) carbon leakage. However, when regions are of different types, unilateral climate policy results in negative carbon leakage.

Identifying the spatial patterns and drivers of deforestation is a critical task in geographic research. In addition to mapping deforestation, it’s important to determine the statistical effects of the spatial configuration of tropical landscapes on current deforestation trends. In order to model drivers of deforestation is important to take into account the spatial structure of data (i.e., whether observed deforestation is spatially clustered or not).

Latin America exhibits one of the highest rates of biodiversity and ecosystem services (ES) loss worldwide along with a remarkable asymmetry in the access to ES benefits (ecosystem services inequality, ESI hereafter). The objective of this manuscript is to propose and validate a conceptual model to understand the links between ESI and ecosystem services supply. First, previous ES frameworks were expanded to acknowledge the role of the unequal access to ES on socio-ecological system dynamics.

Despite the importance of naturally available wild pollination ecosystem services in enhancing sub-Saharan African smallholder farms’ productivity, their values to actual farming systems remain unknown. We develop a nationally representative empirical assessment by integrating nationally representative plot level panel data with spatially and temporally matched land cover maps to identify the contribution of wild pollinators to crop revenue.