Mapping demand and supply for forest ecosystem services to assess the impact of distributional rules on societal welfare Seminar

“The main aim of the paper is to identify and measure the actual flow of ‘ecosystem services’ determined by community-based management policies (CBM) and its contribution to human well-being considering the welfare trade-offs that may arise between social groups due to distributional rules.

We employed a three-step methodological approach:

1. We quantify the actual flow of provisioning ES, i.e. woody biomass used for different purposes, by measuring the potential demand for ‘ecosystem services’ (ES) and how it is connected to the potential supply of those services across space
2. We assess the contribution of the ES flow to the population’s welfare by estimating and monetising individual’s preferences for provisioning ES because of a shift in governance from centralised to CBM (Discrete Choice Experiment).
3. We evaluate how total welfare changes across different distributional scenarios.

Our results demonstrate that, due to the spatial mismatches between demand and supply, the distribution of provisioning ES to the rural population across the whole harvesting area is unequal in biophysical terms. Moreover, by coupling biophysical modelling with welfare (monetary) analysis, we assess the effect of distributional rules for the total population surrounding the forest area and found that the distributional scenario that maximises total societal welfare in monetary terms across the harvesting area is the scenario that distributes 40% of biomass to the rich group while the remaining 60% is allocated to the poor group.”

Speaker Information

Dr Ilda Dreoni - Applied Spatial Modelling, School of Geography and Environmental Science