Note to users. If you're seeing this message, it means that your browser cannot find this page's style/presentation instructions -- or possibly that you are using a browser that does not support current Web standards. Find out more about why this message is appearing, and what you can do to make your experience of our site the best it can be.
Economic Incentives for Rain Forest Conservation Across Scales
C. Kremen,1*
J.
O. Niles,1
M. G. Dalton,2
G. C. Daily,1
P. R. Ehrlich,1
J. P. Fay,1
D. Grewal,3
R. P. Guillery4
Globally, tropical deforestation releases 20 to 30% of
anthropogenic greenhouse gases. Conserving forests could reduce
emissions,but the cost-effectiveness of this mechanism for mitigation
dependson the associated opportunity costs. We estimated these costsfrom local, national, and global perspectives using a case studyfrom
Madagascar. Conservation generated significant benefits overlogging
and agriculture locally and globally. Nationally, however,financial
benefits from industrial logging were larger than conservationbenefits. Such differing economic signals across scales may exacerbatetropical deforestation. The Kyoto Protocol could potentially overcomethis obstacle to conservation by creating markets for protectionof
tropical forests to mitigate climate change.
1 Center for Conservation Biology, Department
of Biological Sciences, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305, USA.
2 Institute of Earth Systems, Science and Policy,
CSU Monterey Bay, 100 Campus Center, Seaside, CA 93955-80013, USA.
3 Yale Law School, 127 Wall Street, New Haven, CT
06511, USA.
4 Institute for Agriculture and Trade
Policy, 2105 First Avenue South, Minneapolis, MN 55404, USA.
*
To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail:
ckremen{at}stanford.edu
The editors suggest the following Related Resources on Science sites:
In Science Magazine
LETTERS
Charles Di Leva;, John O. Niles, Claire Kremen, Philip Guillery;, Robert Bonnie, and Stephan Schwartzman (1 September 2000) Science289 (5484), 1471c.
[DOI: 10.1126/science.289.5484.1471c] |Full Text »
