Department of Decision Sciences

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https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.14078/22

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Constraints to adopting soil fertility management practices in Malawi: a choice experiment approach
(2019) Krah, Kwabena; Michelson, Hope; Perge, Emilie; Jindal, Rohit
Though problems related to low and declining soil fertility continue to impede agricultural production and food security in Sub-Saharan Africa, smallholder farmers in this region – those cultivating two hectares or less – have shown reluctance to adopt practices at scale that help conserve or enhance soil quality. Employing a discrete choice-based experiment, we find evidence that farmers’ propensity to adopt soil fertility management (SFM) practices increases with improved access to mineral fertilizers, and when farmers receive relevant technical training on soil fertility improving technologies. A unique aspect of our study is our focus on understanding how smallholders’ stated SFM preferences relate to their perceptions of recent local climatic variation. We find that farmers who perceive that rainfall amounts are decreasing are less willing to adopt crop rotations to improve soils. Our findings suggest that policies designed to increase adoption of SFM practices are more likely to succeed when they provide farmers with inputs that farmers perceive as complementary to SFM, including mineral fertilizer, and when they are built around an understanding of farmers’ perceptions of climatic variability.
Incentives, conditionality and collective action in payment for environmental services
(2014) Kerr, John; Vardhan, Mamta; Jindal, Rohit
As payment for environmental services (PES) initiatives spread to collectively managed natural resources, questions arise because the incentive structures that might be appropriate for individually managed resources will not necessarily promote the collective action required to manage the commons. Theory suggests challenges for cash payments to promote collective action, and for alternative payment types to facilitate conditionality. Possible ways to reconcile this disconnect involve conceiving of PES more broadly through the use of multiple forms of payment including non-cash incentives and placing greater focus on building institutions for collective action than on strict conditionality.
International market for forest carbon offsets: how these offsets are created and traded. ASB lecture note 14
(2012) Jindal, Rohit; Namirembe, Sara
This lecture note explains how carbon credits or offsets are generated from the forestry sector - both in terms of growing new trees as well as protecting existing ones, and how they are traded in international markets. It is important to note that these projects and the resultant offsets are only a part of a long set of solutions that the international community is considering to address climate change. We also explain why in spite of the surge in international carbon markets, actual trading in forestry carbon offsets remains low. The lecture note is primarily meant to share information among ICRAF’s (World Agroforestry Centre) local partners in South East Asia and Africa on how to engage in international markets for forestry carbon offsets. However, the note will also be useful for government officials, NGO functionaries, private sector operators, and community representatives in other developing countries who wish to access international carbon market to sell locally produced carbon offsets from forestry and other conservation oriented activities, or even to just understand how the market operates.
Moral limits of payments for ecosystem services
(2017) Jindal, Rohit
This paper reviews and analyzes the concept of payments for ecosystem services (PES) and focusing on their moral limits. PES is a part of recently introduced market instruments to address problems of pollution and environmental degradation. It is expected that hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of conservation investment will be transferred globally through PES like mechanisms. Using the framework of moral limits of markets, this paper highlights ethical concerns regarding this expansion of PES. A particular concern is the corruption that happens when cash transfers spoil the intrinsic motivations among many indigenous communities to engage in environmental conservation. Drawing on field research and empirical data from projects in Mozambique, and Tanzania, the paper identifies insights for policy makers, researchers, concluding with a discussion on directions for future research in this area.
Social as much as environmental: The drivers of tree biomass in smallholder forest landscape restoration programmes
(2020) Wells, Geoff J.; Fisher, Janet; Jindal, Rohit; Ryan, Casey M.
A major challenge for forest landscape restoration initiatives is the lack of quantitative evidence on how social factors drive environmental outcomes. Here we conduct an interdisciplinary quantitative analysis of the environmental and social drivers of tree biomass accumulation across 639 smallholder farms restoring native tree species in Mexico, Uganda and Mozambique. We use environmental and social data to assess the relative effects of key hypothesised drivers on aboveground biomass accumulation at the farm-level over ten years. We supplement this with a qualitative analysis of perspectives from local farmers and agroforestry technicians on the potential causal mechanisms of the observed social effects. We find that the material wellbeing of farmers (e.g. assets) and access to agroforestry knowledge explain as much variation in biomass as water availability. Local perspectives suggest that this is caused by the higher adaptive capacity of some farmers and their associated ability to respond to social-ecological shocks and stresses. Additionally, the variation in biomass between farms increased over time. Local perspectives suggested that this was caused by emergent exogenous and stochastic influences which cannot be reliably predicted in technical analyses and guidance. To deal with this persistent uncertainty, local perspectives emphasised the need for flexible and adaptive processes at the farm- and village-levels. The consistency of these findings across three countries suggests these findings are relevant to similar forest restoration interventions. Our findings provide novel quantitative evidence of a social-ecological pathway where the adaptive capacity of local land users can improve ecological processes. Our findings emphasize the need for forest restoration programmes to prioritise investment in the capabilities of local land users, and to ensure that rules support, rather than hinder, adaptive management.
Voluntary carbon trading: potential for community forestry projects in India
(2007) Jindal, Rohit; Kerr, John; Nagar, Shailesh
Voluntary carbon markets, such as the Chicago Climate Exchange (CCX), were worth $90 million in 2006. This paper finds that community forestry interventions of three organizations in India are eligible to sell carbon sequestration credits on CCX. Their combined annual sequestration potential is 104,427 tons of carbon dioxide (tCO2), worth $417,708 at 2007 prices. Although this value will be difficult to realize immediately, it indicates the potential for carbon sequestration to raise rural incomes in India. These benefits can be actualized by first linking small pilot projects with CCX and then scaling up operations. Projects will also need to reduce transaction costs to raise the shares of carbon revenue that farmers receive. The diversion of land to raise tree crops needs to be balanced with food security concerns. A potentially viable approach would be to take up carbon plantations on common lands with concerned agencies acting as a liaison between farmer groups and the market.

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Browsing Department of Decision Sciences by Author "Jindal, Rohit"

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