Mapping the distribution of the quantity and value of forest benefits to local communities is useful for forest management, when socio-economic and conservation objectives may need to be traded off.

In this paper, a commentary on Samuelson’s 1976 classic, “The Economics of Forestry in an Evolving Society”, Robinson and Albers address the relevance of Samuelson’s paper to tropical forests. Samuelson’s paper focuses on rich country settings where market and governance institutions function well and where forests are managed for timber through rotations.

Patterns of forest cover and forest degradation determine the size and types of ecosystem services forests provide. Particularly in low-income countries, nontimber forest product (NTFP) extraction by rural people, which provides important resources and income to the rural poor, contributes to the level and pattern of forest degradation.

The rapid disruption of tropical forests probably imperils global biodiversity more than any other contemporary phenomenon. With deforestation advancing quickly, protected areas are increasingly becoming final refuges for threatened species and natural ecosystem processes.

However, many protected areas in the tropics are themselves vulnerable to human encroachment and other environmental stresses. As pressures mount, it is vital to know whether existing reserves can sustain their biodiversity.

Using enterprise-level data from China's Northeast-Inner Mongolia state-owned forest area for the year 2004, this paper investigates the technical efficiency of forest product processing mills and the relationship between institutional and managerial practices and efficiency. A two-stage procedure proposed by Simar and Wilson (2007) is adopted. In the first stage, a bootstrapped data envelopment analysis (DEA) model is used to compute the efficiency scores.

Mangroves are among themost threatened and rapidly disappearing natural environments worldwide. In addition to supporting a wide range of other ecological and economic functions, mangroves store considerable carbon. Here, we consider the global economic potential for protecting mangroves based exclusively on their carbon.

Typically both local villagers (“insiders”) and non-locals (“outsiders”) extract products from protected forests even though the activities are illegal. Our paper suggests that, depending on the relative ecological damage caused by each group, budget-constrained forest managers may be able to reduce total forest degradation by legalizing “insider” extraction in return for local villagers involvement in enforcement activities.