This Friday we discussed two papers written by Brooks and colleagues and by Stork.

Brooks et al. 2009: “Evaluating the success of conservation actions in safeguarding tropical forest biodiversity”

This paper focuses on the effectiveness of conservation. It tries to create an overview on how much our various conservation actions so far have actually managed to prevent species from going to extinct. It covers sections from protected area designation to education and policy, trying to summarize the past progress, current status and measured outcomes in each section.

Although the topic of this paper is most relevant to say the least, the authors fail to bring new sights to the discussion of conservation effectiveness. They sum up several of the sections very nicely, bringing together many important and interesting bits of information, but yet are not able to give any analytical view in them. Therefore, and unfortunately, the paper remains as a sort of literature review of what has been done or is being done, with few examples of successful or not-so-successful species recoveries and, a good list of relevant numbers and references.

We were slightly annoyed by the focus of the paper on tropical forests, and failed to see the reason why the authors decided to publish this type of an article in a special issue. Given that no quantitative analyses were done (nor, in terms of covering all the given sectors, have been done), we feel slightly sceptical about the final conclusions the authors make: “Overall our review provides grounds for cautious optimism. At least in short term, conservation actions can and do prevent extinctions; thus, there is hope in even the most challenging conservation contexts (Posa et al. 2008).” To our opinion, the review does not offer strong support for this.

There are, however, some key messages to take home with: So far, the quantitative evidence that our global conservation actions are actually making a difference, are more or less lacking. Thus, further studies are desperately needed to (reliably) say what is working and when. In addition the authors make an important statement how “conservation science should place more emphasis on addressing practical conservation needs and goals (Brooks et al. 2009)”. We believe that this will be one of the big issues discussed and studied in conservation science in the near future.

Final conclusion: Good literature review 🙂

Link to the paper: http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/journal/123190981/abstract?CRETRY=1&SRETRY=0

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In our latest session we discussed these two papers. As nobody was really making any notes, this will only be short summary what the papers are about.

Ostrom 2009, Science

This paper talks about the drivers and patterns behind the loss of resources (e.g. fisheries, water resources, forests etc). Because different scientific disciplines use different concepts and languages, our understanding about the processes that lead the deterioration of natural resources is limited. Thus, there is a need for a common framework to organize the findings and information that explain these complex social-ecological systems (SESs). Here Ostrom provides a such frame work ,where each of the individual SESs are first divided to four first-level sybsystems:

1. RS: The resource system (e.g. designated protected area)
2. RU: resource units (e.g. trees, shrubs, wildlife or water resources within the PA)
3. GS: governance system (e.g. the managing party of the PA, the rules of the PA etc.) and
4. U: users (for sustenance, recreation or commercial purpose).

These four subsystems are then divided into lower levels and information is gathered from all subsystems and all levels (when possible) to describe and explain the SES. According to Ostrom, only after a comprehensive database about the characteristics of each of the subsystems are available, can we really understand the functioning of an individual SES and the reasons why certain e.g. management actions succeed in one SES and fail in another.

Ostrom also tackles the currently dominating theory that resource users will never self-organize to maintain their resources, but will consume them uncontrolled unless governments or other top-down institutes intervene. The accumulating information from several science disciplines has, however, shown that some governmental policies accelerate resource destruction where as some resource users have indeed self-organized to preserve their resources to the level of sustainable consumption. Using the framework of this paper, Ostrom lists 10 second level variables that have been frequently identified as positively of negatively affecting the likelihood of users’ self-organizing to manage their resource : Size of resource system (RS), productivity of resource system (RS), predictability of system dynamics (RS), resource unit mobility (RU), number of users (U), leadership (U), norms/social capital (U), knowledge of SES (U), importance of resource to users (U) and collective-choice rules (GS).

Link to the paper:

http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/325/5939/419

Chhatre and Agrawal 2009, PNAS

This paper tackles the question of forest as two-sided resource: Forests are important provider of multiple commons to the livelihood of millions of humans living close to the forests. At the same time forests act as an important factor in the global carbon sequestration. The authors try to address the question whether forests that contribute more to livelihoods store at the same time more or less carbon, or if carbon storage and livelihood contributions of forests are unrelated. They also want to understand the factors influencing the end result, i.e. whether a forest is more important in terms of common goods to livelihood or in terms of carbon storage.

Using the data collected by the International Forestry Resources and Institutions (IFRI) the authors first identified 80 common forests in 10 tropical countries for which they calculated two indexes: the first on describing the amount goods to local livelihood and the second the size of above ground carbon storage. With their analyses the authors first concluded that there is no statistical association between carbon storage and livelihood benefits, meaning that both win-win and trade-off outcomes are possible in forest commons.

They authors then go forward in analysing the factors affecting behind these outcomes, and decide to focus on 3 main points: i) Size of the forest commons, ii) local autonomy and iii) ownership. By looking at these different factors and the trade-off/synergy relationship they first define that forests can be divided to four categories:

1. Sustainable commons which are forests that provide both above average carbon storage AND livelihood benefits.
2. Overused commons which provide below average carbon storage AND livelihood benefits.
3. Deferred use commons which provide high carbon storage BUT low livelihood benefits.
4. Unsustainable commons which provide low carbon storage BUT high livelihood benefits.

Chhatre and Agrawal then conclude that forest size and autonomy are the most important factors in determining whether a forest belongs to sustainable or overused common: The larger the forest and the more autonomy local people have in management, the more likely it is that the forest will provide both high carbon storage and high livelihood benefits.  When these factors (size and autonomy) decrease, a lose-lose outcome becomes more likely. The authorship factor plays a more important role in the trade-off outcomes: Governmental ownership is associated with a higher probability of overuse (low carbon, high livelihood), whereas community ownership is associated with low livelihood benefits and high carbon storage.

The main message of the paper is not just to explore the different factors and relationships behind carbon storage and livelihood benefits. It also wants to send out an message saying that centralized, governmental forest management (like imposed for example by REDD) might not be the best way of increasing carbon sequestration, but a more community-based and decentralized approach should also be considered.

Link to the paper:

http://www.pnas.org/content/106/42/17667