The world has pledged to protect 30 percent of its land and waters by 2030 to halt the rapid deterioration of critical ecosystems. We summarize the state of knowledge about the impacts of protected area policies, with a focus on deforestation and vegetation cover. We discuss critical issues...

The European Union designates 26% of its landmass as a protected area, limiting economic development to favor biodiversity. This paper uses the staggered introduction of protected-area policies between 1985 and 2020 to study the selection of land for protection and the causal effect of...

Human beings' domination of the planet has not been kind to many species worldwide. This is to be expected. Humans have radically altered natural landscapes, harvested heavily from the ocean, and altered the climate in an unprecedented way. Recent concerns over the extent and rate of...

Forests accompany the cities we build. There are an estimated 5.5 billion urban trees in the United States. Globally, about 25 percent of urban land is covered by tree canopy. This study examines urban forests as a policy tool for air pollution mitigation. We study an afforestation program in...

In an effort to measure and track marine-dependent economic activities, the United States National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has developed two statistical tools: The Economics: National Ocean Watch (ENOW) and the Marine Economy Satellite Account (MESA). In both efforts, the...

Shared socioeconomic pathways (SSPs) are perhaps the most influential economic policy analyses today. My paper evaluates their development, natural associations, logical consequences, and economic identification. All five SSP baseline scenarios are predicting scenarios that historical...

We introduce a new database of historical Genuine Savings (GS), an indicator of sustainable development promoted by the World Bank and widely used in contemporary economic research. GS derives from the theoretical work on wealth accounting, and addresses shortcomings in conventional metrics of...

Particulate matter significantly reduces life expectancy in India. We use a randomized controlled trial in the Indian state of Punjab to evaluate the effectiveness of conditional cash transfers (also known as payments for ecosystem services, or PES) in reducing crop residue burning, which is a...

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...

Two factors have elevated recent academic and policy interest in tropical deforestation: first, the realization that it is a major contributor to climate change; and second, a revolution in satellite-based measurement that has revealed that it is proceeding at a rapid rate. We begin by reviewing...