We study the impact of Ecuador's national forest conservation incentives program on reported land conflicts. Data come from a survey of >900 households located within 49 indigenous and Afro‐Ecuadorian communities holding communal conservation contracts. We use quasi‐experimental methods to test for relationships between program participation and changes in land conflicts.

Access to clean water is one of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) to be achieved by 2030, and a priority on the environmental policy agenda in Ethiopia. A main challenge for clean water supply utilities is how to accommodate watershed protection and management costs. The type of land cover around water sources has a notable effect on the cleanliness of the water and hence on water purifying costs.

Protected areas (PAs) can mitigate climate change by reducing carbon emissions that result from forest loss. Carbon emissions from forest degradation are a large component of forest loss and are often driven by the extraction decisions of resource-dependent households. PA policies must reflect how villagers use forests to be effective. Here, a spatial Nash equilibrium of extractors’ uncoordinated forest extraction pattern decisions establishes a baseline of forest-use patterns.

Several studies have shown the economic value of various ecosystem services provided by the forest. However, the economic value of how site-specific ecological conditions interact with other functions provided by the forest, such as timber value and carbon sequestration, has been less studied. As a result, this paper constructs a numerical discrete dynamic optimization model to estimate the economic value of site quality, taking into account its interaction with timber value and carbon sequestration, in Swedish forests.

As in other ecosystems, provision of ecosystem services from forests is uncertain because of stochastic weather conditions. In general, society is risk-averse, which means that factors increasing or decreasing the uncertainty in ecosystem services add a source of cost or value to society, measurement of which is lacking in the literature. This article suggests a method for calculating the impact of site-specific ecological conditions in Swedish forests on the economic value of uncertain ecosystem services in terms of timber and carbon sequestration.

The current share of sub-Saharan Africa in global carbon dioxide emissions is negligible compared to major contributors like Asia, Americas, and Europe. This trend is, however, likely to change given that both economic growth and rate of urbanization in the region are projected to be robust in the future. The current study contributes to the literature by examining both the direct and the indirect impacts of quality of institution on the environment.