Quantifying causal mechanisms to determine how protected areas affect poverty through changes in ecosystem services and infrastructure

Abstract

To develop effective environmental policies, we must understand the mechanisms through which the policies affect social and environmental outcomes. Unfortunately, empirical evidence about these mechanisms is limited, and little guidance for quantifying them exists. We develop an approach to quantifying the mechanisms through which protected areas affect poverty. We focus on three mechanisms: changes in tourism and recreational services; changes in infrastructure in the form of road networks, health clinics, and schools; and changes in regulating and provisioning ecosystem services and foregone production activities that arise from landuse restrictions. The contributions of ecotourism and other ecosystem services to poverty alleviation in the context of a real environmental program have not yet been empirically estimated. Nearly two-thirds of the poverty reduction associated with the establishment of Costa Rican protected areas is causally attributable to opportunities afforded by tourism. Although protected areas reduced deforestation and increased regrowth, these land cover changes neither reduced nor exacerbated poverty, on average. Protected areas did not, on average, affect our measures of infrastructure and thus did not contribute to poverty reduction through this mechanism. We attribute the remaining poverty reduction to unobserved dimensions of our mechanisms or to other mechanisms. Our study empirically estimates previously unidentified contributions of ecotourism and other ecosystem services to poverty alleviation in the context of a real environmental program. We demonstrate that, with existing data and appropriate empirical methods, conservation scientists and policymakers can begin to elucidate the mechanisms through which ecosystem conservation programs affect human welfare.parks | mediator | impact evaluation | quasi-experimental | matching

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

“…Conservation actions can improve human welfare through various mechanisms, including the maintenance and enhancement of ecosystem services. A recent study of these mechanisms could only estimate how protected areas affected poverty through changes in land cover, rather than through changes in specific services that arose from the changes in land cover (54). Future attempts to quantify these mechanisms could benefit from more careful and rigorous connections to the modeling and monetization literature.…”

Spatial covariance of ecosystem services and poverty in China

“…Such temporal analyses are required to identify whether it is indeed forest-related provisioning ES that are leading to poverty alleviation, or whether the higher incomes in non-poor counties stem from non-consumptive ES like tourism (e.g. Ferraro and Hanauer 2014) or other non-ESderived incomes sources.…”

A Crystal Ball for Forests?: Analyzing the Social-Ecological Impacts of Forest Conservation and Management over the Long Term

“…Experimental (Jayachandran et al 2016) and quasi-experimental (Alix-Garcia et al 2012) studies have found that payments for ecosystem services (PES) programs in Uganda and Mexico, respectively, were eff ective in avoiding deforestation. IE studies have also increasingly sought to identify causal mechanisms linking the intervention to ultimate impacts (e.g., Canavire-Bacarreza and Hanauer 2013; Ferraro and Hanauer 2014;Ferraro and Pressey 2015). Th ese studies have begun to explore what happens within the "black box" of program and policy implementation that leads to observed outcomes at the end of the program period.…”

“…Th ese studies have begun to explore what happens within the "black box" of program and policy implementation that leads to observed outcomes at the end of the program period. For instance, Paul Ferraro and Merlin Hanauer (2014) estimated the individual contribution of various mechanisms aff ecting poverty in and around Costa Rica's PAs. Th ey found that, on average, PAs reduced poverty and that two-thirds of the total reduction could be attributed to opportunities created by tourism.…”