The recent Collective Forest Tenure Reform in China has started the process of devolving forest management rights from village collectives to households since 2003. In this paper, we study the impact of the reform on rural energy consumption. Devolving forest tenure improves farmers' access to forest products on their newly acquired forestland, and is therefore expected to increase farmers' fuelwood consumption. The reform also allows farmers to adopt some revenue-enhancing forest technologies which may lead to energy switching in farmer households.

The Country Environmental Analysis (CEA) of Ethiopia is a country-level diagnostic tool to support investment and policy dialogues. It highlights the key environment-related trajectories and challenges facing the country in the coming decade and beyond, and identifies pathways for simultaneously achieving economic, social, and environmental objectives in the context of Ethiopia’s Climate Resilient Green Economy (CRGE) Strategy for 2025, and Second Growth and Transformation Plan (GTP II) for 2016-2020.

Improved cook stoves (ICS) have been widely touted for their potential to deliver the triple benefits of improved household health and time savings, reduced deforestation and local environmental degradation, and reduced emissions of black carbon, a significant short-term contributor to global climate change. Yet diffusion of ICS technologies among potential users in many low-income settings, including India, remains slow, despite decades of promotion.

this study uses a randomized experiment in rural Ethiopia to test on how quickly energy efficient technology (an improved stove) is put in use after the technologies is disseminated. We evaluate two concepts that may affect usage of a product: screening (related to valuation of a product) and sunk cost effects (based on the price the potential user paid for the product). A standard Tobit and IV-Tobit methods of estimations are used for testing sunk cost and screening effects, respectively.

The first chapter of my dissertation Heterogeneous Local Spillovers from Protected Areas in Costa Rica (with Juan Robalino & Alexander Pfaff) offers a contribution to the literature estimating the impact of protected areas (PAs) on preventing tropical deforestation. It extends previous work by looking at how the establishment of national parks affects land use change in the neighboring private land. This is a relevant question as most analyses to date examine the realized deforestation impacts of PAs only within their borders, generally finding reduced deforestation effects.

Spillovers can significantly reduce or enhance the net effects of land-use policies, yet there exists little rigorous evidence concerning their magnitudes. We examine how Costa Rica’s national parks affect deforestation in nearby areas. We find that average deforestation spillovers are not significant in 0–5 km and 5–10 km rings around the parks. However, this average blends multiple effects that are significant and that vary in magnitude across the landscape, yielding varied net impacts.

Participation of local communities in management and utilization of forest resources through collective action has become widely accepted as a possible solution to failure of centralized, top-down approaches to forest conservation. Developing countries have thus resorted to devolution of forest management through initiatives such as Participatory Forest Management (PFM) and Joint Forest Management (JFM). In Kenya, under such initiatives, communities have been able to self-organize into community forest associations (CFAs).