The Journal of Environment & Development

This article addresses forestry projects attempting to register with the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM). Advocates argue that forestry projects have significant potential for sequestering carbon, contributing to livelihood improvements, and promoting sustainable development in developing countries—especially African countries with predominately agrarian economies and relatively high GHG emissions from land-use change. Through a comparison of two carbon-forestry projects in central Tanzania, we investigated both the livelihood effects of these projects and the risk and benefit perceptions of project administrators and the government. Both projects have been unable to gain national government approval, and we find evidence of mixed benefits for local communities. Village communities participating in one program consistently identified environmental and social benefits of planting trees locally and judged them as more important than carbon payments. A key variable is ownership, as villagers that have forfeited their land to a plantation have little stake in the program, whereas villagers participating in a community-based program own their trees. Our results suggest that enhancing ties to local ownership can contribute to sustainable development while better enhancing the potential of the carbon market to work for the rural poor in developing countries.

Although China extended the length of compensation for the Upland Conversion Program (UCP), the sustainability of the program after government compensation expires is still a pending problem. This article proposes an alternative scheme of compensation payment based on the carbon sink of the UCP. Taking Yunnan province as an example, this article explores the feasibility of the scheme by comparing the value and opportunity cost of carbon sink. It is found that it is feasible to change the UCP to a carbon offset project if its length is more than 20 years when the discount rate is 7% and the current bid price (Yuan 91.8/ton) for Chinese carbon offset project prevails. The feasibility becomes higher as site productivity or discount rate decreases, or as the project period is prolonged, ceteris paribus. Increase in carbon sink or price can also make a carbon offset project more feasible. Unlike the existing compensation scheme, this proposed scheme can also provide an incentive for plantation management.

Concerns over the status of freshwater availability in the Caribbean region and in particular the eastern Caribbean states have been expressed for at least the past 30 years. There is a growing realization that availability will be vulnerable to extremes of climate behavior and increasing demand for water. Climate modeling for the Caribbean region under a range of scenarios suggests a continuation of a warming in average temperatures, a lengthening of seasonal dry periods, and increases in frequency of occurrence of drought conditions. Using information from the most recent IPCC report and regional downscaling, the authors suggest what some of the macrolevel changes in temperature and rainfall might be and the implications for water resources availability. This article evaluates the existing availability of water resources, the implications of the most recent climate change modeling for the Caribbean region, and the impact of on existing service provision strategies.

Elected officials and managers are both integral players in natural resource management. Politicians and technicians recognize that interdependencies exist, but finding organizational models that effectively integrate the distinct political and technical aspects of these endeavors remains a challenge. In Brazil’s Taquari Basin, leaders formed a watershed-based intermunicipal consortium in an attempt to achieve such integration. The experience of this consortium shows that organizing management around watersheds does not naturally lead to political—technical integration. The institutional separation of political and technical activities within this consortium’s structure generated divergent beliefs about appropriate functions for a watershed-based organization, ultimately impeding collaboration. Efforts to overcome these differences were largely unsuccessful, as the communication strategies employed were based on flawed understandings of the interests and objectives of politicians and technicians, respectively. This study draws on conceptual frameworks from organizational sociology to uncover the social forces that both facilitate and impede collaboration across the political—technical divide.

Using cross-country data, the major thrust of this study is to establish the existence of a nonlinear relationship between environmental performance and ethnic diversity, while controlling for factors known to affect a country’s ability to meet environmental standards. Using the Environmental Performance Index developed by Columbia and Yale Universities in collaboration with the World Economic Forum, this study finds that countries with moderate levels of ethnic diversity experience the greatest environmental performance as they reap the benefits of a civically engaged society with creative, innovative, and efficient human talent pool and do not bear the negative effects of a highly fractionalized society that typically suffers from poor communication and social cohesion, among other societal ills. The policy implications are important, as policy makers need to understand how ethnic diversity affects a country’s ability to meet environmental goals such that these effects are accounted for in new environmental policies and initiatives.