Research on payments for ecosystem services (PES) schemes indicates that few of them in fact implement full marketization on the ground, highlighting the need for better understanding of the performance of incompletely marketized PES models. One prominent example of a PES program with incomplete...

African countries are natural resource-rich. The continent has natural forests, homes of endemic biodiversity and various ores. This richness brings hope for sustainable and inclusive development in a continent whose population is rapidly growing. It also raises fears of environmental...

The ibiCash Protocol serves as a mechanism for encapsulating the time value of forests within a currency made up of units which represent the intangible value of 1 hectare of standing forest for the period of a single day in each of the world's ecoregions. At the end of each day, the system...

Beyond the economic support in terms of food, fuelwood, charcoal, wood, and timber supplies that investment towards forest environments provides, its contribution to environmental quality could also provide health benefits. Using data from 16 selected sub-Saharan African countries from 2002 to...

Quantifying factors giving rise to temporal variation in forest fires is important for advancing scientific understanding and improving fire prevention. We demonstrate that eighty percent of the large year-to-year variation in forest area burned in California can be accounted for by variation in...

The number of forest fires has increased globally, together with considerable smoke emission that significantly impacts the atmospheric environment and associated ecosystems. Most current studies have focused on the in situ effects of fire on the forest ecosystem. However, the mechanisms by...

Human actions can alter the local and regional climate, particularly via land use. We assess the impact of the Great Plains Shelterbelt, a large-scale forestation program in the 1930s which planted 220 million trees across six US Midwestern states. The program led to a regional increase in...