Assessing the local economic impacts of land protection

Land protection, whether public or private, is often controversial at the local level because residents worry about lost economic activity. We used panel data and a quasi-experimental impact-evaluation approach to determine how key economic indicators were related to the percentage of land protected. Specifically, we estimated the impacts of public and private land protection based on local area employment and housing permits data from 5 periods spanning 1990–2015 for all major towns and cities in New England. To generate rigorous impact estimates, we modeled economic outcomes as a function of the percentage of land protected in the prior period, conditional on town fixed effects, metro-region trends, and controls for period and neighboring protection. Contrary to narratives that conservation depresses economic growth, land protection was associated with a modest increase in the number of people employed and in the labor force and did not affect new housing permits, population, or median income. Public and private protection led to different patterns of positive employment impacts at distances close to and far from cities, indicating the importance of investing in both types of land protection to increase local opportunities. The greatest magnitude of employment impacts was due to protection in more rural areas, where opportunities for both visitation and amenity-related economic growth may be greatest. Overall, we provide novel evidence that land protection can be compatible with local economic growth and illustrate a method that can be broadly applied to assess the net economic impacts of protection.     

Assessing intervention effectiveness at promoting voluntary conservation practice adoption in agrienvironments

Although implementing conservation practices on private farms and forests can produce substantial environmental benefits, these practices are not being adopted widely enough to result in measurable improvements at regional scales. Researchers have investigated the production and program factors influencing producer choices to voluntarily adopt these practices. However, the findings of reviews are inconsistent, raising questions about review methods, including the omission of relevant variables. Further, applying lessons from past work to promote adoption is difficult because many reviews investigated dispositional or demographic variables that practitioners and policy makers cannot directly observe or influence. We conducted a new review of 146 empirical studies that tested the effects of different interventions (e.g., financial incentives, outreach events, and nudges) on increasing the likelihood of producers adopting conservation practices. We conducted a metaregression of quantitative studies from diverse disciplines that filtered studies by quality (i.e., use of randomization and clear analysis reporting). We synthesized these results with a thematic analysis of qualitative studies on producer perspectives about conservation practices. Financial incentives had the strongest evidence of increasing producers’ likelihood of adopting conservation practices (odds ratio 1.86, p < 0.05). However, this effect was only apparent after filtering by study quality, which also improved model fit and identified significant regional differences (odds ratio –1.69, p < 0.01). The thematic review of qualitative studies revealed that peer groups may be successful in reinforcing adoption behaviors due to homophily effects and that financial incentives not only offset implementation costs but also mitigated perceived risks of adoption. Given the problems we encountered in testing hypotheses about the magnitude of variability explained by intervention types and practice characteristics, we recommend additional experimental and longitudinal work that accounts for financial incentives and pairs qualitative and quantitative data to clarify relationships between program design and practice adoption rates.