Conditions associated with protected area success in conservation and poverty reduction

Abstract

Protected areas are the dominant approach to protecting biodiversity and the supply of ecosystem services. Because these protected areas are often placed in regions with widespread poverty and because they can limit agricultural development and exploitation of natural resources, concerns have been raised about their potential to create or reinforce poverty traps. Previous studies suggest that the protected area systems in Costa Rica and Thailand, on average, reduced deforestation and alleviated poverty. We examine these results in more detail by characterizing the heterogeneity of responses to protection conditional on observable characteristics. We find no evidence that protected areas trap historically poorer areas in poverty. In fact, we find that poorer areas at baseline seem to have the greatest levels of poverty reduction as a result of protection. However, we do find that the spatial characteristics associated with the most poverty alleviation are not necessarily the characteristics associated with the most avoided deforestation. We show how an understanding of these spatially heterogeneous responses to protection can be used to generate suitability maps that identify locations in which both environmental and poverty alleviation goals are most likely to be achieved.

Estimating the impacts of conservation on ecosystem services and poverty by integrating modeling and evaluation

“…All four countries have been the subjects of previous studies on the impact of protected areas on deforestation and regrowth (23,25,29,32). Two of them have been the subjects of published studies on the impact of protected areas on poverty in neighboring communities (31,32), and on the moderators of the forest and poverty impacts (26,37).…”

“…Protected areas are also integral parts of strategies to reduce carbon emissions from deforestation and degradation, such as the REDD+* program (21,22). Recent studies have estimated the effects of terrestrial protected area networks on deforestation (23)(24)(25)(26)(27), fire (28), regrowth (29), and poverty (30-32), but not their effects on ecosystem services. Explicitly estimating effects on ecosystem services is important, because there is no reason to assume that the spatial variability of effects on ecosystem services matches the spatial variability of effects on human behaviors; for example, the spatial variability of carbon is highly heterogeneous (18,33), and the locations where carbon density is highest might not be the same locations where protected areas have the greatest effects on land use.…”

On biodiversity conservation and poverty traps

“…The first empirically examines the relationships between poverty traps and biodiversity conservation. Ferraro et al (27) address a fundamental controversy: Do protected areas make or reinforce poverty traps, or do they instead offer a mechanism to improve the condition of rural households? Using geospatial data and econometric analyses, the authors estimate how the impacts of protected areas on poverty and deforestation vary according to biophysical and demographic characteristics across diverse sites in Costa Rica and Thailand.…”

Analyse des connaissances actuelles sur les impacts de la certification forestière: proposition d'un cadre d'évaluation

“…Elles comprennent des méthodologies expérimentales rigoureuses qui s'appuient sur des essais contrôlés randomisés, des analyses plus qualitatives et moins informatives qui permettent de distinguer parmi les résultats l'effet causal de l'action, et des méthodes non expérimentales plus qualitatives (Bamberger et White 2007 ;GAO 2009 ;Tableau 2 (Ferraro et Pattanayak 2006 ;Pattanayak et al, 2010). Les chercheurs commencent seulement à remédier à cette lacune ; on peut ainsi à présent trouver plusieurs guides pratiques sur la manière d'éviter ces erreurs dans la sphère de la conservation (Andam et al 2008 ;Sims 2010 ;Ferraro et al 2011 ;Nelson et Chomitz 2011 ;Alix-Garcia et al 2012 ;Arriagada et al 2012 ;Laufer et al 2013).…”