We examine the role of risk and time preferences in how forest owners respond to forest certification. We test hypotheses from a two-period harvest model derived from prospect theory in the context of Fujian, China, where new forest certification started in 2003. Using survey and field experiment data, we find that certification resulted in reduced harvesting, and the effect was larger for households who are more risk averse and exhibited distorted probability weighting.

Watershed management is a complex activity with constraints on funding and human
resources in many parts of the world, and there is a need for global effort to identify
strategies that can work. To complement regulatory approaches, attention is now also being
given to market-based incentives because of their potential cost-effectiveness. This study
seeks to provide impetus to the use of the most successful market-based incentives to
promote sustainable watershed practices through strengthening and increasing direct participation

Globally, there is an increasing level of funding targeted to pay farmers and rural communities for the provision of ecosystem services, for example through Payments for Ecosystem or Environmental Services (PES) schemes and pilots for Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and forest Degradation, and maintaining or enhancing forest carbon stocks (REDD +).

Promotion and supporting the adoption of land management and conservation technologies (LMCTs) among poor farming households has been considered to improve crop yields as well as production technical efficiency (TE). This article compares production efficiency between adopters and nonadopters of LMCTs in Tanzania. Using national panel data, the study applied stochastic frontier model to estimate the TE of adopters and nonadopters. The findings show that adopters of LMCTs had a relatively significantly higher TE (0.73) than their nonadopter counterparts (0.69).

In the tropics, some agricultural lands are abandoned for economic or technical reasons, leading to the recovery of woody vegetation. Our research aimed to identify the main drivers of spontaneous recovery of vegetation in a basin located in the Colombian Andes. This was done by combining spatially explicit environmental and socioeconomic variables at landscape (e.g. distances to human settlements, to roads, and to forests and mean annual precipitation) and local scales (e.g. depth of the organic layer, soil bulk density, and canopy openness).

Restoration of degraded and depleted mangrove habitats and planting of mangroves over coastal mudflats is happening at many places, but there are few studies that evaluate the flow of ecosystem services from these regenerated ecosystems. The state of Gujarat in Western India has planted thousands of hectares of mangroves over the coastal mudflats and, today, the state’s mangrove cover is nearly double that in the 1930s. However, these mangroves have limiting features: for example, these are mostly single-species, Avicenna marina, and are sparse, and lack freshwater supply.