Voluntary incentive schemes for farm forestry: uptake, policy effectiveness and employment impacts

Some Farm Forestry Research Problems

Incentive Schemes for Community Sensing

Fig. 1. OpenSense air pollution sensors that could be used in community sensing. Top left: on top of a bus; bottom left: on top of a tram; top right: attached to a solar-powered weather station on a building; and bottom right: attached to a smartphone. Sensing is an important part of computational sustainability, where evidence are collected about important environmental phenomena that are not ...

Incentive Schemes for Participatory Sensing

We consider a participatory sensing scenario where a group of private sensors observes the same phenomenon, such as air pollution. Since sensors need to be installed and maintained, owners of sensors are inclined to provide inaccurate or random data. We design a novel payment mechanism that incentivizes honest behavior by scoring sensors based on the quality of their reports. The basic principl...

Incentive Schemes for Local Government

In recent years, explicit incentive schemes for public organisations, based on quantitative measurement of outputs, have become increasingly commonly used in the UK. For example, school league tables, hospital star ratings, and various schemes for local government, such as Comprehensive Performance Assessment (CPA), have been introduced in the last twenty years or so. Moreover, with few excepti...

Influence and Effectiveness of Financial Incentive Programs in Promoting Sustainable Forestry in the South

Selected state agency foresters in each of the 13 southern states were surveyed about the financial incentive programs available to nonindustrial private forest owners. The foresters were asked to name and describe the public and private programs available in their state, to assess forest owners’ awareness of each program, its appeal among the owners aware of it, its effectiveness in encouragin...