If the United States chooses to implement a greenhouse gas reduction program, it would be necessary to decide whether to include carbon sequestration policies—such as those that promote forestation and discourage deforestation—as part of the domestic portfolio of compliance activities. We investigate the cost of forest-based carbon sequestration by analyzing econometrically micro-data on reveal...

Tropical forest habitat continues to decline globally, with serious negative consequences for environmental sustainability. The small mountain country of Nepal provides an excellent context in which to examine trajectories of forest-cover change. Despite having experienced large-scale forest clearing in the past, significant reforestation has taken place in recent years. The range of biophysica...

We present an in-depth analysis of natural forest management practices in Costa Rica based on a new historical forestry GIS database encompassing five conservation regions in the country where selective logging has been prevalent for the last 18 years. Natural forest management refers to the selective logging practices for the production of timber in natural forest ecosystems. The study conside...

Forest management strategies and policies such as REDD (reduced emissions from deforestation and forest degradation) may have unintentional implications for forest sectors in countries not targeted by such policies. The success of a policy effort like REDD would result in a significant reduction in deforestation and forest degradation and an ensuing reduction in the supply of natural forest tim...

Policies for climate mitigation on land rarely acknowledge biophysical factors, such as reflectivity, evaporation, and surface roughness. Yet such factors can alter temperatures much more than carbon sequestration does, and often in a conflicting way. We outline a framework for examining biophysical factors in mitigation policies and provide some best-practice recommendations based on that fram...

Assumptions about nature are embedded in people’s preferences for environmental policy and management. The people we interviewed justified preservationist policies using four assumptions about nature knowing best: nature is balanced, evolution is progressive, technology is suspect, and the Creation is perfect. They justified interventionist policies using three assumptions about nature: it is d...

Forest degradation in the Brazilian Amazon due to selective logging and forest fires may greatly increase the human footprint beyond outright deforestation. We demonstrate a method to quantify annual deforestation and degradation simultaneously across the entire region for the years 2000–2010 using high-resolution Landsat satellite imagery. Combining spectral mixture analysis, normalized differ...

This study explores the relationships between forest cover change and the village resettlement and land planning policies implemented in Laos, which have led to the relocation of remote and dispersed populations into clustered villages with easier access to state services and market facilities. We used the Global Forest Cover Change (2000–2012) and the most recent Lao Agricultural Census (2011)...

Schumpeter chastised Ricardo for his alleged "vice" - the so-called "Ricardian Vice" - of drawing far reaching policy conclusions from utterly simplistic models, which, moreover, were underdetermined. The paper first argues that Schumpeter saw Ricardo's approach to the theory of value and distribution through a marginalist lens and therefore arrived at a distorted picture of the latter. Several...

Just as for people, a new year is a good time for a journal to stop, look back, and start a new beginning, hoping for a good season ahead. This is what we have been doing each year in the Croatian Medical Journal for the last twenty years. We will probably never stop doing this, even when we become an august journal, because the world of scientific publishing rapidly changes. This year, we pres...