Unexpected Co-Benefits: Forest Connectivity and Property Tax Incentives

Locke, Christina; Rissman, Adena R.

doi:10.2139/ssrn.2816144

Cited by 2 publications

(2 citation statements)

References 40 publications

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“…In our case, a similar change in the behaviour of the recipients was confirmed only indirectly by the interviews. Moreover, as Giertliova et al ( 2019) stated, the biggest advantage of land tax reductios are their transparency and long-term functioning, thus can be combined with other policy instruments to prevent forest conversion to development (Locke & Rissman 2012). If such support did not exist, forest owners and enterprises would try to get their increased costs or reduced earnings into market prices, especially in wood prices, and thus distort the market (Giertliová et al 2019).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Forest land tax reductions – an effective payment for forest ecosystem services in Slovakia?

Báliková

Dobšinská

Balážová

et al. 2021

Central European Forestry Journal

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Preferential land tax programs are used over 50 years and are mainly connected with nature protection and environmental goals. Nowadays, they are also considered as a way how to promote and support forest ecosystem services that arise from exempted forest land. In Slovak Republic national forest land tax reduction scheme exists for special purpose and protection forests, as well for other forests with special importance. The goal of the paper was to develop a multidimensional evaluation of this economic instrument for ecosystem service support in Slovakia. We evaluated how the forest land tax reduction fits into the payments for ecosystem services theory, which services are supported and what is the potential and implementation effectiveness according to theory of policy analysis. Even though, the forest owners and enterprises benefit from tax reductions, evidence regarding its visibility as payment for ecosystem service is low. Forest land tax reductions are considered as other economic incentive for ecosystem services support with moderate potential effectiveness. Despite the instrument have low visibility of FES supported from both sides – sellers and beneficiaries, its potential effectiveness is high, due its automatic and stable implementation without relevant implementation gaps.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Forest land tax reductions – an effective payment for forest ecosystem services in Slovakia?

Báliková

Dobšinská

Balážová

et al. 2021

Central European Forestry Journal

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“…We obtained these forest morphology classes for the forest present in both 2000 and 2012 by applying the eight neighbor rule, in which a forest cell is connected if any of its sides or corners is in contact with another forest cell, and a one-pixel edge (30 m). This neighbor rule and edge width have been used previously to calculate forest patches and their connectivity (Sorte et al 2004, Locke and Rissman 2012, Rogan et al 2016. We also calculated the number of forest patches, the mean area of the forest patch, the number of forest loss patches, and the largest area of forest loss using the R package SDMTools (VanDerWal et al 2014; Table 2).…”

Section: Forest Composition and Configurationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Payments for ecosystem services in Mexico reduce forest fragmentation

Ramirez‐Reyes

Sims

Potapov

et al. 2018

Ecological Applications

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Forest fragmentation can lead to habitat reduction, edge increase, and exposure to disturbances. A key emerging policy to protect forests is payments for ecosystem services (PES), which offers compensation to landowners for environmental stewardship. Mexico was one of the first countries to implement a broad-scale PES program, enrolling over 2.3 Mha by 2010. However, Mexico's PES did not completely eliminate deforestation in enrolled parcels and could have increased incentives to hide deforestation in ways that increased fragmentation. We studied whether Mexican forests enrolled in the PES program had less forest fragmentation than those not enrolled, and whether the PES effects varied among forest types, among socioeconomic zones, or compared to the protected areas system. We analyzed forest cover maps from 2000 to 2012 to calculate forest fragmentation. We summarized fragmentation for different forest types and in four socioeconomic zones. We then used matching analysis to investigate the possible causal impacts of the PES on forests across Mexico and compared the effects of the PES program with that of protected areas. We found that the area covered by forest in Mexico decreased by 3.4% from 2000 to 2012, but there was 9.3% less forest core area. Change in forest cover was highest in the southern part of Mexico, and high-stature evergreen tropical forest lost the most core areas (-17%), while oak forest lost the least (-2%). Our matching analysis found that the PES program reduced both forest cover loss and forest fragmentation. Low-PES areas increased twice as much of the number of forest patches, forest edge, forest islets, and largest area of forest lost compared to high-PES areas. Compared to the protected areas system in Mexico, high-PES areas performed similarly in preventing fragmentation, but not as well as biosphere reserve core zones. We conclude that the PES was successful in slowing forest fragmentation at the regional and country level. However, the program could be improved by targeting areas where forest changes are more frequent, especially in southern Mexico. Fragmentation analyses should be implemented in other areas to monitor the outcomes of protection programs such as REDD+ and PES.

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Unexpected Co-Benefits: Forest Connectivity and Property Tax Incentives

Cited by 2 publications

References 40 publications

Forest land tax reductions – an effective payment for forest ecosystem services in Slovakia?

Forest land tax reductions – an effective payment for forest ecosystem services in Slovakia?

Payments for ecosystem services in Mexico reduce forest fragmentation

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