In March 2021, the United Nations Statistical Commission took a major step toward moving beyond traditional measures of economic well-being by officially approving a framework for ecosystem accounting
Connecting gender equality and biodiversity - for sustainable societies Welcome to a webinar on how to promote gender-transformative solutions for addressing biodiversity loss and climate change. Date…
Implications for Participatory Forest Management and Payments to Communities for Ecosystem Services
Forest ecosystem services are critical for human well-being as well as the functioning and growth of economies. However, despite the growing demand for these services, they are hardly given due consideration in public policy formulation. The values attached to these services by local communities in developing countries are also generally unknown. Using a case study of the Mau forest conservancy in Kenya, this study applied choice experiment techniques to estimate the value attached to salient forest ecosystem services by forest-adjacent communities.
Highlights
• Farmers would rather receive compensation for soil and water conservation works than biodiversity.
• Significant costs can be shared by farmers for forest conservation.
• Investments in forestland create incentives for farmers to sustainably use forests.
• Accounting for heterogeneity allows better estimation of willingness to accept.
On 30 March (3:30pm-5:30pm CEST), join the GGKP and Economic Statistics Working Group (ESWG) for the first session in a series of seminars on the “missing capitals”—assets such as natural, human and…
This paper focuses on whether the provision of landless forest-adjacent communities with options to grow appropriate food crops inside forest reserves during early stages of reforestation programmes enable vertical transition of low income households and conserves forests. We consider the welfare and environmental impact of a unique incentive scheme known as the Plantation Establishment and Livelihood Improvement Scheme (PELIS) in Kenya. PELIS was aimed at deepening community participation in forestry, and improving the economic livelihoods of adjacent communities.
The degradation of any ecosystem services (ES) and the benefits human being enjoy from nature freely involve multifaceted processes such as those in-built environment.
Rangeland conditions in the Lesotho highland dam catchment areas is important for local livelihoods and regional water supply. We investigated changes in land cover and condition from 1991 (before construction) to 2013, using Landsat imagery. The Normalised Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) decreased in the catchment areas, while increasing within two protected areas. NDVI decreases were greatest close to the dams and in the high altitude summer grazing areas.
It is commonly asserted that the successful management of common property resources (CPR), and by extension, the provision of public goods such as biodiversity and carbon, requires the devolution of control to local communities. However, where trust in community institutions is low, the intrinsic motivation to co-operate may be diminished. In this study, we carried out surveys and framed field experiments on the introduction of payments for ecosystem services (PES) to Namibia’s communal conservancies, established under the community-based natural resource management (CBNRM) programme.