Can Environmental Cash Transfers Reduce Deforestation and Improve Social Outcomes? A Regression Discontinuity Analysis of Mexico’s National Program (2011-2014)
Environmental conditional cash transfers, or "payments for ecosystem services" are a centerpiece of global efforts to protect biodiversity, safeguard watersheds, and mitigate climate change by reducing forest loss. This paper evaluates th...
| Main Authors: | , , , , , , |
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| Format: | Working Paper |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
World Bank, Washington, DC
2019
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| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/694951547752004287/Can-Environmental-Cash-Transfers-Reduce-Deforestation-and-Improve-Social-Outcomes-A-Regression-Discontinuity-Analysis-of-Mexico-s-National-Program-2011-2014 http://hdl.handle.net/10986/31175 |
| Summary: | Environmental conditional cash
transfers, or "payments for ecosystem services"
are a centerpiece of global efforts to protect biodiversity,
safeguard watersheds, and mitigate climate change by
reducing forest loss. This paper evaluates the impacts of
Mexico's national payments for ecosystem services
program, which provides five years of payments to landowners
in exchange for maintaining and managing natural land cover.
Using a regression discontinuity design, the paper studies
impacts on environmental, socioeconomic, and social capital
outcomes for the 2011-14 program cohorts. The analysis finds
that treated communities increased management activities to
protect land cover, such as patrolling for illegal
conversion or combatting soil erosion (by 48 percent
compared to controls). The program reduced the loss of tree
cover in areas at high risk of deforestation (by 29 percent
compared to controls), with effects being larger for those
that have been in the program the longest (38 percent
compared to controls). These results are similar to
estimates of impact for earlier program cohorts and continue
to highlight the importance of targeting the program to
areas of high risk of land cover loss to increase
environmental effectiveness. The program continued to reach
poor communities and households, but estimated impacts on
household wealth indicators are small in magnitude and not
statistically significant. These results indicate that
community-level conditional payments did not harm
household-level socioeconomic indicators, a key safeguard
requirement of conservation policies of the United Nations
Programme on Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and
Forest Degradation. The data also show that payments for
ecosystem services significantly increased community social
capital -- the institutions, attitudes, and values that
govern human interactions -- (by 9 percent compared to
controls), and these externally provided incentives did not
crowd out household contributions to other community work. |
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