Conference Agenda

In Colombia, Sustainable Forest Management (SFM) has been recognized as an approach to prevent deforestation while supporting the livelihoods of forest-dependent households. However, timber harvesting of natural tropical forests currently operates as a subsistence activity, generating low income and negative impacts on ecosystems. This study develops a discrete time bioeconomic model for SFM, with an objective function focusing on the biological and economic implications of timber extraction for three high-valued commercial species, Achapo (Cedrelinga cateniformis), Cabuyo (Eschweilera coriacea) and Dormidero negro (Parkia discolor), located in the Guaviare region (Colombian Amazon). Our results show that the maximum benefits from sustainable forest harvesting of the three species are achieved in a 25-year span, with net benefits per hectare of USD 507.8, for a planning horizon of 50 years. Sustainable forest harvesting was found to be robust with respect to a number of assumptions in the model. These results provide a technical basis for harvesting authorizations and permits. Policy implications are discussed.

Currently, more than 10% of the global forest area is certified. However, uptake of forest management certification has been highly uneven throughout the world, and relatively little is still known about the generic factors that promote or inhibit its adoption. Based on an extensive literature review, a number of hypotheses are developed on the relationship between different demand-side and supply-side variables and the uptake of forest certification. These hypotheses are then tested using econometric estimation methods with data for a large panel of 150 countries from 2002 to 2020, focusing on the two most widespread schemes, the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) and the Programme for the Endorsement of Forest Certification (PEFC). It is found that both FSC and PEFC certification density are positively and significantly correlated with different dimensions of governance, GDP per capita, the share of forest products exports to Europe and the general export orientation of the forest-based sector. Novel to the literature, this study also provides evidence of the important role of environmental NGOs for forest certification, with clear differences between FSC and PEFC certification: while there is a positive and significant correlation between the number of environmental NGOs and FSC certification density, the environmental NGO variable is negatively and significantly associated with PEFC certification density. The paper finishes with discussing a number of important implications of the findings for policy makers tasked with accelerating the implementation of forest certification schemes.

In this paper, we study how deforestation in West Africa affects economic development in locations distant from where tree losses occur. Clouds passing over recently cleared areas accumulate less water, leading to a reduction in rainfall downwind. Using satellite data, we exploit wind patterns in the region to quantify the effects of this externality on key development indicators. We find significant negative effects on rainfall up to 200 km from deforested regions. Additionally, we observe a decrease in GDP and an increase in out-migration in rural areas, whereas in urban areas, both GDP and the number of demonstrations rise. Our results underscore the importance of spatial interdependencies in natural ecosystems across developing regions.

Natural capital is an important source of wealth and income, but these assets and corresponding flows of ecosystem services are not necessarily equally distributed within countries. This paper develops a framework to systematically record the distribution of ecosystem service benefits and nature dependencies in the population by integrating the UN system for ecosystem accounting with distributional national accounts, creating distributional ecosystem accounts. I apply the framework to forest ecosystem assets in Finland, combining high-resolution geospatial forest data and micro level income data from administrative registries, linking all privately and publicly owned forests to individuals. To demonstrate how ecosystems contribute to incomes and inequality, four forest-based ecosystem services - timber provisioning, carbon sequestration, habitat maintenance, and outdoor recreation - are quantified and the beneficiaries are identified in the income distribution. I then consider the distributional impacts of forest harvests by allocating costs of natural capital depreciation across the income distribution. When applying policy instruments to incentivise socially optimal flows of ecosystem services, taxing harvests comes with an additional benefit as it has a progressive distributional effect, while subsidising providers of ecosystem services disproportionally benefits high-income households.