The Economics of Managed Landscape Conservation

Historically, both conservation research and policy have concentrated on primary forests. Increasingly, however, the focus is being broadened to include human-dominated landscapes, such as agroforestry systems, managed forests, hedgerows, and fallow lands. One reason is that considerable research has demonstrated that such landscapes can provide many of the same ecological services as primary forest, albeit often at lower levels: they can harbor biodiversity; sequester carbon; prevent soil erosion; and aid in flood control, water purification, and aquifer recharge (Daily 2003). In addition, some managed landscapes can provide corridors between patches of primary forests and can help to preserve such forests by diverting extractive activities, such as hunting and foraging (Gajaseni 1996). Finally, large tracts of undisturbed primary forest are becoming scarce and this trend will be difficult to reverse (Daily 2003). Economics can help shed light on the factors that drive both the adoption of agroforesty systems and the retention of land in such systems. Most economic research has focused on the first issue (for a review, see Pattanayak et al. 2003). This paper focuses on the second, summarizing research led by a team at Resources for the Future (RFF) on the factors that drive land cover, and land cover change, in Latin American shade coffee areas (Blackman et al. 2008; Blackman, Ávalos-Sartorio, and Chow 2006). The remainder of the paper presents some background information about shade coffee, discusses our research, and offers some reflections