Most of the literature on the causes of tropical deforestation has focused on the proximate and distal causes. However, research exploring the psychological drivers of deforestation, i.e., motivations, is still scant despite being crucial to understand the processes of land-use change and individual decision making within social-ecological systems. We studied the combined effect of structural and individual causes of deforestation, with particular emphasis on motivations, for a sample of rural households in Colombia’s foremost tropical deforestation frontier.

Payments for Ecosystem Services (PES) schemes incentivise landowners to maintain, restore or enhance ecosystem services. Currently, there are more than 550 active PES programmes worldwide, expected to support conservation efforts and, ideally, to also reduce rural poverty. In this article we explore the discourses that underpin PES debates and practice in Colombia, a late-comer to the PES agenda in Latin-America. Informed by interviews with PES actors and Q-methodology (n = 41), we identify three PES discourses: conservation conduit, contextual conservation, and inconvenient conservation.

Payments for environmental services (PES) constitute a growing approach to achieve the sustainability of ecosystems and the benefits they provide to people. However, informal tenure and lack of capacity to enforce property rights impede implementation of PES initiatives. Such challenges are common for local communities in coastal and marine areas who overexploit Common-Pool Resources (CPR) under open access. Assigning property rights to organized users has been implemented as a solution, transforming a public good into a club good.

El objetivo del presente artículo es proponer una reflexión que contribuya a una mejor y más precisa comprensión de lo que implica la formación en competencias ciudadanas según lo evaluado en las Pruebas Saber. En la primera sección se reflexionará en torno a la función primordial en el orden axiológico político que tienen los valores y los principios constitucionales en la Carta política colombiana. En la segunda, se expondrán los diversos valores y principios constitucionales que deben servir de piso conceptual para el ejercicio pleno de la ciudadanía democrática.

In S. Lele, S. Brondizio, J. Byrne, G. Mace, J. Martinez-Alier (Eds.), Rethinking environmentalism: linking justice, sustainability and diversity. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. pp.251-286.

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.