Today’s discussion article was a 2011 TREE review paper, ‘Decision making under great uncertainty: environmental management in an era of global change’, by Polasky, Carpenter, et al. (2011). The article provides an introduction to the issue of decision making under ‘deep’ uncertainty –  situations where the high uncertainty levels prevent realistic assessments of the probabilities and outcomes that are traditionally used in decision-theory based approaches like maximising expected utility. Continue reading →

Wanting to update myself on the Community-Based Conservation literature of the past decade, and inspired by much of Kothari’s work recently, I decided to bring to this week’s journal club a paper (published earlier this year in Conservation and Society) that touches upon several themes and issues that researchers at GCC are working with currently (e.g. conservation, governance, protected areas, and indigenous peoples, just to mention a few). Continue reading →

Time for an update on how the rainforests in Africa are doing? Have a look at the recent Phil Trans R Soc B theme issue on “Change in African rainforests: past, present and future” (link). Since some of us are working on analyzing deforestation rates and patterns we chose to read Mayaux et al.’s paper: “State and evolution of the African rainforests between 1990 and 2010” for our journal club discussion. Continue reading →