Science, Environment and Development Group

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Thursday, 12 April, 2007
Measuring Avoided Deforestation from Land Use Policies
Paul J. Ferraro, Assistant Professor of Economics, Andrew Young School of Policy Studies, Georgia State University
Biography, Abstract

Biography:

Paul J. Ferraro is on the faculty in the Department of Economics at Georgia State University’s Andrew Young School of Policy Studies. He is a Senior Science Fellow at the World Wildlife Fund and a member of Global Environment Facility’s Science Advisory Panel. Dr. Ferraro’s research focuses on the design and evaluation of cost-effective environmental policies and institutions, and the use of experiments to study human behavior and decision-making. He received his PhD in economics from Cornell University. He also holds a BA in biology and history, and an MS in economics, from Duke University. He is a collaborating author on the 2005 Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, and his research appears in journals such as Conservation Biology, Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization, Journal of Environmental Economics and Management, Journal of Policy Analysis and Management, Land Economics, PLoS Biology, Science and Trends in Ecology & Evolution (see http://epp.gsu.edu/pferraro for more details).

Abstract:

Protected areas have long been the principal means for achieving biodiversity conservation goals. They are also an important component in the recent controversy over the potential role of "avoided deforestation" in climate change policy. Measuring the avoided deforestation resulting from protective measures is complicated because avoided deforestation is a counterfactual event. By ignoring the nonrandomized nature of protected area establishment and the spatial spillovers that can result from their establishment, current empirical estimates of avoided deforestation fail to properly estimate the counterfactual vegetation cover. We demonstrate how matching estimators can be used to estimate avoided deforestation in and around protected areas. These same methods can be used to evaluate the impacts of other land use policies such as payments for environmental services or road building prohibitions. We apply our methods to estimate avoided deforestation from protected areas established in Costa Rica between 1960 and 1997. Our results indicate that protection resulted in avoided deforestation, but that traditional methods overestimate the amount of avoided deforestation by a factor of two or more. The reasons for this overestimation have implications for the use of protected areas in biodiversity conservation and climate change policies.