TY - JOUR
T1 - What works in tropical forest conservation, and what does not
T2 - Effectiveness of four strategies in terms of environmental, social, and economic outcomes
AU - Burivalova, Zuzana
AU - Allnutt, Thomas F.
AU - Rademacher, Dan
AU - Schlemm, Annika
AU - Wilcove, David S.
AU - Butler, Rhett A.
N1 - Funding Information:
We thank Umesh Srinivasan, Fangyuan Hua, Shreya Dasgupta, Mike Gaworecki, Rebecca Kessler, Erik Hoffner, Willie Shubert, Jon Christensen, Peter Kareiva, Amy Fensome, Fernanda Tomaselli, and all participants of the VIA workshop on forest certification for advice and help with this project, which was financially supported by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation and the World Wildlife Fund. Z.B. was also supported by the NatureNet Science Fellowship.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2019, John Wiley and Sons Inc. All rights reserved.
PY - 2019/6
Y1 - 2019/6
N2 - Tropical forests and their biodiversity are disappearing, despite decades of conservation efforts. Are we now in a position to understand whether some conservation strategies work better while others consistently fail in protecting tropical forests? We searched the literature to evaluate four mainstream strategies (forest certification and reduced impact logging, payments for ecosystem services, protected areas, community forest management) in terms of 35 environmental, social, and economic metrics. We evaluated whether applying the strategy improved, left unchanged, or worsened the conservation metrics and we created an interactive platform to view the data. We concluded that (a) the scientific literature on the effectiveness of conservation strategies in tropical forests is still vastly inadequate, due to poor design, lack of scope, and too few examples; (b) the effects of conservation on biodiversity and the economic outcomes of conservation are particularly understudied; and (c) all strategies fail at least some of the times, but all of them succeed at least some times. Our recommendation is that each new instance of implementing a given strategy should consider in detail, at the very least, the negative evidence on the given strategy, in order to avoid repeating the same mistakes. We introduce an interactive, dynamic platform to host various types of conservation effectiveness evidence.
AB - Tropical forests and their biodiversity are disappearing, despite decades of conservation efforts. Are we now in a position to understand whether some conservation strategies work better while others consistently fail in protecting tropical forests? We searched the literature to evaluate four mainstream strategies (forest certification and reduced impact logging, payments for ecosystem services, protected areas, community forest management) in terms of 35 environmental, social, and economic metrics. We evaluated whether applying the strategy improved, left unchanged, or worsened the conservation metrics and we created an interactive platform to view the data. We concluded that (a) the scientific literature on the effectiveness of conservation strategies in tropical forests is still vastly inadequate, due to poor design, lack of scope, and too few examples; (b) the effects of conservation on biodiversity and the economic outcomes of conservation are particularly understudied; and (c) all strategies fail at least some of the times, but all of them succeed at least some times. Our recommendation is that each new instance of implementing a given strategy should consider in detail, at the very least, the negative evidence on the given strategy, in order to avoid repeating the same mistakes. We introduce an interactive, dynamic platform to host various types of conservation effectiveness evidence.
KW - biodiversity
KW - community forest management
KW - conservation evidence
KW - deforestation
KW - forest certification
KW - payments for ecosystem services
KW - protected areas
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U2 - 10.1111/csp2.28
DO - 10.1111/csp2.28
M3 - Review article
AN - SCOPUS:85072217032
SN - 2578-4854
VL - 1
JO - Conservation Science and Practice
JF - Conservation Science and Practice
IS - 6
M1 - e28
ER -