Although developing countries have established scores of new protected areas over the past three decades, they often amount to little more than “paper parks” that are chronically short of the financial, human, and technical resources needed for effective management. It is not clear whether and how severely under-resourced parks affect deforestation. In principle, they could either stem it by, for example, creating an expectation of future enforcement, or they could spur it by, for example, creating open access regimes.

Biodiversity plays a key role in sustaining the functioning of ecosystems and thus in the provision of ecosystem services. A great deal of biodiversity is to be found in private forests, thus the way in which these forests are managed has major implications for biodiversity.

This paper uses the water-reallocation scheme created within the National Water Act (1998) to analyze the impacts of water policy on farm livelihoods in South Africa. Based on one of the most water stressed catchments in the country, the Olifants river basin, we provide an integrated modeling approach combining water and agricultural modules to investigate the impacts of compulsory licensing and water market on crop production and investment made to improve water use efficiency.

Although protected areas, or “parks”, are among the leading policy tools used to stem tropical deforestation, rigorous evaluations of their effectiveness—that is, evaluations that control for their tendency to be sited in remote areas with relatively little deforestation—have only recently begun to appear. Important open questions concern the link between the stringency of protection and park effectiveness. How do mixed-use parks that allow sustainable extractive activities perform relative to strictly protected parks? And what types of mixed-use management perform best?

This policy brief discusses the whether the  preference of Swedish forestry stakeholders is biodiversity or production goals. Healthy and productive forests benefit us all, but what are the priorities of those directly managing Swedish forests? This brief presents a comparison of the preferences of key stakeholders regarding Swedish forest management and biodiversity protection.

This study presents findings from a systematic comparative research effort to investigate the additionality claims of CDM afforestation projects in Tanzania, Uganda and Moldova.

Using what we refer to as an ex-post comparative baseline approach that accounts for how project financing and background economic conditions evolve over a CDM project’s implementation and crediting periods, we demonstrate that the projects in Uganda and Moldova are very likely to be fully additional while only approximately one-quarter of carbon credits resulting from the Tanzania project are genuine.