Adaptive social impact management for conservation and environmental management

Concerns about the social consequences of conservation have spurred increased attention the monitoring and evaluation of the social impacts of conservation projects. This has resulted in a growing body of research that demonstrates how conservation can produce both positive and negative social, economic, cultural, health, and governance consequences for local communities. Yet, the results of social monitoring efforts are seldom applied to adaptively manage conservation projects. Greater attention is needed to incorporating the results of social impact assessments in long‐term conservation management to minimize negative social consequences and maximize social benefits. We bring together insights from social impact assessment, adaptive management, social learning, knowledge coproduction, cross‐scale governance, and environmental planning to propose a definition and framework for adaptive social impact management (ASIM). We define ASIM as the cyclical process of monitoring and adaptively managing social impacts over the life‐span of an initiative through the 4 stages of profiling, learning, planning, and implementing. We outline 14 steps associated with the 4 stages of the ASIM cycle and provide guidance and potential methods for social‐indicator development, predictive assessments of social impacts, monitoring and evaluation, communication of results, and identification and prioritization of management responses. Successful ASIM will be aided by engaging with best practices – including local engagement and collaboration in the process, transparent communication of results to stakeholders, collective deliberation on and choice of interventions, documentation of shared learning at the site level, and the scaling up of insights to inform higher‐level conservation policies‐to increase accountability, trust, and perceived legitimacy among stakeholders. The ASIM process is broadly applicable to conservation, environmental management, and development initiatives at various scales and in different contexts.     

Coastal zone management challenges in Ghana: issues associated with coastal sediment mining

Coastal erosion is a serious environmental problem that has caused the loss of private infrastructure and national assets along Ghana’s coast. Several hard engineering measures have thus been used to protect some communities and vital state assets when they became threatened. Regardless of this problem, sediment mining activities are increasingly practiced along most of Ghana’s coast, further exacerbating coastal erosion intensity and degrading coastal ecosystems. This paper provides an overview of the activities of coastal sediment miners along four administrative Districts in the Central Region of Ghana and identifies how issues arising from the practice are managed at the local community level as well as by state environmental regulators. The study uses a mixed-method approach, involving individual and group interviews, administration of a set of structured questionnaire and field observations, to identify coastal sediment mining and emerging management issues. Overall, three main categories of coastal sediment mining activities were identified in the area. Results indicate that coastal sediment mining is widely practiced by both commercial contractors and community members, giving rise to the high perception among residents that it is the reason for the degradation of the coastline in the studied areas. The study also established that state environmental regulators have weak inter-agency cooperation leading to poor enforcement of environmental laws and non-prosecution of offending individuals. The paper suggests that since each identified sediment mining activity has its own peculiar issues and mode of operation, coastal managers should address each category independently in order to derive lasting impacts in curtailing the practice.     

Opportunities for better use of collective action theory in research and governance for invasive species management

Controlling invasive species presents a public-good dilemma. Although environmental, social, and economic benefits of control accrue to society, costs are borne by only a few individuals and organizations. For decades, policy makers have used incentives and sanctions to encourage or coerce individual actors to contribute to the public good, with limited success. Diverse, subnational efforts to collectively manage invasive plants, insects, and animals provide effective alternatives to traditional command-and-control approaches. Despite this work, there has been little systematic evaluation of collective efforts to determine whether there are consistent principles underpinning success. We reviewed 32 studies to identify the extent to which collective-action theories from related agricultural and environmental fields explain collaborative invasive species management approaches; describe and differentiate emergent invasive species collective-action efforts; and provide guidance on how to enable more collaborative approaches to invasive species management. We identified 4 types of collective action aimed at invasive species—externally led, community led, comanaged, and organizational coalitions—that provide blueprints for future invasive species management. Existing collective-action theories could explain the importance attributed to developing shared knowledge of the social-ecological system and the need for social capital. Yet, collection action on invasive species requires different types of monitoring, sanctions, and boundary definitions. We argue that future government policies can benefit from establishing flexible boundaries that encourage social learning and enable colocated individuals and organizations to identify common goals, pool resources, and coordinate efforts.     

Non-timber forest products and village livelihoods in Rajasthan,India: adaptation in a changing environment

This paper presents the results of research conducted between 2009 and 2014 in the village of Khanda Sharol in the state of Rajasthan, India. Our research objective was to determine how the livelihoods of village residents have been affected by the intensification of forest use, and the resulting loss of domestic access to traditionally used forest resources. Results indicate that changes in forest cover have resulted in a loss of livelihood options for village residents. Yet rather than being victimized by environmental change processes, this paper shows how villagers have responded by partnering with public and private actors to develop a community protected forest area that is now helping villagers to meet their livelihood needs. These findings suggest that sustainable livelihoods in rural regions of India require committed and scaled approaches involving local, public, and private actors.     

Developing an interdisciplinary and cross‐sectoral community of practice in the domain of forests and livelihoods

Although significant resources are being spent researching and fostering the relationship between forests and livelihoods to promote mutually beneficial outcomes, critical gaps in understanding persist. A core reason for such gaps is that researchers, practitioners, and policy makers lack the structured space to interact and collaborate, which is essential for effective, interdisciplinary research, practice, and evaluation. Thus, scientific findings, policy recommendations, and measured outcomes have not always been synthesized into deep, systemic understanding; learning from practice and implementation does not easily find its way into scientific analyses, and science often fails to influence policy. Communities of practice (CofPs) are dynamic sociocultural systems that bring people together to share and create knowledge around a common topic of interest. They offer participants a space and structure within which to develop new, systemic approaches to multidimensional problems on a common theme. Uniquely informed by a systems‐thinking perspective and drawing from the scientific and gray literatures and in‐depth interviews with representatives of established CofPs in the natural resource management and development domain, we argue that a well‐designed and adequately funded CofP can facilitate interdisciplinary and cross‐sectoral relationships and knowledge exchange. Well‐designed CofPs integrate a set of core features and processes to enhance individual, collective, and domain outcomes; they set out an initial but evolving purpose, encourage diverse leadership, and promote collective‐identity development. Funding facilitates effective communication strategies (e.g., in person meetings). We urge our colleagues across sectors and disciplines to take advantage of CofPs to advance the domain of forests and livelihoods.     

Multiple receptor ambient monitoring and firm compliance with environmental taxes under budget and target driven regulatory missions

We analyze the potential for an environmental monitoring agency under different regulatory missions to use multiple measures of ambient pollution levels to induce firm compliance via endogenously determined probabilistic firm-level inspections of polluting activities. Departing from previous analyses, we consider a framework where the regulator has multiple, rather than a single, measures of ambient pollution in a setting where many firms are subject to a self-reported emissions tax that is not perfectly enforceable. Under a budget-driven mission, we show that a regulator can fruitfully utilize the added information from multiple ambient monitoring receptors to induce improved environmental compliance through the creation of strategic interactions among firms. Additionally, our results provide new evidence on the relative efficiency of budget- vs. target-driven environmental enforcement missions.     

The influence of individuals in forming collective household preferences for water quality

Preference for water quality and its nonmarket valuation can be used to inform the development of pricing policies and long term supply strategies. Tap water quality is a household concern. The objective status quo of water provision varies between households and not between individuals within households, while charges are levied on households not individuals. Individual preferences differ from collective preferences. In households where there are two adults, we examine the preferences of each separately and then as a couple in collective decisions. We show the level of influence each has in developing the collective decision process. We use discrete choice experiments to model preference heterogeneity across three experiments on women, men and on both. We propose a random utility model which decomposes the error structure in the utility of alternatives so as to identify the individual influence in collective decisions. This approach to choice data analysis is new to environmental economics.     

Increasing the impact of collective incentives in payments for ecosystem services

Collective payments for ecosystem services (PES) programs make payments to groups, conditional on specified aggregate land-management outcomes. Such collective contracting may be well suited to settings with communal land tenure or decision-making. Given that collective contracting does not require costly individual-level information on outcomes, it may also facilitate conditioning on additionality (i.e., conditioning payments upon clearly improved outcomes relative to baseline). Yet collective contracting often suffers from free-riding, which undermines group outcomes and may be exacerbated or ameliorated by PES designs. We study impacts of conditioning on additionality within a number of collective PES designs. We use a framed field-laboratory experiment with participants from a new PES program in Mexico. Because social interactions are critical within collective processes, we assess the impacts from conditioning on additionality given: (1) group participation in contract design, and (2) a group coordination mechanism. Conditioning on above-baseline outcomes raised contributions, particularly among initially lower contributors. Group participation in contract design increased impact, as did the coordination mechanism.     

生物监测及其在环境监测中的应用(Biological Monitoring and Its Application in Environmental Monitoring)

生物监测是近几十年来发展起来的应用于环境监测领域的一门新兴技术,是指利用生物个体、种群或群落对环境污染或变化所产生的反应,从生物学角度对环境污染状况进行监测和评价.作为环境监测的重要组成部分,生物监测具有敏感性、长期性、连续性、经济性、非破坏性和综合性等优势,有望在生态系统环境监测、总量控制、环境风险评价、环境污染早期预警、突发事件监测和环境标准制定等领域取得突破.在总结国内外相关研究的基础上,从目前在环境监测中应用的生物监测的原理、分类、特点、方法学和实际应用等方面进行综述.尽管生物监测还有不足之处,但可以肯定,其发展和应用将会对环境监测事业产生极大的推动作用,有着非常广阔的发展前景.     

Environmental policies and productivity growth: Evidence across industries and firms

This paper investigates the impact of changes in environmental policy stringency on industry- and firm-level productivity growth in a panel of OECD countries. To test the strong version of the Porter Hypothesis (PH), we extend a neo-Schumpeterian productivity model to allow for effects of environmental policies. We use a new environmental policy stringency (EPS) index and let the effect of countries׳ environmental policies vary with the pollution intensity of the industry and with the countries’ and firms’ technological advancement. A tightening of environmental policy is associated with a short-term increase in industry-level productivity growth in the most technologically-advanced countries. This effect diminishes with the distance to the global productivity frontier, eventually becoming insignificant. For the average firm, no evidence of PH is found. However, the most productive firms see a temporary boost in productivity growth, while the less productive ones experience a productivity slowdown.     

Principles and processes for enhancing sustainable rural livelihoods: Collaborative learning in Uganda

Livelihood diversification is essential to food security and improved incomes for human development in African rural communities. Uganda's agrarian economy suffers from limited diversification, environmental degradation, low incomes, and multifaceted negative impacts of AIDS. Efforts to stimulate and support innovation in agricultural production technology, forms of social organization, and poor markets are essential elements in promotion of sustainable rural livelihoods. Iowa State University's Center for Sustainable Rural Livelihoods and its partner organizations are applying a multi-dimensional approach to engage Uganda farmers and rural leaders in community-based learning and capability strengthening. We describe the role played by livelihood diversification and explore the promotion of sustainable livelihoods through scholarship with praxis. Sustainable livelihoods concepts are examined as a means to better understand contemporary African rural development. We identify principles and processes critical to achieving sustainable livelihoods. Their application is highlighted based on our early collaborative experience, including a discussion of the complexities associated with entering into balanced partnerships required for a successful community-based program. We explore the value of social science perspectives and processes for strengthening rural development in developing countries.     

Impact of payments for environmental services and protected areas on local livelihoods and forest conservation in northern Cambodia

The potential impacts of payments for environmental services (PES) and protected areas (PAs) on environmental outcomes and local livelihoods in developing countries are contentious and have been widely debated. The available evidence is sparse, with few rigorous evaluations of the environmental and social impacts of PAs and particularly of PES. We measured the impacts on forests and human well‐being of three different PES programs instituted within two PAs in northern Cambodia, using a panel of intervention villages and matched controls. Both PES and PAs delivered additional environmental outcomes relative to the counterfactual: reducing deforestation rates significantly relative to controls. PAs increased security of access to land and forest resources for local households, benefiting forest resource users but restricting households’ ability to expand and diversify their agriculture. The impacts of PES on household well‐being were related to the magnitude of the payments provided. The two higher paying market‐linked PES programs had significant positive impacts, whereas a lower paying program that targeted biodiversity protection had no detectable effect on livelihoods, despite its positive environmental outcomes. Households that signed up for the higher paying PES programs, however, typically needed more capital assets; hence, they were less poor and more food secure than other villagers. Therefore, whereas the impacts of PAs on household well‐being were limited overall and varied between livelihood strategies, the PES programs had significant positive impacts on livelihoods for those that could afford to participate. Our results are consistent with theories that PES, when designed appropriately, can be a powerful new tool for delivering conservation goals whilst benefiting local people.     

Neurological and neuropsychological deterioration in artisanal gold miners from the town of Andacollo,Chile

It is widely known that human exposure to mercury vapor can cause neurological and neuropsychological deterioration. We have investigated if a population of Chilean artisanal gold-mining workers heavily exposed to elemental mercury (Hg⁰) display neurological and neuropsychological impairment. Male volunteers occupationally exposed to Hg⁰ (“gold miners”, n = 35) were recruited and compared with a group of unexposed workers (n = 40). Blood specimens were obtained from both groups for total mercury quantification. Upon neurological examination, 71% of the “gold miners” group showed abnormalities expressed as frontal impairment, tremor, or simultaneously frontal impairment, parkinsonism, and pyramidal syndrome. In contrast, only 16% of the individuals in the control group displayed neurological abnormalities. The “gold miners” group also showed impairment of the neuropsychological performance and the distribution of abnormal scores for almost all the neuropsychological tests applied was significantly higher in this group compared to the control group. Educational level, alcohol intake, and smoking habits did not influence the outcome of the neurological or neuropsychological examinations. Finally, despite that the higher blood mercury concentrations were found in the “gold miners” group, they were not significantly different from the values obtained in the control group.     

Trade liberalization, corruption, and environmental policy formation: theory and evidence

This study explores the linkages between trade policy, corruption, and environmental policy. We begin by presenting a theoretical model that produces several testable predictions, including: (i) the effect of trade liberalization on the stringency of environmental policy depends on the level of corruption; and (ii) corruption reduces environmental policy stringency. Using panel data from a mix of developed and developing countries from 1982 to 1992, we find evidence that supports these conjectures. We view these results as representing an attempt at understanding the myriad of complex relationships that exist in an open economy.     

Changes in surface water quality from small-scale gold mining operations in the Surinamean rainforest

Abstract

Small-scale miners often engage in environmentally damaging activities, are subject to poor safety conditions, and utilize inefficient mineral extraction technologies. Here, we explore environmental impacts to surface waters from regional artisanal small-scale gold placer mining operations conducted in iron and aluminum-rich saprolites found within the lateritic, interior Amazon rainforest of Suriname. Heavy equipment was utilized to release gold from its host material followed by amalgamation and gravity separation. In contrast with background tributary recordings, streams adjacent to these gold mining operations consistently contained turbidity measurements that exceeded United States’ EPA guidelines for aquatic species of 50 nephelometric turbidity units and were typically in the hundreds to thousands of units. Turbidity was further heightened in association with precipitation events. Mercury played a prominent role in whole ore amalgam concentration practices. Freshwater fish from the region were found to harbor mercury that encroached upon public health criteria. Dissolved phase metals present further ecotoxicological challenges to the region, but their association with mining activities was less clear. These findings collectively reveal that small-scale placer gold mining practices in the Surinamese rainforest result in an increase of suspended sediments and release of mercury into waterways that could impact communities that depend upon local fisheries.     

Local Participation in Natural Resource Monitoring: a Characterization of Approaches

Abstract: The monitoring of trends in the status of species or habitats is routine in developed countries, where it is funded by the state or large nongovernmental organizations and often involves large numbers of skilled amateur volunteers. Far less monitoring of natural resources takes place in developing countries, where state agencies have small budgets, there are fewer skilled professionals or amateurs, and socioeconomic conditions prevent development of a culture of volunteerism. The resulting lack of knowledge about trends in species and habitats presents a serious challenge for detecting, understanding, and reversing declines in natural resource values. International environmental agreements require signatories undertake systematic monitoring of their natural resources, but no system exists to guide the development and expansion of monitoring schemes. To help develop such a protocol, we suggest a typology of monitoring categories, defined by their degree of local participation, ranging from no local involvement with monitoring undertaken by professional researchers to an entirely local effort with monitoring undertaken by local people. We assessed the strengths and weaknesses of each monitoring category and the potential of each to be sustainable in developed or developing countries. Locally based monitoring is particularly relevant in developing countries, where it can lead to rapid decisions to solve the key threats affecting natural resources, can empower local communities to better manage their resources, and can refine sustainable‐use strategies to improve local livelihoods. Nevertheless, we recognize that the accuracy and precision of the monitoring undertaken by local communities in different situations needs further study and field protocols need to be further developed to get the best from the unrealized potential of this approach. A challenge to conservation biologists is to identify and establish the monitoring system most relevant to a particular situation and to develop methods to integrate outputs from across the spectrum of monitoring schemes to produce wider indices of natural resources that capture the strengths of each.     

Governing intensification: the influence of state institutions on smallholder farming strategies in Calakmul,Mexico

ABSTRACT

In forest frontiers, smallholder agrarian livelihoods remain uneasily juxtaposed with conservation interests. Agricultural intensification is often considered a viable means of reconciling competing environmental and livelihood objectives given its potential to concentrate production on less land. However, intensification may have unintended consequences, including loss of resilient agricultural systems. The risks of smallholder agricultural intensification warrant a better understanding of its drivers. This study uses the case of Calakmul, Mexico, to examine the critical role of the state in intensification processes. Drawing on household surveys and key-informant interviews, it traces the linkages between state institutions and local farming practices. Statistical and qualitative analyses reveal how intensification is both incentivized and imposed by prevailing policies, the former via subsidies and the latter via regulations against field rotations. The outcome – increased external inputs and longer cultivation periods between fallows – may undermine the sustainability of smallholders’ agroecosystems, an undesirable consequence amid limited livelihood alternatives.     

Using interview surveys and multispecies occupancy models to inform vertebrate conservation

Species distribution data are an essential biodiversity variable requiring robust monitoring to inform wildlife conservation. Yet, such data remain inherently sparse because of the logistical challenges of monitoring biodiversity across broad geographic extents. Surveys of people knowledgeable about the occurrence of wildlife provide an opportunity to evaluate species distributions and the ecology of wildlife communities across large spatial scales. We analyzed detection histories of 30 vertebrate species across the Western Ghats biodiversity hotspot in India, obtained from a large-scale interview survey of 2318 people who live and work in the forests of this region. We developed a multispecies occupancy model that simultaneously corrected for false-negative (non-detection) and false-positive (misidentification) errors that interview surveys can be prone to. Using this model, we integrated data across species in composite analyses of the responses of functional species groups (based on disturbance tolerance, diet, and body mass traits) to spatial variation in environmental variables, protection, and anthropogenic pressures. We observed a positive association between forest cover and the occurrence of species with low tolerance of human disturbance. Protected areas were associated with higher occurrence for species across different functional groups compared with unprotected lands. We also observed the occurrence of species with low disturbance tolerance, herbivores, and large-bodied species was negatively associated with developmental pressures, such as human settlements, energy production and mining, and demographic pressures, such as biological resource extraction. For the conservation of threatened vertebrates, our work underscores the importance of maintaining forest cover and reducing deforestation within and outside protected areas, respectively. In addition, mitigating a suite of pervasive human pressures is also crucial for wildlife conservation in one of the world's most densely populated biodiversity hotspots.     

Googling Trends in Conservation Biology

Web‐crawling approaches, that is, automated programs data mining the internet to obtain information about a particular process, have recently been proposed for monitoring early signs of ecosystem degradation or for establishing crop calendars. However, lack of a clear conceptual and methodological framework has prevented the development of such approaches within the field of conservation biology. Our objective was to illustrate how Google Trends, a freely accessible web‐crawling engine, can be used to track changes in timing of biological processes, spatial distribution of invasive species, and level of public awareness about key conservation issues. Google Trends returns the number of internet searches that were made for a keyword in a given region of the world over a defined period. Using data retrieved online for 13 countries, we exemplify how Google Trends can be used to study the timing of biological processes, such as the seasonal recurrence of pollen release or mosquito outbreaks across a latitudinal gradient. We mapped the spatial extent of results from Google Trends for 5 invasive species in the United States and found geographic patterns in invasions that are consistent with their coarse‐grained distribution at state levels. From 2004 through 2012, Google Trends showed that the level of public interest and awareness about conservation issues related to ecosystem services, biodiversity, and climate change increased, decreased, and followed both trends, respectively. Finally, to further the development of research approaches at the interface of conservation biology, collective knowledge, and environmental management, we developed an algorithm that allows the rapid retrieval of Google Trends data.     

Species-specific influence of group composition on collective behaviors in ants

The success of a social group is often driven by its collective characteristics and the traits of its individuals. Thus, understanding how collective behavior is influenced by the behavioral composition of group members is an important first step to understand the ecology of collective personalities. Here, we investigated how the efficiency of several group behaviors is influenced by the aggressiveness of its members in two species of Temnothorax ants. In our manipulation of group composition, we created two experimentally reconstituted groups in a split-colony design, i.e., each colony was split into an aggressive and a docile group of equal sizes. We found strong species-specific differences in how collective behaviors were influenced by its group members. In Temnothorax longispinosus, having more aggressive individuals improved colony defense and nest relocation efficiency. In addition, source colony identity strongly influenced group behavior in T. longispinosus, highlighting that manipulations of group compositions must control for the origin of the chosen individuals. In contrast, group composition and source colony did not influence collective behaviors in Temnothorax curvispinosus. This suggests that the mechanisms regulating collective behaviors via individual differences in behavior might differ among even closely related species.