Conference Agenda

Tropical deforestation creates serious local and global externalities. Ecopayments or Payment for Ecosystem Services (PES) offer conditional transfers that can increase conservation when they are well designed and targeted. However, impacts may be limited if participants were already conserving prior to enrollment, as may occur when other conservation or land-right policies have been implemented. To inform PES targeting, we assess “conservation redundancy” by estimating forest impacts of Ecuador’s SocioBosque (SB) ecopayments program on Amazonian frontiers, both alone and in combination with Protected Areas (PAs) or Indigenous Lands (ILs). We distinguish between SB’s smaller Individual and larger Collective contracts across the following policy configurations: SB alone; SB + PA; SB + IL; and SB+PA+IL. Using remotely sensed forest data, we apply Difference-in-Difference estimators and find some forest impact of SB Collective alone, with larger but imprecise effects for SB Individual alone. In specific, we find no additional effect from SB Collective within PAs and no significant additional effect when SB is combined with ILs or PA+IL, indicating substantial policy redundancy.

Deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon has declined since 2023, yet the durability of these gains depends in part on whether smallholders, who face persistent institutional and financial barriers, can comply with environmental regulations such as Brazil’s Rural Environmental Registry (Cadastro Ambiental Rural, CAR). This study provides one of the first empirical tests of whether a national regulatory instrument (CAR) and a subnational incentive-based intervention (REDD+) reinforce one another in practice for smallholders. Using panel data from CIFOR’s Global Comparative Study on REDD+ (2010, 2014, 2018), we estimate inverse-probability-weighted logistic models to assess the association between REDD+ participation and CAR uptake, and weighted fixed-effects models to examine whether forest cover trajectories differ systematically across REDD+ participants depending on subsequent CAR registration, allowing for heterogeneity by baseline forest cover. Our results indicate that REDD+ participation was associated with higher CAR uptake primarily among smallholders already engaged in REDD+ by 2014, with little evidence of additional post-2014 registration once baseline CAR status is accounted for. Neither REDD+ nor CAR alone produced consistent changes in forest cover. However, joint REDD+ and CAR participation was associated with higher forest cover in 2014 and 2018. These complementarities vary by baseline land-use conditions: large early gains occurred in high-forest landholdings, modest short-lived effects in medium-forest landholdings, and delayed but positive effects in low forest properties. While results depend on assumptions regarding unobserved baseline CAR registration, the findings suggest that CAR registration operates as a pathway through which REDD+ may influence forest outcomes under specific land-use conditions and time frames. Overall, the study advances understanding of how regulatory and incentive-based policy mixes operate for smallholders in Amazonian conservation.

Smallholder farmers in Central America are highly vulnerable to climate change due to reliance on rain-fed agriculture, degraded soils, and limited adaptive resources. Climate-smart agriculture (CSA) and soil restoration can strengthen resilience, yet adoption remains uneven and poorly understood. Using survey data from 2,770 farmers across four Central American countries, collected three years after a large-scale CSA program, we examine how training affects adoption and perceived benefits and challenges. Training is strongly associated with adoption and with greater ability to identify practice-specific benefits, even years after program completion. However, resource constraints and high input costs - rather than lack of knowledge - are the main barriers to adoption to some key practices such as soil fertility management. These findings underscore that scaling CSA adoption requires not only effective training but also systems change to overcome economic and logistical constraints.

Trade in carbon-emissions reductions is widely agreed to have the potential to greatly lower the cost of climate mitigation. For firms, emissions reductions are sometimes mandated by regulation, leaving only cost minimization as a strategy for increasing profit. Firms might also reduce emissions to attract and retain workers and consumers. Even in this case, lowering costs still increases profits. Thus, demand for carbon offsets is partly driven by the desire to minimize costs. Unfortunately for climate mitigation, lower offset costs may reflect lower quality. Fully non-additional “offsetting” actions cost suppliers nothing, so the “offsets” are cheap; however, this non-additionality implies zero climate mitigation. The demonstrated lack of impact of many carbon offsets due to over-crediting and information asymmetries, when juxtaposed with ongoing corporate purchases of such carbon “offsets,” raises questions regarding firms’ willingness to pay for quality (i.e., impactful) offsets. This study explores how offset characteristics affect firms’ demand. Using a discrete-choice experiment with U.S.-firm managers, we quantify willingness to pay for offsets’ actual effectiveness, social and environmental co-benefits, and implementing partners. We then consider the impact of a threat of greater external monitoring and whether that is a function of self-reported reputational exposure and/or the two principal components we use to distinguish two firm ‘types.’