Corridors of Clarity: Four Principles to Overcome Uncertainty Paralysis in the Anthropocene.

Global environmental change challenges humanity because of its broad scale, long-lasting, and potentially irreversible consequences. Key to an effective response is to use an appropriate scientific lens to peer through the mist of uncertainty that threatens timely and appropriate decisions surrounding these complex issues. Identifying such corridors of clarity could help understanding critical phenomena or causal pathways sufficiently well to justify taking policy action. To this end, we suggest four principles: Follow the strongest and most direct path between policy decisions on outcomes, focus on finding sufficient evidence for policy purpose, prioritize no-regrets policies by avoiding options with controversial, uncertain, or immeasurable benefits, aim for getting the big picture roughly right rather than focusing on details.

Small-scale forestry and carbon offset markets: An empirical study of Vermont Current Use forest landowner willingness to accept carbon credit programs.

This study investigates the preferences of small forest landowners regarding forest carbon credit programs while documenting characteristics of potentially successful frameworks. We designed hypothetical carbon credit programs with aggregated carbon offset projects and requirements of existing voluntary and compliance protocols in mind. We administered a mail survey to 992 forest landowners in Vermont's Current Use Program utilizing best-worst choice, a novel preference elicitation technique, to elicit their preferences about these programs. We found that small forest landowners see revenue as the most important factor in a carbon credit program and the duration of the program as the least important factor. Landowners reported that shorter program duration, higher revenue, and lower withdrawal penalties positively impact their willingness to accept forest carbon credit programs. Notably, our study includes carbon credit program implementer as a key program attribute, allowing us to quantify landowners' tradeoffs between non-profit, for-profit, and government organizations. Overall, we found that landowners significantly prefer working with a non-profit organization. Based on monetary estimates of willingness-to-accept compensation, our results suggest that aggregated forest carbon offset projects incorporating small forest landowners could be piloted successfully in Vermont by non-profit organizations while maintaining relatively strict guidelines of existing carbon offset protocols.

Moving beyond panaceas in fisheries governance.

In fisheries management-as in environmental governance more generally-regulatory arrangements that are thought to be helpful in some contexts frequently become panaceas or, in other words, simple formulaic policy prescriptions believed to solve a given problem in a wide range of contexts, regardless of their actual consequences. When this happens, management is likely to fail, and negative side effects are common. We focus on the case of individual transferable quotas to explore the panacea mindset, a set of factors that promote the spread and persistence of panaceas. These include conceptual narratives that make easy answers like panaceas seem plausible, power disconnects that create vested interests in panaceas, and heuristics and biases that prevent people from accurately assessing panaceas. Analysts have suggested many approaches to avoiding panaceas, but most fail to conquer the underlying panacea mindset. Here, we suggest the codevelopment of an institutional diagnostics toolkit to distill the vast amount of information on fisheries governance into an easily accessible, open, on-line database of checklists, case studies, and related resources. Toolkits like this could be used in many governance settings to challenge users' understandings of a policy's impacts and help them develop solutions better tailored to their particular context. They would not replace the more comprehensive approaches found in the literature but would rather be an intermediate step away from the problem of panaceas.

Trade-offs between three forest ecosystem services across the state of New Hampshire, USA: timber, carbon, and albedo.

Forests are more frequently being managed to store and sequester carbon for the purposes of climate change mitigation. Generally, this practice involves long-term conservation of intact mature forests and/or reductions in the frequency and intensity of timber harvests. However, incorporating the influence of forest surface albedo often suggests that long rotation lengths may not always be optimal in mitigating climate change in forests characterized by frequent snowfall. To address this, we investigated trade-offs between three ecosystem services: carbon storage, albedo-related radiative forcing, and timber provisioning. We calculated optimal rotation length at 498 diverse Forest Inventory and Analysis forest sites in the state of New Hampshire, USA. We found that the mean optimal rotation lengths across all sites was 94 yr (standard deviation of sample means = 44 yr), with a large cluster of short optimal rotation lengths that were calculated at high elevations in the White Mountain National Forest. Using a regression tree approach, we found that timber growth, annual storage of carbon, and the difference between annual albedo in mature forest vs. a post-harvest landscape were the most important variables that influenced optimal rotation. Additionally, we found that the choice of a baseline albedo value for each site significantly altered the optimal rotation lengths across all sites, lowering the mean rotation to 59 yr with a high albedo baseline, and increasing the mean rotation to 112 yr given a low albedo baseline. Given these results, we suggest that utilizing temperate forests in New Hampshire for climate mitigation purposes through carbon storage and the cessation of harvest is appropriate at a site-dependent level that varies significantly across the state.

Integration of ecological-biological thresholds in conservation decision making.

In the Anthropocene, coupled human and natural systems dominate and only a few natural systems remain relatively unaffected by human influence. On the one hand, conservation criteria based on areas of minimal human impact are not relevant to much of the biosphere. On the other hand, conservation criteria based on economic factors are problematic with respect to their ability to arrive at operational indicators of well-being that can be applied in practice over multiple generations. Coupled human and natural systems are subject to economic development which, under current management structures, tends to affect natural systems and cross planetary boundaries. Hence, designing and applying conservation criteria applicable in real-world systems where human and natural systems need to interact and sustainably coexist is essential. By recognizing the criticality of satisfying basic needs as well as the great uncertainty over the needs and preferences of future generations, we sought to incorporate conservation criteria based on minimal human impact into economic evaluation. These criteria require the conservation of environmental conditions such that the opportunity for intergenerational welfare optimization is maintained. Toward this end, we propose the integration of ecological-biological thresholds into decision making and use as an example the planetary-boundaries approach. Both conservation scientists and economists must be involved in defining operational ecological-biological thresholds that can be incorporated into economic thinking and reflect the objectives of conservation, sustainability, and intergenerational welfare optimization.

Incorporating carbon storage into the optimal management of forest insect pests: a case study of the southern pine beetle (Dendroctonus frontalis Zimmerman) in the New Jersey Pinelands.

Forest insect pest disturbance is increasing in certain areas of North America as many insect species, such as the southern pine beetle, expand their range due to a warming climate. Because insect pests are beginning to occupy forests that are managed for multiple uses and have not been managed for pests before, it is becoming increasingly important to determine how forests should be managed for pests when non-timber ecosystem services are considered in addition to traditional costs and revenues. One example of a service that is increasingly considered in forest management and that may affect forest pest management is carbon sequestration. This manuscript seeks to understand whether the incorporation of forest carbon sequestration into cost-benefit analysis of different forest pest management strategies affects the financially optimal strategy. We examine this question through a case study of the southern pine beetle (SPB) in a new area of SPB expansion, the New Jersey Pinelands National Reserve (NJPR). We utilize a forest ecology and economics model and include field data from the NJPR as well as outbreak probability statistics from previous years. We find under the majority of scenarios, incorporating forest carbon sequestration shifts the financially optimal SPB management strategy from preventative thinning toward no management or reactionary management in forest stands in New Jersey. These results contradict the current recommended treatment strategy for SPB and signify that the inclusion of multiple ecosystem services into a cost-benefit analysis may drastically alter which pest management strategy is economically optimal.

Pro-environmental behavior: rational choice meets moral motivation.

The determinants of individual behaviors that provide shared environmental benefits are a longstanding theme in social science research. Alternative behavioral models yield markedly different predictions and policy recommendations. This paper reviews and compares the literatures from two disciplines that appear to be moving toward a degree of convergence. In social psychology, moral theories of pro-environmental behavior have focused on the influence of personal moral norms while recognizing that external factors, such as costs and incentives, ultimately limit the strength of the norm-behavior relationship. Rational choice models, such as the theory of planned behavior in social psychology and the theories of voluntary provision of public goods in economics, have sought to incorporate the effects of personal norms and to measure their importance in explaining behaviors, such as recycling and the demand for green products. This paper explores the relationship between these approaches and their implications for the theory and practice of ecological economics.