title: Estimating the impacts of conservation on ecosystem services and poverty by integrating modeling and evaluation.
abstract: Scholars have made great advances in modeling and mapping ecosystem services, and in assigning economic values to these services. This modeling and valuation scholarship is often disconnected from evidence about how actual conservation programs have affected ecosystem services, however. Without a stronger evidence base, decision makers find it difficult to use the insights from modeling and valuation to design effective policies and programs. To strengthen the evidence base, scholars have advanced our understanding of the causal pathways between conservation actions and environmental outcomes, but their studies measure impacts on imperfect proxies for ecosystem services (e.g., avoidance of deforestation). To be useful to decision makers, these impacts must be translated into changes in ecosystem services and values. To illustrate how this translation can be done, we estimated the impacts of protected areas in Brazil, Costa Rica, Indonesia, and Thailand on carbon storage in forests. We found that protected areas in these conservation hotspots have stored at least an additional 1,000 Mt of CO2 in forests and have delivered ecosystem services worth at least $5 billion. This aggregate impact masks important spatial heterogeneity, however. Moreover, the spatial variability of impacts on carbon storage is the not the same as the spatial variability of impacts on avoided deforestation. These findings lead us to describe a research program that extends our framework to study other ecosystem services, to uncover the mechanisms by which ecosystem protection benefits humans, and to tie cost-benefit analyses to conservation planning so that we can obtain the greatest return on scarce conservation funds.
authors.affiliation: Department of Economics, Andrew Young School of Policy Studies, Georgia State University, Atlanta, GA 30319; hanauer@sonoma.edu pferraro@gsu.edu.
authors.forename: Paul J
authors.initials: PJ
authors.lastname: Ferraro
authors.affiliation: Department of Economics, Sonoma State University, Rohnert Park, CA 94928; hanauer@sonoma.edu pferraro@gsu.edu.
authors.forename: Merlin M
authors.initials: MM
authors.lastname: Hanauer
authors.affiliation: The Nature Conservancy, Fort Collins, CO 80524; Institute on the Environment, University of Minnesota, St. Paul, MN 55108;
authors.forename: Daniela A
authors.initials: DA
authors.lastname: Miteva
authors.affiliation: The Nature Conservancy, Arlington, VA 22203; Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment, Stanford, CA 94305;
authors.forename: Joanna L
authors.initials: JL
authors.lastname: Nelson
authors.affiliation: Sanford School of Public Policy and Nicholas School of the Environment, Duke University, Durham, NC 27708;
authors.forename: Subhrendu K
authors.initials: SK
authors.lastname: Pattanayak
authors.affiliation: School of Natural Resources and Environment, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI 48109; and.
authors.forename: Christoph
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Nolte
authors.affiliation: Departments of Economics and Environmental Studies, Amherst College, Amherst, MA 01002.
authors.forename: Katharine R E
authors.initials: KR
authors.lastname: Sims
mesh_terms: D001938:Brazil; D057965:Carbon Sequestration; D003247:Conservation of Natural Resources / Q000191:economics*; D003362:Cost-Benefit Analysis; D003364:Costa Rica; D017753:Ecosystem; D004777:Environment; D058735:Environmental Policy / Q000191:economics; D065928:Forests; D006801:Humans; D007214:Indonesia; D018803:Models, Economic; D011203:Poverty / Q000191:economics*; D013785:Thailand
keywords: avoided emissions; parks; quasi-experiment; sequestration; tropical forest