Nature Based Solutions for Conservation and Development

Abstract

There is a growing need to reconcile conservation and development objectives. Policies designed to achieve each goal have often operated in tension, limiting their effectiveness when pursued in isolation. Nature based solutions is one approach aimed at increasing synergies between environmental protection and economic development. This dissertation contributes to this by exploring three distinct contexts: (1) the environmental effects of ecotourism concessions and the entry of tourists in the Peruvian Amazon, (2) farmers’ preferences for grassland conservation contracts in Uruguay, and (3) the socioeconomic impacts of timber certification programs in Brazil. Through this work, I provide empirical evidence on underexplored topics in environmental and development economics, simultaneously informing key policy areas such as tourism development, sustainable agriculture, and forest resource management.The first chapter employs a mixed-methods approach to estimate the effects of tourism on forest cover and to identify the factors that condition the success of ecotourism as a conservation tool. The second chapter designs and implements a discrete choice experiment to elicit farmers’ preferences for key contract attributes relevant to the conservation of natural grassland quality. The third chapter applies a battery of quantitative methods to assess the impacts of timber certification on local socioeconomic outcomes in communities.Taken together, the dissertation highlights the importance of context-specific policy design, attention to heterogeneity across sectors and populations, and careful alignment of economic incentives with conservation objectives. Using the three cases of Peru, Uruguay, and Brazil, the results point to concrete pathways through which conservation and development goals can be jointly pursued, as well as to the conditions under which such complementarities are most likely to emerge.