Three Essays on the Economics of Conservation Policy

Abstract

The challenges of sustainable development require land use which supports healthy ecosystems. As two sides of the same process, restoring degraded lands and protecting lands play a dual role in the path towards reaching those goals. In three essays, I use methods of economic and political analysis to understand the policy challenges faced by conservation practice, including restoration planning, protected area governance, and protected area evaluation. Priorities of where to invest in ecosystem restoration are of major policy interest. While shifting ecological and land use dynamics have been shown to affect restoration plans, the impact of changing conditions on the economic value of restoration sites remains less explored. Climate change can be expected to affect both the benefits and costs of both a particular restoration project as well as large-scale restoration planning decisions, through changing crop yields, shifting vegetation, and urbanization, among other factors, potentially leading to abandonment or forgone opportunity. Here, I first present a framework for how economic value calculations for a restoration project are affected by projected future changes. I then apply the model to an empirical context of ecological interest: forest replanting in Brazil, compiling a dataset which includes spatial variation in opportunity costs, habitat protection benefits, biodiversity intactness, and projected changes in each of those variables as of 2050. I focus on the implications of two specific drivers of change: changing crop yields predicted by economic projections of climate models, and changing habitat driven by shifts in forest cover. I find that targeted restoration can be justified in a majority of areas across the country at present by habitat value alone, yet that conditions in 2050 would yield far more restoration benefits than present conditions would suggest, implying the need for greater present-day investment. I also find sizeable geographic changes to restoration priorities at multiple scales, including a shift towards central regions of the country, away from at-risk forests in the Amazon and improving agricultural regions of the south. The extent of changing priorities differs with the extent of restoration, with a greater degree of changes in priorities at low levels of restoration investment. The expansion of Marine Protected Areas (MPAs) is a major conservation priority, providing vital services for local populations and ecosystems alike. However, MPA effectiveness varies widely, often depending on governance—the rules and practices that regulate resource use. In Eastern Indonesia, the State University of Papua and the World Wildlife Fund have been collecting data from 230 settlements across 12 MPAs to investigate patterns of governance and understand the factors behind MPA success. This study applies Ostrom’s Design Principles for common pool resource governance, aggregating survey data to measure alignment with governance principles and conducting robustness checks to validate the framework. I use cluster analysis (Latent Profile Analysis) to identify common governance patterns among settlements. The analysis reveals substantial variation in governance across and within MPAs. While some MPAs demonstrate uniformly high levels of governance alignment, others show significant heterogeneity, potentially impacting their effectiveness. Cluster analysis identified four general categories of governance among settlements, highlighting areas of both strong and weak alignment with principles. Notably, the role of higher-level governance exhibited a distinct distribution among good governance principles, suggesting external management influences. These findings demonstrate the variation within single MPAs, emphasizing the need for context-specific approaches to governance. The framework provides a template for evaluating governance practices in MPAs, both by operationalizing Ostrom’s principles and using LPA to identify patterns of governance. The analysis also yields context-specific insights on the nature of governance in the MPAs of Eastern Indonesia and its alignment with principles of good governance. Estimating the impact of protected areas (PAs) on ecological outcomes is central to conservation goals, yet non-random site selection and effects which vary across space and time present challenges. I construct a dataset of PA creation and land cover change across 1km grid cells spanning over thirty years along the coast of Brazil, focusing on a common governance type, strictly protected PAs, and ecosystem, mangrove forests. I use a difference-in-differences estimator with staggered implementation, enabled by high temporal resolution data on mangrove forest cover. After matching, yearly estimates suggest a decrease in mangrove cover prior to PA creation followed by an increase following creation, a pattern which eventually attenuates, yet is more present in federal and strict PAs. Given the possibility of selection effects rather than anticipation, to construct a balanced sample I aggregate outcomes and treatment to four-year intervals based on federal planning cycles. Across all aggregated specifications, I do not find a significant effect of protection status. In tandem, the annual and four-year results suggest the possibility of time-specific effects across the study period, but at a minimum, align with the literature on limited PA effects in the aggregate.