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Financial advisers recommend a diverse portfolio to respond to market fluctuations across sectors. Similarly, nature has evolved a diverse portfolio of species to maintain ecosystem function amid environmental fluctuations. In urban planning, public health, transport and communications, food production, and other domains, however, this feature often seems ignored. As we enter an era of unprecedented turbulence at the planetary level, we argue that ample responses to this new reality — that is, response diversity — can no longer be taken for granted and must be actively designed and managed. We describe here what response diversity is, how it is expressed and how it can be enhanced and lost.

A series of international initiatives have set ambitious goals for restoring global forests. This review synthesizes natural and social science research on forest restoration (FR), with a focus on restoration on cleared land in low- and middle-income countries. We define restoration more broadly than reestablishing native forests, given that landholders might prefer other forest types. We organize the review loosely around ideas in the forest transition literature. We begin by examining recent trends in FR and forest transition indicators. We then investigate two primary parts of the forest transition explanation for forest recovery: wood scarcity, including its connection to restoration for climate change mitigation, and the dynamic relationships between migration and land use. Next, we review ecological and silvicultural aspects of restoration on cleared land. We conclude by discussing selected interventions to promote restoration and the challenge of scaling up restoration to achieve international initiatives' goals.

Restoring tree cover in tropical countries has the potential to benefit millions of smallholders through improvements in income and environmental services. However, despite their dominant landholding shares in many countries, smallholders' role in restoration has not been addressed in prior global or pan-tropical restoration studies. We fill this lacuna by using global spatial data on trees and people, national indicators of enabling conditions, and micro-level expert information. We find that by 2050, low-cost restoration is feasible within 280, 200, and 60 million hectares of tropical croplands, pasturelands, and degraded forestlands, respectively. Such restoration could affect 210 million people in croplands, 59 million people in pasturelands and 22 million people in degraded forestlands. This predominance of low-cost restoration opportunity in populated agricultural lands has not been revealed by prior analyses of tree cover restoration potential. In countries with low-cost tropical restoration potential, smallholdings comprise a significant proportion of agricultural lands in Asia (∼76 %) and Africa (∼60 %) but not the Americas (∼3%). Thus, while the Americas account for approximately half of 21st century tropical deforestation, smallholder-based reforestation may play a larger role in efforts to reverse recent forest loss in Asia and Africa than in the Americas. Furthermore, our analyses show that countries with low-cost restoration potential largely lack policy commitments or smallholder supportive institutional and market conditions. Discussions among practitioners and researchers suggest that four principles - partnering with farmers and prioritizing their preferences, reducing uncertainty, strengthening markets, and mobilizing innovative financing - can help scale smallholder-driven restoration in the face of these challenges.

Valuing global environmental public goods can serve to mobilize international resources for their protection. While stated-preference valuation methods have been applied extensively to public goods valuation in individual countries, applications to global public goods with surveys in multiple countries are scarce due to complex and costly implementation. Benefit transfer is effectively infeasible when there are few existing studies valuing similar goods. The Delphi method, which relies on expert opinion, offers a third alternative. We explore this method for estimating the value of protecting the Amazon rainforest, by asking more than 200 environmental valuation experts from 37 countries on four continents to predict the outcome of a contingent valuation survey to elicit willingness-to-pay (WTP) for Amazon forest protection by their own countries' populations. The average annual per-household values of avoiding a 30% forest loss in the Amazon by 2050, assessed by experts, vary from a few dollars in low-income Asian countries, to a high near $100 in Canada, Germany and Norway. The elasticity with respect to average (PPP-adjusted) per-household incomes is close to unity. Results from the Delphi study match remarkably well those from a recent population stated-preference survey in Canada and the United States, using a similar valuation scenario.

The Amazon rainforest, the world's largest tropical rainforest and an important constituent of the global biosphere, continues degrading by rapid deforestation, which is expected to continue despite policies to prevent it. Current international funding to protect the Amazon rainforest focuses on benefits from reduced carbon emissions. This paper examines an additional rationale for Amazon protection: the valuation of its biodiversity and forests as natural heritage to the international community. To measure the economic value of this benefit, the paper examines U.S. and Canadian households' willingness to pay to help finance Amazon rainforest protection. The analysis finds that mean willingness to pay to avoid forest losses projected to occur by 2050 despite current protective policies is $92 per household per year. Aggregating across all households and considering the area protected, the analysis finds that preserving the Amazon rainforest is worth $3,168 per hectare (95-percent confidence interval $1,580-$4,756), on average, to households in the United States and Canada. Considering households in other developed countries would generate yet larger estimates of aggregate value, likely comparable to the carbon benefits from rainforest protection. The results reveal high values of the Amazon rainforest to people geographically distanced from it, lending support to international efforts to reduce deforestation in the Amazon.

Forests are widely believed to provide a water purification service that reduces the cost of treating drinking water, but few empirical economic studies have investigated this service in developing countries, where deforestation rates and thus threats to the service tend to be higher than in developed countries. Even fewer studies have investigated the distribution of the benefits of this service, or any other regulating ecosystem service for that matter, in either developing or developed countries. Using quarterly panel data for 158 water utilities in Thailand during 2004–2014, we find robust evidence that forests significantly reduced the material cost of water treatment, but we find no evidence that the cost reductions were progressive in the sense of being larger in provinces with higher poverty rates. The economic justification for source water protection in Thailand appears to hinge purely on considerations of efficiency — does source water protection provide net benefits? — not on the distribution of those benefits between poorer and richer locations. Research in other countries is needed to determine if the absence of pro-poor distributional impacts of forest water purification is unique to Thailand or the norm and if interventions that enhance forest water purification significantly reduce poverty in locations served by treated drinking water systems.

Economists are increasingly using impact evaluation methods to measure the effectiveness of forest conservation programs. Theoretical analysis of two complementary economic models demonstrates that the average treatment effect on the treated (ATT) typically reported by these studies can be related to an economic measure of program performance only under very restrictive conditions. This is because the ATT is usually expressed in purely physical terms (e.g., avoided deforestation) and ignores heterogeneity in the costs and benefits of conservation programs. For the same reasons, clinical trials are a misleading analogy for the evaluation of conservation programs. To be more useful for economic analyses of conservation programs, impact evaluations should work toward developing measures of program outcomes that are economically more relevant, data that would enable the evaluation of impacts on forest degradation (not just deforestation) and primary forests (not forests in general), better estimates of spatially disaggregated treatment effects (not program-wide averages), and better information on the accuracy of estimated treatment effects as predictors of future risks.

Several recent initiatives such as Planetary Health , EcoHealth and One Health claim that human health depends on flourishing natural ecosystems. However, little has been said about the operational and implementation challenges of health-oriented conservation actions on the ground. We contend that ecological–epidemiological research must be complemented by a form of implementation science that examines: (i) the links between specific conservation actions and the resulting ecological changes, and (ii) how this ecological change impacts human health and well-being, when human behaviours are considered. Drawing on the policy evaluation tradition in public economics, first, we present three examples of recent social science research on conservation interventions that affect human health. These examples are from low- and middle-income countries in the tropics and subtropics. Second, drawing on these examples, we present three propositions related to impact evaluation and non-market valuation that can help guide future multidisciplinary research on conservation and human health. Research guided by these propositions will allow stakeholders to determine how ecosystem-mediated strategies for health promotion compare with more conventional biomedical prevention and treatment strategies for safeguarding health. This article is part of the themed issue ‘Conservation, biodiversity and infectious disease: scientific evidence and policy implications’.

Governments around the world are increasingly invoking hydrological services, such as flood mitigation and water purification, as a justification for forest conservation programs in upstream areas. Yet, rigorous empirical evidence that these programs are actually delivering the intended services remains scant. We investigate the effect of deforestation on flood-mitigation services in Peninsular Malaysia during 1984–2000, a period when detailed data on both flood events and land-use change are available for 31 river basins. Floods are the most common natural disaster in tropical regions, but the ability of tropical forests to mitigate large-scale floods associated with heavy rainfall events remains disputed. We find that the conversion of inland tropical forests to oil palm and rubber plantations significantly increased the number of days flooded during the wettest months of the year. Our results demonstrate the importance of using disaggregated land-use data, controlling for potentially confounding factors, and applying appropriate estimators in econometric studies on forest ecosystem services.

We analyze the impact of development on flood fatalities using a new data set of 2,171 large floods in 92 countries between 1985 and 2008. Our results challenge the conventional wisdom that development results in fewer fatalities during natural disasters. Results indicating that higher income and better governance reduce fatalities during flood events do not hold up when unobserved country heterogeneity and within-country correlation of standard errors are taken into account. We find that income does have a significant, indirect effect on flood fatalities by affecting flood frequency and flood magnitude, but this effect is nonmonotonic, with net reductions in fatalities occurring only in lower income countries. We find little evidence that improved governance affects flood fatalities either directly or indirectly.

BACKGROUND The development of surgery in low- and middle-income countries has been limited by a belief that it is too expensive to be sustainable. However, subspecialist surgical care can provide substantial clinical and economic benefits in low-resource settings. The goal of this study is to describe the clinical and economic impact of recurrent short-term plastic surgical trips in low- and middle-income countries. METHODS The authors conducted a retrospective review of clinic and operative logbooks from Hands Across the World's surgical experience in Ecuador. The authors calculated the disability-adjusted life-years averted to estimate the clinical impact of cleft repair and then calculated the economic impact of surgical intervention for cleft disease. RESULTS One thousand one hundred forty-two reconstructive surgical cases were performed over 15 years. Surgery was most commonly performed for scar contractures [449 cases (39.3 percent)], of which burn scars comprised a substantial amount [215 cases (18.8 percent)]. There were 40 postoperative complications within 7 days of operation (3.5 percent), and partial wound dehiscence was the most common complication [16 of 40 (40 percent)]. Cleft disorders constituted 277 cases (24.3 percent), and 102 cases were primary cleft lip and/or palate cases. Between 396 and 1042 total disability-adjusted life-years were averted through surgery for these 102 cases of primary cleft repair. This translates to an economic benefit between $4.7 million (human capital approach) and $27.5 million (value of a statistical life approach). CONCLUSIONS Plastic surgical disease is a significant source of morbidity for patients in resource-limited regions. Dedicated programs that provide essential reconstructive surgery can produce substantial clinical and economic benefits to host countries.

"Resilience to specified kinds of disasters is an active area of research and practice. However, rare or unprecedented disturbances that are unusually intense or extensive require a more broad-spectrum type of resilience. General resilience is the capacity of social-ecological systems to adapt or transform in response to unfamiliar, unexpected and extreme shocks. Conditions that enable general resilience include diversity, modularity, openness, reserves, feedbacks, nestedness, monitoring, leadership, and trust. Processes for building general resilience are an emerging and crucially important area of research."

Object Evidence from the CURE Children's Hospital of Uganda (CCHU) suggests that treatment for hydrocephalus in infants can be effective and sustainable in a developing country. This model has not been broadly supported or implemented due in part to the absence of data on the economic burden of disease or any assessment of the cost and benefit of treatment. The authors used economic modeling to estimate the annual cost and benefit of treating hydrocephalus in infants at CCHU. These results were then extrapolated to the potential economic impact of treating all cases of hydrocephalus in infants in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). Methods The authors conducted a retrospective review of all children initially treated for hydrocephalus at CCHU via endoscopic third ventriculostomy or shunt placement in 2005. A combination of data and explicit assumptions was used to determine the number of times each procedure was performed, the cost of performing each procedure, the number of disability-adjusted life years (DALYs) averted with neurosurgical intervention, and the economic benefit of the treatment. For CCHU and SSA, the cost per DALY averted and the benefit-cost ratio of 1 year's treatment of hydrocephalus in infants were determined. Results In 2005, 297 patients (median age 4 months) were treated at CCHU. The total cost of neurosurgical intervention was $350,410, and the cost per DALY averted ranged from $59 to $126. The CCHU's economic benefit to Uganda was estimated to be between $3.1 million and $5.2 million using a human capital approach and $4.6 million–$188 million using a value of a statistical life (VSL) approach. The total economic benefit of treating the conservatively estimated 82,000 annual cases of hydrocephalus in infants in SSA ranged from $930 million to $1.6 billion using a human capital approach and $1.4 billion–$56 billion using a VSL approach. The minimum benefit-cost ratio of treating hydrocephalus in infants was estimated to be 7:1. Conclusions Untreated hydrocephalus in infants exacts an enormous price from SSA. The results of this study suggest that neurosurgical intervention has a cost/DALY averted comparable to other surgical interventions that have been evaluated, as well as a favorable benefit-cost ratio. The prevention and treatment of hydrocephalus in SSA should be recognized as a major public health priority.

Recent research indicates that monsoon rainfall became less frequent but more intense in India during the latter half of the Twentieth Century, thus increasing the risk of drought and flood damage to the country’s wet-season (kharif) rice crop. Our statistical analysis of state-level Indian data confirms that drought and extreme rainfall negatively affected rice yield (harvest per hectare) in predominantly rainfed areas during 1966–2002, with drought having a much greater impact than extreme rainfall. Using Monte Carlo simulation, we find that yield would have been 1.7% higher on average if monsoon characteristics, especially drought frequency, had not changed since 1960. Yield would have received an additional boost of nearly 4% if two other meteorological changes (warmer nights and lower rainfall at the end of the growing season) had not occurred. In combination, these changes would have increased cumulative harvest during 1966–2002 by an amount equivalent to about a fifth of the increase caused by improvements in farming technology. Climate change has evidently already negatively affected India’s hundreds of millions of rice producers and consumers.

I wandered into environment and development economics through an initially disconnected series of interests in the environment, development and, finally, economics. Family camping trips instilled in me a love of nature from an early age, but growing up in the US industrial heartland in the 1960s also exposed me (literally) to serious pollution problems. My home state of Ohio is famous for having a river that caught on fire. It is also on the shores of Lake Erie, which was the source of my family's Friday fish dinners untilmercury contamination closed the fishery. About the only business in my rural hometown was a waste dump, which contaminated all the wells in the town and forced the town to develop a more costly water source.

Data from farmer-managed fields have not been used previously to disentangle the impacts of daily minimum and maximum temperatures and solar radiation on rice yields in tropical/subtropical Asia. We used a multiple regression model to analyze data from 227 intensively managed irrigated rice farms in six important rice-producing countries. The farm-level detail, observed over multiple growing seasons, enabled us to construct farm-specific weather variables, control for unobserved factors that either were unique to each farm but did not vary over time or were common to all farms at a given site but varied by season and year, and obtain more precise estimates by including farm- and site-specific economic variables. Temperature and radiation had statistically significant impacts during both the vegetative and ripening phases of the rice plant. Higher minimum temperature reduced yield, whereas higher maximum temperature raised it; radiation impact varied by growth phase. Combined, these effects imply that yield at most sites would have grown more rapidly during the high-yielding season but less rapidly during the low-yielding season if observed temperature and radiation trends at the end of the 20th century had not occurred, with temperature trends being more influential. Looking ahead, they imply a net negative impact on yield from moderate warming in coming decades. Beyond that, the impact would likely become more negative, because prior research indicates that the impact of maximum temperature becomes negative at higher levels. Diurnal temperature variation must be considered when investigating the impacts of climate change on irrigated rice in Asia.

Resource economics theory implies that risks associated with weak governance have an ambiguous impact on extraction, with the net impact depending on the relative strengths of depletion and investment effects. Previous empirical studies have found that improved governance tends to reduce deforestation but to raise oil production. Here, we present evidence that the marginal impact of improved governance on timber harvests in developing countries during 1984–2006 was nonmonotonic. It tended to raise harvests in countries with weaker governance but to reduce harvests in countries with stronger governance. This nonmonotonic impact occurred for both an index of governmental integrity (corruption, bureaucracy quality, law and order) and an index of governmental stability. A simulation of hypothetical increases in these governance indices to the maximum 2006 values observed in the sample predicted that improved governance would reduce harvests in most countries but could raise harvests in some, with large increases occurring in countries with the weakest governance.

Environmental management programs that attempt to cope with institutional weaknesses in developing countries by being less reliant on governments' formal regulatory apparatus are becoming increasingly common. Three leading examples of such innovative programs are (1) public disclosure and voluntary programs to address industrial pollution; (2) programs that inform households about environmental health risks; and (3) payments for environmental services. Although (1) and (2) have reduced emissions of industrial pollutants and household exposure to environmental health risks in some cases, the reductions are small relative to the size of the problems. Conservation benefits from (3) have been similarly small so far. Evidence on the effectiveness of these programs is limited, both because the programs are relatively new and because there has been limited use of rigorous impact evaluation methods. Despite this weak performance record, continued experimentation with innovative programs appears to be warranted, especially if the opportunity cost is not too high in terms of redirecting resources away from formal environmental management programs and if rigorous impact evaluations are built in to determine whether and why innovative programs have worked. Future research needs to pay attention to the great heterogeneity among developing countries (i.e., successful implementation in one country is no guarantee of success elsewhere), and to the relationship of innovative programs to formal environmental management programs. Copyright 2010, Oxford University Press.

Protection against coastal disasters has been identified as an important service of mangrove ecosystems. Empirical studies on this service have been criticized, however, for using small samples and inadequately controlling for confounding factors. We used data on several hundred villages to test the impact of mangroves on human deaths during a 1999 super cyclone that struck Orissa, India. We found that villages with wider mangroves between them and the coast experienced significantly fewer deaths than ones with narrower or no mangroves. This finding was robust to the inclusion of a wide range of other variables to our statistical model, including controls for the historical extent of mangroves. Although mangroves evidently saved fewer lives than an early warning issued by the government, the retention of remaining mangroves in Orissa is economically justified even without considering the many benefits they provide to human society besides storm-protection services.

A potential cost of harvesting in multi-species ecosystems is the extinction of nonharvested species that are at the same trophic level as the harvested species. Existing analytical models are not well-suited for studying this harvest externality because they focus on species interactions across trophic levels instead of within them. We identify the conditions under which the harvesting of a single species causes at least one extinction of nonharvested species at the same trophic level. We compare two harvest regimes: uniform management, in which a privately optimal harvest rate is applied to the entire ecosystem; and specialized management, in which a portion of the ecosystem is intensively managed for the harvested species and the rest is left unharvested. Which regime is more likely to result in extinction depends on the discount rate and on the harvested species' competitive ability and colonization rate compared to those of the other species.

Economic theory predicts that the current change in national wealth, broadly defined to include natural and human capital as well as produced capital ("genuine savings"), determines whether the present value of future changes in consumption is positive or negative. Theoretical research has focused on the effects of population growth on this relation, but no rigorous empirical investigation has been conducted. Panel data for 64 developing countries during 1970--82 are used to test the effects of three adjustments for population growth, including one that controls for omitted wealth. Although the adjustments have substantial impacts on estimates of genuine savings, they lead to only limited improvements in the relation between those estimates and subsequent consumption changes. Even without adjustments for population growth, adjustments for natural resource depletion improve the relation significantly. Policymakers and economists can interpret published estimates of genuine savings as signals of future consumption paths if and only if the estimates include adjustments for natural resource depletion. But better estimates of capital stocks are needed before it can be confidently said that adjustments for population growth significantly improve the accuracy of those signals. Copyright The Author 2008. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development / the world bank . All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org, Oxford University Press.

Area fees have become an increasingly important component of forest revenue systems in tropical developing countries. They are commonly viewed as having a neutral impact on decisions by timber concessionaires. This view is incorrect. Using both theoretical and empirical models, we demonstrate that area fees can induce concessionaires to accelerate timber harvests and to harvest more selectively. In Cameroon, area fees at recent levels create an incentive for concessionaires to harvest forests in half the estimated sustained-yield period. Countries that wish to encourage concessionaires to comply with sustained-yield requirements must implement measures that counter the depletion-accelerating effects of area fees.

We examine the tradeoff between the number and average size of nature reserves. When the costs of enforcing reserve boundaries are negligible, we find analytically that the relative price of biodiversity has a positive impact on the optimal total reserved area but an ambiguous impact on the optimal number of reserves. Simulation modeling of floral diversity in a tropical timber concession reveals that the resolution of this ambiguity depends on spatial distributions of the populations of tree species: whether or not they are spatially aggregated (clumped). The impact of biodiversity price on optimal reserve number remains analytically ambiguous when enforcement costs are not negligible. Multiple reserves being economically superior to a single reserve now requires, in addition to aggregation, a biodiversity price that is sufficiently high to offset the effects of enforcement costs. Most of our simulation scenarios generate threshold biodiversity prices that do not exceed a leading estimate of the marginal value of a higher plant species in the bioprospecting literature. Several smaller reserves evidently can be economically superior to a single larger one even in the presence of enforcement costs.

Since surgery was first included in the second edition of Disease Control Priorities (DCP2, 2006), research examining the cost-effectiveness of surgical interventions in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) has expanded substantially (see chapter 18). A growing body of evidence suggests that surgical platforms can be cost-effective in these countries, according to the criteria established by the World Health Organization (WHO) (Grimes and others 2013).In parallel, a nascent field of study within global health economics has attempted to expand the application of benefit-cost analysis (BCA) to global health interventions in these countries. In contrast with cost-effectiveness analysis, BCA seeks to estimate the net economic benefit of an intervention in monetary terms. The nature of BCA allows researchers to investigate the potential economic return of an investment in global health; it also allows ministries of health and finance to meaningfully compare health care projects to investments in other governmental sectors, such as education and transportation, which are routinely valued with BCA. The use of BCA in global health has recently become more visible; for example, Jamison, Jha, and Bloom (2008) and Jamison and others (2012) prominently feature BCA in their challenge papers for the 2008 and 2012 Copenhagen Consensus (CC).Within the surgical cost-effectiveness literature, cleft lip and palate (CLP) has been the subject of at least three cost-effectiveness studies in LMICs; all suggest that CLP can be repaired in LMICs in a cost-effective manner (Corlew 2010; Magee, Vander Burg, and Hatcher 2010; Poenaru 2013). A more thorough review of CLP can be found in chapters 8 and 13 of this volume. The role of cesarean delivery in the context of obstructed labor, and its associated cost and benefit, has been previously studied by the authors (Alkire and others 2012a) and is presented here with updated results. This chapter presents two distinct BCAs: An approach for performing BCA using CLP repair as a model surgical intervention using primary data from a subspecialty hospital dedicated to CLP in India A BCA based on secondary data that model the benefit and cost of cesarean delivery for treatment of obstructed labor in 47 LMICs.

© The Author(s) 2014 Reprints and permissions: sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav. The incentives for resource extraction and development make the conservation of biodiversity challenging within tropical forestlands. The 2007 establishment of the Royal Belum State Park in the Malaysian state of Perak offers lessons for creating protected areas in tropical countries where subnational governments are major forestland owners. This article elucidates the social and political forces that influenced Royal Belum’s creation. Those forces included Malaysian conservation groups’ efforts to establish the ecological uniqueness of the site and rally public support to protect it; the Perak state government, which is the landowner under Malaysia’s constitution, seeking a protection option that would minimize the economic costs to it (and perhaps generate net economic benefits); and the federal government providing a legal framework and support for park protection and ecotourism development. Successful long-run protection of Royal Belum will require action beyond simply designating the area as protected.

Our society faces the pressing challenge of increasing agricultural production while minimizing negative consequences on ecosystems and the global climate. Indonesia, which has pledged to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from deforestation while doubling production of several major agricultural commodities, exemplifies this challenge. Here we focus on palm oil, the world's most abundant vegetable oil and a commodity that has contributed significantly to Indonesia's economy. Most oil palm expansion in the country has occurred at the expense of forests, resulting in significant GHG emissions. We examine the extent to which land management policies can resolve the apparently conflicting goals of oil palm expansion and GHG mitigation in Kalimantan, a major oil palm growing region of Indonesia. Using a logistic regression model to predict the locations of new oil palm between 2010 and 2020 we evaluate the impacts of six alternative policy scenarios on future emissions. We estimate net emissions of 128.4-211.4 MtCO2 yr(-1) under business as usual expansion of oil palm plantations. The impact of diverting new plantations to low carbon stock land depends on the design of the policy. We estimate that emissions can be reduced by 9-10% by extending the current moratorium on new concessions in primary forests and peat lands, 35% by limiting expansion on all peat and forestlands, 46% by limiting expansion to areas with moderate carbon stocks, and 55-60% by limiting expansion to areas with low carbon stocks. Our results suggest that these policies would reduce oil palm profits only moderately but would vary greatly in terms of cost-effectiveness of emissions reductions. We conclude that a carefully designed and implemented oil palm expansion plan can contribute significantly towards Indonesia's national emissions mitigation goal, while allowing oil palm area to double.

In rapidly industrializing countries, decisions need to be made as to what characteristics new tropical forest parks in or near urban areas should have. Using a discrete choice experiment, we estimate prospective visitors' willingness-to-pay for a range of forest park characteristics for a representative sample of Malaysian households in the Kuala Lumpur-Selangor region. To enable park managers to adapt park designs to important types of heterogeneity among park visitors, we further identify how these estimates vary across geography (i.e., residential location: urban, suburban, rural), major ethnic groups, and patterns of recreational behavior. We show how a model that includes a wide array of visitor heterogeneity can be used to identify configurations of park characteristics that maximize social welfare across both the general sample and specific subgroups of prospective visitors.' Refereed/Peer-reviewed

Previous studies have found that atmospheric brown clouds partially offset the warming effects of greenhouse gases. This finding suggests a tradeoff between the impacts of reducing emissions of aerosols and greenhouse gases. Results from a statistical model of historical rice harvests in India, coupled with regional climate scenarios from a parallel climate model, indicate that joint reductions in brown clouds and greenhouse gases would in fact have complementary, positive impacts on harvests. The results also imply that adverse climate changes due to brown clouds and greenhouse gases contributed to the slowdown in harvest growth that occurred during the past two decades.

(2006). Quick Fixes for the Environment: Part of the Solution or Part of the Problem? Environment: Science and Policy for Sustainable Development: Vol. 48, No. 10, pp. 20-27.

The most important message of Levin (Ecol Res 21:328–333, 2006) is that “Ecologists and economists have much incentive for interaction.” Recent studies that account for evolutionary processes and local interactions support this view by obtaining results that run counter to conventional wisdom within resource economics. A second major message of the article is that to meet environmental challenges, humanity must develop social norms that enhance cooperative responses. Successful examples of resource management systems back up norms with economic incentives: rewards for good behavior and punishments for bad. Economic incentives are especially important if rapid and large changes in human behavior are desired.

The Amazon rainforest, the world's largest and most biodiverse, represents a global public good of which 15 percent has already been lost. The worldwide value of preserving the remaining forest is today unknown. A"Delphi"exercise was conducted involving more than 200 environmental valuation experts from 36 countries, who were asked to predict the outcome of a survey to elicit willingness to pay for Amazon forest preservation among their own countries'populations. Expert judgments of average willingness-to-pay levels, per household per year, to fund a plan to protect all of the current Amazon rainforest up to 2050, range from $4 to $36 in 12 Asian countries, to near $100 in Canada, Germany, and Norway, with other high-income countries in between. Somewhat lower willingness-to-pay values were found for a less strict plan that allows a 12 percent further rainforest area reduction. The elasticity of experts'willingness-to-pay assessments with respect to own-country per capita income is slightly below but not significantly different from unity when results are pooled across countries and income is adjusted for purchasing power parity.

Information on the potential costs of HIV/AIDS to the private sector is needed if companies are to be given a financial incentive to invest in prevention and treatment interventions. To estimate the cost of HIV/AIDS to businesses in southern Africa using company-specific data on employees costs and HIV prevalence. Six formal sector enterprises in South Africa and Botswana provided detailed human resource financial and medical data and carried out voluntary anonymous HIV seroprevalence surveys. The present value of incident HIV infections with a 9-year median survival and 7% real discount rate was estimated. Costs included were sick leave; productivity loss; supervisory time; retirement death disability and medical benefits; and recruitment and training of replacement workers. HIV prevalence in the workforces studied ranged from 7.9 to 25.0%. HIV/ AIDS among employees added 0.4–5.9% to the companies’ annual salary and wage bills. The present value of an incident HIV infection ranged from 0.5 to 3.6 times the annual salary of the affected worker. Costs varied widely across firms and among job levels within .rms. Key reasons for the differences included HIV prevalence levels and stability of employee benefits and the contractual status of unskilled workers. Some costs were omitted from the analysis because of lack of data and results should be regarded as quite conservative. AIDS is causing labor costs for businesses in southern Africa to rise and threatens the competitiveness of African industry. Research on the effectiveness of workplace interventions is urgently needed. (authors)

Fixed logging costs and administrative constraints on logging regulations can create nonconvexities in forestry production sets that include timber and nontimber products. Managing forests to produce multiple values at a landscape level, through the aggregation of stands that are completely or partially specialized in the production of timber or nontimber products, can consequently be superior to management systems that treat all stands uniformly, even when all stands are identical. Both fixed costs and administrative constraints are empirically important sources of nonconvexity in tropical rainforests. The former is more important when the nontimber product is carbon sequestration, while the latter is more important when the nontimber product is biodiversity protection. Uniform management appears to be superior for the joint production of timber and carbon sequestration, while specialized management might often be superior for the joint production of timber and biodiversity, at least at low discount rates.

The economic justification for public expenditure is especially strong in the case of environmental management. Yet expenditures on environmental management have received little attention in public expenditure reviews by the World Bank and other international development organisations. An initial analysis of environmental expenditures in the Indonesian government budget between FY1994/95 and FY1998/99 yields four basic findings. First, most spending in the nominal environmental sector, sector 10 (Environment and Spatial Planning), is on non-environmental activities, and much environmental expenditure occurs in other budget sectors. Second, environmental expenditures fell sharply in real terms during the economic crisis, to levels far below those in FY94/95. Third, they also fell sharply relative to the budget and to GDP. Finally, environmental expenditures declined more in Indonesia during the economic crisis than in Malaysia, Thailand and Korea, relative to both the budget and GDP.

Habitat destruction and infectious disease are dual threats to nature and people. The potential to simultaneously advance conservation and human health has attracted considerable scientific and popular interest; in particular, many authors have justified conservation action by pointing out potential public health benefits [1–5]. One major focus of this debate—that biodiversity conservation often decreases infectious disease transmission via the dilution effect—remains contentious [6–8]. Studies that test for a dilution effect often find a negative association between a diversity metric and a disease risk metric [8], but how such associations should inform conservation policy remains unclear for several reasons. For one, diversity and infection risk have many definitions, making it possible to identify measures that conform to expectations [9]. Furthermore, the premise that habitat destruction consistently reduces biodiversity is in question [10,11], and disturbance or conservation can affect disease in many ways other than through biodiversity change [12,13]. To date, few studies have examined the broader set of mechanisms by which anthropogenic disturbance or conservation might increase or decrease infectious disease risk to human populations (e.g. [14–17]). Due to interconnections between biodiversity change, economics and human behaviour (e.g. [18]), moving from ecological theory to policy action requires understanding how social and economic factors affect conservation. This Theme Issue arose from a meeting aimed at synthesizing current theory and data on ‘biodiversity, conservation and infectious disease’ (4–6 May 2015). Ecologists, evolutionary biologists, economists, epidemiologists, veterinary scientists, public health professionals, and conservation biologists from around the world discussed the latest research on the ecological and socio-economic links between conservation, biodiversity and infectious disease, and the open questions and controversies in these areas. By combining ecological understanding with …

Inadequate funding from developed countries has hampered international efforts to conserve biodiversity in tropical forests. We present two complementary research approaches that reveal a significant increase in public demand for conservation within tropical developing countries as those countries reach upper-middle-income (UMI) status. We highlight UMI tropical countries because they contain nearly four-fifths of tropical primary forests, which are rich in biodiversity and stored carbon. The first approach is a set of statistical analyses of various cross-country conservation indicators, which suggests that protective government policies have lagged behind the increase in public demand in these countries. The second approach is a case study from Malaysia, which reveals in a more integrated fashion the linkages from rising household income to increased household willingness to pay for conservation, nongovernmental organization activity, and delayed government action. Our findings suggest that domestic funding in UMI tropical countries can play a larger role in (i) closing the funding gap for tropical forest conservation, and (ii) paying for supplementary conservation actions linked to international payments for reduced greenhouse gas emissions from deforestation and forest degradation in tropical countries Refereed/Peer-reviewed

Despite the proliferation of micro and small enterprises (MSEs) in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA), most have difficulty surviving, let alone expanding their operations. Using empirical evidence from two Ugandan towns we explore the impact of investments in water supply infrastructure on MSEs. Our findings suggest that, despite perceptions among firm owners that water supply is a binding constraint, economic benefits to MSEs of supply improvements may be limited. Current water infrastructure planning strategies may be based on erroneous assumptions about the relative demand for improved water supply by firms and households, as well as the feasibility of cross-subsidies between groups of users.

A decade has passed since Wasting Assets, a study of Indonesia by Robert Repetto and colleagues at the World Resources Institute, drew widespread attention to the potential divergence between gross and net measures of national income. This was by no means the first ‘green accounting’ study. Martin Weitzman, John Hartwick, and Partha Dasgupta and Geoffrey Heal had all conducted seminal theoretical work in the 1970s. But the World Resources Institute study demonstrated that data were adequate even in a developing country to estimate adjustments for the depletion of some important forms of natural capital and that the adjustments could be large relative to conventional, gross measures of national product and investment. The adjusted, net measures suggested that a substantial portion of Indonesia's rapid economic growth during the 1970s and 1980s was simply the unsustainable ‘cashing in’ of the country's natural wealth.

National accounting issues related to forest resources have attracted much attention recently. The net-depletion method, the most popular method for estimating aggregate changes in the value of timber stocks, tends to overstate both the depreciation of mature forests due to harvests and the appreciation of immature forests due to growth. Alternative, correct methods, which I term the net-price and El Serafy variations, can be derived from an asset valuation model that takes forest age into account. An empirical example indicates that estimates from the net-depletion method can deviate from actual values by up to 40 percent for some age classes.

Hyde, Amacher, and Magrath (1996) imply that deforestation and timber rents (logging revenue minus logging costs other than timber fees) are not subjects that justify policymakers' attention, arguing that market responses limit the scope of deforestation and that rents are usually small. But they fail to recognize that land markets will not develop efficiently, nor will efficient levels of forestry investments occur, when policy distortions and other factors obstruct the conversion of open-access forests to private or communal ownership. For these reasons rates of deforestation can be far above optimal levels. Contrary to the authors' claims, timber rents often (although not always) are large in developing countries. Moreover, the allocation of rents between loggers and the government owners of public forests can indeed affect the profitability of forestry (and thus deforest ation), the intensity of timber harvesting, and national welfare. Copyright 1998 by Oxford University Press.

Previous studies of the association between pollution and income have tended to analyse cross-sectional or panel data for a sample of developing and developed countries. This paper presents an analysis for a single country, Malaysia. This south-east Asian country has more, and probably better, data on environmental quality than perhaps any other developing country. I find that pollution–income relationships from the cross-country studies fail to predict accurately trends in air and water pollution in Malaysia. In particular, none of six pollution-income relationships estimated using a panel data set for Malaysian states has the hypothesized 'environmental Kuznets curve' form. Although these results are inconsistent with the predictions of the cross-country relationships, they make sense in the Malaysian context. Perhaps most important, their interpretation confirms the importance of policy decisions in determining environmental outcomes.

Exogenous price changes affect the amount that a small country exporting natural resource commodities must invest to sustain its consumption level. The necessary amount is given by the difference between Hotelling rent and the discounted sum of future terms-of-trade effects (capital gains). The latter term is found to be large relative to the former in the case of petroleum depletion in Indonesia. This suggests that resource-rich countries will need to invest more than previously expected to sustain their consumption levels, if natural resource prices continue their long-term historical decline.