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China and Vietnam have developed some of the most ambitious payments for ecosystem services (PES) initiatives for watershed conservation and forest management. These include the Sloping Land Conversion Programme in China and pilot projects designed to implement Decision 380 and the subsequent national PES law in Vietnam. This study reviews how these two government-driven initiatives […]

Cost-effectiveness is an important aspect in the assessment of payments for environmental services (PES) initiatives. In participatory field trials with communities in Western Kenya, we combined procurement auctions for forest enrichment contracts with performance-based payments and compared the outcomes with a baseline scenario currently used by the Kenyan Forest Service. Procurement auctions were the most […]

The relationship between forests and human nutrition is not yet well understood. A better understanding of this relationship is vital at a time when the majority of new land for agriculture is being cleared from forests. We use Demographic Health Survey data on food consumption for children from 21 African countries and Global Land Cover […]

Quarterly socioeconomic data from 240 households are used to study the links between forest-related income and rural livelihoods in southern China. Results show average forest-related income shares of 31.5%, which was predominantly derived from cultivated non-timber sources. Forest-related income was important to households at all income levels, although lower income households were more dependent due […]

The Brazilian state of Mato Grosso was a global deforestation hotspot in the early 2000s. Deforested land is used predominantly to produce meat for distal consumption either through cattle ranching or soya bean for livestock feed. Deforestation declined dramatically in the latter part of the decade through a combination of market forces, policies, enforcement and […]