Forest Policy and Economics最新文献

The impact of forest certification standards on firm management and market performance is analysed in this paper, so as to isolate the influence of internal (moral and learning) and external (market and signalling) sources of motivation. To do so, three propositions are formulated and then empirically tested on a sample of Spanish companies certified by the Programme for the Endorsement of Forest Certification (PEFC). In the structural model, the association of the external motivations with management performance was not confirmed, although the one of internal motivations was significant and companies certified due to internal reasons yielded greater benefits. Our results suggested that the implementation of forest certification per se will not improve overall performance. Moreover, when the standard is internally driven, it is reasonable to expect the implementation of the necessary measures to improve management performance, using the guidelines prescribed by such standard. The findings may be used to characterize certified firms and to anticipate the benefits of both the implementation and the certification of the standard, shedding light on the associations between the motivational factors and the benefits of forest certification standards, a field which has yet to be addressed.

Forests play a significant role in Norway's Land Use, Land-Use Change, and Forestry (LULUCF) sector, where the forest sink is equal to about 40% of the national emissions from all other sectors combined. Although not an EU member, Norway has adopted the EU LULUCF regulation through a climate agreement with the EU. This article examines how the LULUCF regulation influences the coherence of Norway's forest policies. Adopting the regulation initially received little public debate, but there is increasing political contestation over how to achieve the LULUCF net carbon dioxide removal target. In the short term, reaching the target might imply rapidly reducing forest harvest, but this would decrease activity in the forestry sector and the supply of harvested wood products that could involve substituting less climate-friendly materials and energy sources. From a long-term perspective, forest management efforts like denser planting, fertilization, harvesting, and rejuvenation might be needed to increase the forest sink capacity. Such policies are supported by forest owners and forestry organizations, but they are opposed by some environmental NGOs and other stakeholders advocating for the protection of forests and biological diversity. The study concludes that assessments of coherence crucially depend on how problems are defined and the time perspective adopted.

People's participation in decision-making processes in the domain of forest management has been acknowledged as an effective mechanism for improving livelihoods and forest conditions. The present study makes an attempt to ascertain the participation levels and identify the factors influencing the people's participation in Joint Forest Management (JFM) programmes in the Kashmir Himalayas. The study is based on primary data, with a sample size of 434 households collected through a two-stage random sampling survey. The Participation Index (PI) was used to measure people's participation across different stages: planning, implementation, and monitoring. The determinants that influence the level of participation are then analyzed through the Binary Logistic Regression Model (BLRM). The findings indicate that the people's participation at the planning stage was 47.93%, at the implementation stage 54.38%, and at the monitoring stage 49.46%, indicating an overall moderate level of participation. The BLRM depicts that among the selected variables, gender, marital status, years of schooling, land holding size, income from forest, distance from the market, training, knowledge, and information have a significantly positive influence, while age, distance from the forest, restrictions on charcoal/timber harvesting, and a lack of incentives were found to have a significant negative influence on the people's participation in the JFM programme. Therefore, policy reforms should be reoriented to improve the organizational structure of forest management groups and implement fair benefit-sharing mechanisms, which are crucial for enhancing the participation of local communities in forest management initiatives.

Across the Pacific, deforestation and forest degradation are driving the loss of ecosystem services. Increasing recognition of the need for mechanisms that can bridge economic development and environmental sustainability has led to the emergence of the broad concept of Nature-based Solutions (NbS), including Payments for Environmental Services (PES) such as ‘reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation’ (REDD+) of forested areas. REDD+ projects are being piloted in the region, but the scale of adoption remains limited raising doubts about whether the concept has much appeal beyond small-scale government-supported initiatives. Although a relatively simple concept, it is proving difficult to translate into an appealing practice that is widely understood and adopted by rural land managers. We conducted a review of the achievements and challenges of REDD+ projects in Melanesia while drawing on global and regional lessons. Most projects are reaping the benefits of enhanced community development, employment, capacity building, and stronger governance. Perverse incentives, lack of systematic assessments of carbon offsets, poor stakeholder engagement, insufficient feedback mechanisms, marginalisation of women, and the lack of prosperous and sustainable alternative livelihoods remain key challenges. This suggests the need for developing policy mixes, understanding the drivers of deforestation and forest degradation, addressing equity concerns, strengthening tenure security, removing perverse incentives, and ensuring financially competitive conservation incentives for enhancing the appeal of REDD+ to rural communities, policymakers, and the private sector, so its reach across the Pacific can be extended.

The rapid disappearance of tropical forests has led to increased adoption of sustainability commitments. However, implementing zero-deforestation commitments faces numerous challenges, including resistance from those who benefit from the current practices in agricultural commodity-exporting countries, such as large-scale farmers. This study focuses on industrial soy farmers in Tocantins, a Brazilian state in the Cerrado ecoregion with high soy-driven deforestation rates. Drawing from a review of the land-use change literature in Brazil and background interviews with soy farmers in Tocantins, we ran a focus group with them to appraise three scenarios of increased restrictions on agricultural land-use expansion. They are: (1) access to a productivity-increasing technology conditioned to refraining from opening new farms in areas with native vegetation; (2) a hardened European policy limiting imports to conversion-free soy regardless of the ecosystem; and (3) a strengthening of Brazil's environmental policy, increasing the amount of land farmers are to set aside for conservation. Our findings show Brazilian soy farmers are highly skeptical of environmental regulations and suspicious of foreign actors. While rallying for greater autonomy, they rejected attempts to rein in their (agri)business-as-usual practices and dismissed such policy efforts as ultimately driven by hidden agendas – showing a strong inclination to resort to conspiracy theories, understood as alternative explanations that attribute events to scheming by powerful actors. A frontier mindset, underscored by libertarian values, coupled with distrust in state institutions or in the motives of foreign regulators thus create an obstructive, reactionary stance in the face of zero-deforestation efforts in Brazil.

The study assesses the impact of the Forest Law Enforcement, Governance and Trade Voluntary Partnership Agreement (FLEGT VPA) and the Lacey Act Amendment (LAA) on the export quantities of wood products from Cameroon, Ghana and the Republic of Congo using the panel gravity Poisson Pseudo Maximum Likelihood (PPML) technique. The results indicate that FLEGT VPA had a negative and significant impact on industrial roundwood export quantity from all three countries. Similarly, its effects on the export of sawnwood and wood-based panels are also negative, except for Cameroon. On the other hand, the impact of LAA appears to be mixed. These results are validated by applying an alternative Driscoll-Kraay robust standard error estimation method.

In customary tenure systems, the literature documents the limitations of land formalization in ensuring tenure security and fostering investment. One hypothesis put forward for this is that formalized tenure arrangements offer little legal protection; and as a result, farmers look for their socio-political connections to ensure tenure security and make investment decisions. By distinguishing trust in institutions from trust in social networks, this study examines their relationship with tenure security and investment in high-value trees. Using data from Liberian farmers who grow rubber, cocoa and coffee, we use two-stage IV regression to explore the divergent relationship of the trust indicators with tenure security. Moreover, using tenure security as an endogenous switching variable, we explore its correlation with investment. We find both trust indicators are positively related with tenure security while alternative specifications appear to show the more important role of trust on institutions for enhancing tenure security. We also find both trust indicators spur investment, and note of their divergent influence on investment in different trees. These results reflect a growing recognition of the need to decouple trust on institutions from social trust to give policy development a useful direction on the divergent influence of tenure institutions, such as social and institutional trust.

This paper investigates timber legality issues in the Western Balkans by examining the transposition of national policy frameworks in five Western Balkan countries (Slovenia, Croatia, Serbia, Montenegro, and the Republic of Srpska, BH) with the European Union Timber Regulation (EUTR) requirements. The study uses a multiple-embedded case study design to investigate national policies and regulations on preventing and tackling illegal logging and those dealing with the trade in timber and timber products. A qualitative content analysis of retrieved documents was conducted to check the extent to which EUTR requirements are covered. Interviews with 36 key actors across selected countries were conducted to analyse their perceptions of the EUTR and the recently approved European Union Deforestation Regulation (EUDR), focusing on awareness, transparency, information flow, resources, and challenges of ensuring timber legality. The study also distinguished institutional and actor-oriented factors influencing the transposition of EUTR and forthcoming EUDR requirements into national policies and forest management practices. The contribution offers a comparative gap analysis of EU requirements' incorporation within targeted countries' national policy frameworks and an overview of common and opposing perceptions on timber legality and legitimate forestry practices among key stakeholders in five Western Balkan countries.

This study surveyed 292 visitors to eight recreational forests during the COVID-19 pandemic to investigate whether the pandemic had a stimulatory effect on visitation rates. An increase in visitation was noted, with existing visitors visiting more frequently. Many indicated that they planned to continue to visit more and the enjoyment they gained from the recreational experience was high. Few novel visitors were encountered. Using logistic regression, employed individuals and those working in the ‘Office/Education/Health’ sector were found to be significantly more likely to increase the frequency of their visits during the pandemic than those unemployed or working in other sectors; the opposite was true for older visitors. Using a panel regression model, it was found that increasing distance to a recreational forest was inversely related with level of preference; broadleaf forests and forests containing recreational facilities were positively correlated with level of preference. Visitors tended to have higher education levels than the population at large. They also did not generally travel far to reach a recreational forest and predominantly travelled by car. The results support the expansion of the forest estate near public transport and urban areas to maximise opportunities for forest recreation. They also highlight that more needs to be done to attract new visitors to forests and to expand the diversity of visitors.

This bibliometric study is situated in the context of increasing awareness of inequalities in forest science. It was led by a single, core question: What geographical inequalities structure global forest science and how do they align with the natural geographical distribution of forest areas? Bourdieu's field theory was used to investigate the inequalities, focusing on three types of capital considered important for participation in global science: scientific capital (products of knowledge and acts of recognition), collaboration capital, and funding capital. To operationalise the types of capital for bibliometric analysis, eight regional-level indicators and seven country-level indicators were developed. The Dimensions database served as the data source to extract relevant publications in forest science from 2000 to 2021 based on the database's publication-level field classification. Forest-related research needs were determined using non-bibliometric data, specifically the extent of cover per region and country. This enabled the calculation of disparity ratios between the world shares of forest publications and the world shares of forests. The results highlight persisting inequalities in the distribution of different forms of capital in global science, as well as (mis)alignment with the geographical distribution of forest areas. While the Bourdieusian assumption that “capital breeds capital” seems to apply to two dominant regions (Europe and Northern America), explaining their continued centrality as loci of forest science, it does not seem to apply more generally. The study points to a mismatch between research foci and needs, which is concerning given the importance of place and context in forest science.