Titled Amazon Indigenous Communities Cut Forest Carbon Emissions

Allen Blackman and Peter Veit

Ecological Economics, 2018, vol. 153, issue C, 56-67

Abstract: Indigenous communities (ICs) have emerged as important players in global efforts to reduce forest carbon emissions, in part because they are viewed as conscientious stewards of the forest lands to which they have legal title. Yet ICs tend to be located in remote areas where deforestation would be limited regardless of who manages them. Therefore, to determine whether IC management actually cuts forest carbon emissions, it is important to control for such confounding factors. To that end, we use propensity score matching and regression to analyze the effects on 2001–2013 deforestation and forest carbon emissions of IC management in the Amazon regions of Bolivia, Brazil, Ecuador and Colombia. We find that IC management reduces both deforestation and forest carbon emissions in Bolivia, Brazil and Colombia. We are not able to discern a statistically significant effect in Ecuador. These findings suggest that IC management can, in fact, help combat climate change.

Keywords: Amazon; Brazil; Bolivia; Climate; Colombia; Deforestation; Ecuador; Forest carbon; Indigenous community; Matching; REDD (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (12)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0921800917309746
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:ecolec:v:153:y:2018:i:c:p:56-67

DOI: 10.1016/j.ecolecon.2018.06.016

Access Statistics for this article

Ecological Economics is currently edited by C. J. Cleveland

More articles in Ecological Economics from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().