The pattern of global land use has important implications for the world's food and timber supplies, bioenergy, biodiversity and other eco-system services. However, the productivity of this resource is critically dependent on the world's climate, as well as investments in, and dissemination of...

The question of whether biofuels help mitigate climate change has attracted much debate in the literature. Using a global computable general equilibrium model that explicitly represents land-use change impacts due to the expansion of biofuels, this study attempts to shed some light on this...

Livestock systems globally are changing rapidly in response to human population growth, urbanization, and growing incomes. This paper discusses the linkages between burgeoning demand for livestock products, growth in livestock production, and the impacts this may have on natural resources, and...

The Amazon rainforest, the world's largest tropical rainforest and an important constituent of the global biosphere, continues degrading by rapid deforestation, which is expected to continue despite policies to prevent it. Current international funding to protect the Amazon rainforest focuses on...

The Amazon rainforest, the world's largest and most biodiverse, represents a global public good of which 15 percent has already been lost. The worldwide value of preserving the remaining forest is today unknown. A "Delphi" exercise was conducted involving more than 200 environmental valuation...

This paper surveys the current state of knowledge concerning the value of the Amazon rainforest, including a survey of work to date to quantify changes in economic values when the rainforest cover changes. The focus is on local and regional impacts of forest loss or protection, including both...

The Amazon Rainforest is a global public good. As such, and given that 15 percent of the original Amazon forest area has already been lost, households worldwide might be willing to pay to reduce or avoid additional losses. A full elicitation of global preferences for valuing preservation of the...

This paper uses a choice experiment conducted in Nepal during 2013 to estimate household-level willingness to participate in a village-level program under the Reduced Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation initiative requiring reductions in fuelwood collection, as a function of the...

This paper revisits the issue of environment and development raised in the 1992 World Development Report, with new analysis tools and data. The paper discusses inference and interpretation in a machine learning framework. The results suggest that production gradually favors conserving the...

A spatial econometric model is used to link road upgrading to forest clearing and biodiversity loss in the moist tropical forests of Bolivia, Cameroon, and Myanmar. Using 250-meter cells, the model estimates the relationship between the rate of forest clearing in a cell and its distance to the...