REDD+ (Reduced Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation) is a form of payment for ecosystem services (a voluntary transaction in which a buyer makes a payment to a seller conditional on the ecosystem providing some service, such as carbon storage) aimed at decreasing carbon emissions from conversion of forest to farm land and unsustainable harvesting of forest resources in lower-income countries.

REDD + is one of the tools under development to mitigate climate change, but it is not yet clear how to appropriately bring in the approximately 25 per cent of developing country forests that are managed by communities. Drawing on the economics of collective action literature, the authors attempt to shed light on whether forest collective action itself sequesters carbon.

We estimate the effects on deforestation that have resulted from policy interactions between parks and payments and between park buffers and payments in Costa Rica between 2000 and 2005. We show that the characteristics of the areas where protected and unprotected lands are located differ significantly. Additionally, we find that land characteristics of each of the policies and of the places where they interact also differ significantly. To adequately estimate the effects of the policies and their interactions, we use matching methods.

This study looks into the effect of resource collection (fuelwood collection and fetching water) on child education using data collected from rural Ethiopia. We find that, in general, natural resource scarcity contributes to child illiteracy by increasing the work burden on children in rural Ethiopia. In particular, children’s participation in fetching water is found to be one of the most important factors reducing children’s ability to read and write. There is greater child literacy when household heads have more education and when the family lives near a school.