To ensure food security among rural communities under a changing climate, policymakers need information on the prevalence and determinants of food insecurity, the role of extreme weather events in exacerbating food insecurity, and the strategies that farmers use to cope with food insecurity. Using household surveys in Guatemala and Honduras, we explore the prevalence of food insecurity among smallholder farmers on both a recurrent (seasonal) and episodic (resulting from extreme weather events) basis, analyze the factors associated with both types of food insecurity, and document farmer coping strategies. Of the 439 households surveyed, 56% experienced recurrent food insecurity, 36% experienced episodic food insecurity due to extreme weather events, and 24% experienced both types. Food insecurity among smallholder farmers was correlated with sociodemographic factors (e.g., age, education, migration) and asset ownership. The factors affecting food insecurity differed between type and prevalence of food insecurity. Our results highlight the urgent need for policies and programs to help smallholder farmers improve their overall food security and resilience to extreme weather shocks. Such policies should focus on enhancing farmer education levels, securing land tenure, empowering women, promoting generational knowledge exchange, and providing emergency food support in the lean season or following extreme weather events.

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Costa Rica is considering expanding their marine protected areas (MPAs) to conserve marine resources. Due to the importance of households' responses to an MPA in defining the MPA's ecological and economic outcomes, this paper uses an economic decision framework to interpret data from near-MPA household surveys to inform this policy discussion. The model and data suggest that the impact of expanding MPAs relies on levels of enforcement and on-shore wages. If larger near-shore MPAs can produce high wages through increased tourism, MPA expansions could provide ecological benefits with low burdens to communities. Due to distance costs and gear investments, however, MPAs farther off-shore may place high burdens on off-shore fishers.

The design of protected areas, whether marine or terrestrial, rarely considers how people respond to the imposition of no-take sites with complete or incomplete enforcement. Consequently, these protected areas may fail to achieve their intended goal. We present and solve a spatial bio-economic model in which a manager chooses the optimal location, size, and enforcement level of a marine protected area (MPA). This manager acts as a Stackelberg leader, and her choices consider villagers' best response to the MPA in a spatial Nash equilibrium of fishing site and effort decisions. Relevant to lower income country settings but general to other settings, we incorporate limited enforcement budgets, distance costs of traveling to fishing sites, and labor allocation to onshore wage opportunities. The optimal MPA varies markedly across alternative manager goals and budget sizes, but always induce changes in villagers' decisions as a function of distance, dispersal, and wage. We consider MPA managers with ecological conservation goals and with economic goals, and identify the shortcomings of several common manager decision rules, including those focused on: (1) fishery outcomes rather than broader economic goals, (2) fish stocks at MPA sites rather than across the full marinescape, (3) absolute levels rather than additional values, and (4) costless enforcement. Our results demonstrate that such naïve or overly narrow decision rules can lead to inefficient MPA designs that miss economic and conservation opportunities.

Replication is an important “credibility control” mechanism for clarifying the reliability of published findings. However, replication is costly, and it is infeasible to replicate everything. Accurate, fast, lower cost alternatives such as eliciting predictions from experts or novices could accelerate credibility assessment and improve allocation of replication resources for important and uncertain findings. We elicited judgments from experts and novices on 100 claims from preprints about an emerging area of research (COVID-19 pandemic) using a new interactive structured elicitation protocol and we conducted 35 new replications. Participants’ average estimates were similar to the observed replication rate of 60%. After interacting with their peers, novices updated both their estimates and confidence in their judgements significantly more than experts and their accuracy improved more between elicitation rounds. Experts’ average accuracy was 0.54 (95% CI: [0.454, 0.628]) after interaction and they correctly classified 55% of claims; novices’ average accuracy was 0.55 (95% CI: [0.455, 0.628]), correctly classifying 61% of claims. The difference in accuracy between experts and novices was not significant and their judgments on the full set of claims were strongly correlated (r=.48). These results are consistent with prior investigations eliciting predictions about the replicability of published findings in established areas of research and suggest that expertise may not be required for credibility assessment of some research findings.