Final Report Summary - NEWFOREX (New Ways to Value and Market Forest Externalities)
Executive Summary:
Note that this summary and the following full report make extensive use of the FIGUREs attached to the report as pictures.
The EU FP7 project NEWFOREX focused on the issue forest ecosystem services and the improved provision of these. It is well-known to most people that forest provides many other goods and services to people than those traded in the market place. Where timber and fuel wood are prominent among the marketed goods, there are numerous and often major groups of goods and services that are not marketed. These include mushrooms, berries and other goods collected for free, recreational services at large, carbon sequestration, the protection of biodiversity and many other things. These goods and services remain externalities of forest production.
Methods for assessing these values have been under development for the last three decades, yet remain in incomplete use with considerable room for improvement. In particular the understanding of who benefits from the provision of forest ecosystem services has not been studied in any detail in spite of the obvious policy relevance. Furthermore, as forest owners are not rewarded for the value of these externalities they may make decisions providing less non-marketed ecosystem services than optimal; this represents what economists call a market failure. Because of the market failure, it is likely that we as a society can increase welfare, if we develop ways to enhance their provision. If Society asks forest owners to change their forest management practices to provide more ecosystem services, they will incur costs in different forms, and methods to assess these become important. Furthermore, it stress the need to consider how society can design its policies for enhanced ecosystem service provision and begs the question of who should carry the costs of an enhanced provision.
The three main objectives of NEWFOREX reflected these issues and were specifically:
1. To provide methods for valuing forest externalities, which handle the jointly produced externalities in an integrated way, where specific attention will be given to the question: Who benefits? This is important as it is among the beneficiaries that likely ‘buyers’ are to be found.
2. To develop a methodology for assessing the cost of provision for externalities. We experiment with methods in order to take into account trans-boundary effects of forest management, and transactions and opportunity costs.
3. To assess several market-based methods for enhancing the provision of forest externalities, including e.g. payment schemes provision, certification or (re-)definition of property rights, and point towards new potentials for improved policy instruments.
Numerous results have been obtained regarding the insights into 1) drivers of demand for forest ecosystem services across the case studies, 2) the conditions under which they may be supplied, 3) how benefits and values are distributed among the population in the case study regions, 4) awareness and knowledge about provision costs, 5) forest owners perception of cost of provision and market based instruments, 5) the diversity of policy instruments in use for enhancing the provision of forest ecosystem services, and 6) institutional aspects affecting the performance of selected economic instruments across the case studies.
To reach these results NEWFOREX researchers worked extensively with stakeholders and undertook analytical, applied research using a set of empirical surveys among potential beneficiaries (citizens, buyers) and providers (forest owners) of forest ecosystem services. These took place in several EU case studies and a developing country case study in Brazil. The researcher focused in particular, but not exclusively, on key externalities: Carbon sequestration, biodiversity protection, watershed services and recreation services. The surveys were designed as far as possible to allow for comparative analyses and detailed results supporting the achievement of the objectives and relevant policies in the case areas. Addressing the demand and supply side simultaneously is a unique and innovative stroke of the NEWFOREX project.
NEWFOREX has produced ample evidence for European citizens’ willingness to pay for enhanced provision of several forest ecosystem services over a wide range including biodiversity protection, carbon sequestration, recreational aspects, groundwater recharge and many more. Furthermore, NEWFOREX has provided examples of how a better modelling of the heterogeneity of preferences across citizens for specific forest ecosystem services can shed important light on the distributional and essentially democratic impacts and aspects of environmental values. For example both in the Finnish and Danish cases, results showed considerable variation in preferences for enhancing specific recreational options. In the Danish case, the researchers applied a novel discrete mixture preference model to obtain deep information on the distribution. They found that while additional access rights overall had a positive value, this result was created by a large minority deriving moderate to fairly high values from the option whereas a small majority in fact found increased access of low to moderate negative value – expressing concerns for recreational quality and biodiversity protection. Clearly such information is of policy relevance (See FIGURE 1).
[Insert Figure 1 around here]
NEWFOREX has undertaken a very comprehensive survey of forest land owners covering part of six European countries and a region in Brazil. The survey results in combination with empirical models of forest production and forest economics have allowed NEWFOREX to test and evaluate a number of methods for assessing the cost of provision of forest ecosystem services. A central result is that current practices for assessing such costs in policy practice differ substantially across countries; reflecting difference in forest owner populations and forest management practices. Further results include the successful application of stated preference methods in Brazil, Finland and Denmark to reveal forest land owners willingness to enter into conditional contracts targeting various ecosystem services. Results revealed substantial variation in forest owner opportunity costs for given contract types, e.g. among Brazilian smallholders in the Amazon (FIGURE 2). The different methods also allow an assessment of various contracting aspects and the role of transactions costs, additionality issues and many other things. Clearly, these variations in preferences can be used to inform policy design and in particular increase the targeting of polices to those groups and areas where win-win options are more likely.
[Insert Figure 2 around here]
NEWFOREX have investigated ongoing policy instruments for forest ecosystem service provision and have evaluated potentially new such instruments with the help of forest owners as well as the general public. One of the most important political aspects of any policy designed to enhance the provision of ecosystem services is the aspect of distribution of costs and benefits across those who demand and benefit from and those that supply the ecosystem service. In NEWFOREX we asked the public (and in some cases also the forest owners) about their view on this distribution for different ecosystem services. The results for recreational services are shown in FIGURE 3. The results spell out an important aspect often overlooked when debating policies like payment for ecosystem services: The issue of a legitimate design. We have many demands for such policies. We want them to be cost effective – coordinating efforts across people that can deliver the best value for money. They must ensure additionality – we don’t want to pay for things, we would have anyway. We want to encourage compliance and rule out undue rent opportunities. However, to gain public support, we also need the policies to be legitimate and acceptable in terms of, e.g. equity or ethical concerns, or with respect to the distribution of costs, benefits and rights. The results of NEWFOREX show that the answer to who should carry the cost depends quite a bit on the context. Only when – as in the national park area in Finland – there are obvious ways to have users pay, do a significant part of the public place their trust in this. There is generally highest support for society (that is all of us) to carry the costs jointly and compensate the forest owners for costs.
[Insert Figure 3 around here]
The results of NEWFOREX have been and still are being disseminated in numerous presentations for professionals, forest owners, policy makers and in written form in policy and scientific papers. Furthermore, two book volumes of policy oriented short chapters on specific aspects of forest ecosystem services are being printed in the fall of 2014.
Project Context and Objectives:
The EU FP7 project NEWFOREX focused on the issue forest ecosystem services and the improved provision of these. It is well-known to most people that forest provides many other goods and services to people than those traded in the market place. Where timber and fuel wood are prominent among the marketed goods, there are numerous and often major groups of goods and services that are not marketed. These include mushrooms, berries and other goods collected for free, recreational services at large, carbon sequestration, the protection of biodiversity and many other things. These goods and services remain externalities of forest production.
Methods for assessing these values have been under development for the last three decades, yet remain in incomplete use with considerable room for improvement. In particular the understanding of who benefits from the provision of forest ecosystem services has not been studied in any detail in spite of the obvious policy relevance. Furthermore, as forest owners are not rewarded for the value of these externalities they may make decisions providing less non-marketed ecosystem services than optimal; this represents what economists call a market failure. Because of the market failure, it is likely that we as a society can increase welfare, if we develop ways to enhance their provision. If Society asks forest owners to change their forest management practices to provide more ecosystem services, they will incur costs in different forms, and methods to assess these become important. Furthermore, it stress the need to consider how society can design its policies for enhanced ecosystem service provision and begs the question of who should carry the costs of an enhanced provision.
The three main objectives of NEWFOREX reflected these issues and were specifically:
1. To provide methods for valuing forest externalities, which handle the jointly produced externalities in an integrated way, where specific attention will be given to the question: Who benefits? This is important as it is among the beneficiaries that likely ‘buyers’ are to be found.
2. To develop a methodology for assessing the cost of provision for externalities. We experiment with methods in order to take into account trans-boundary effects of forest management, and transactions and opportunity costs.
3. To assess several market-based methods for enhancing the provision of forest externalities, including e.g. payment schemes provision, certification or (re-)definition of property rights, and point towards new potentials for improved policy instruments.
In pursuing and reaching all these three objectives, NEWFOREX researchers have obtained numerous results regarding and insights into 1) drivers of demand for forest ecosystem services across the case studies, 2) the conditions under which they may be supplied, 3) how benefits and values are distributed among the population in the case study regions, 4) awareness and knowledge about provision costs, 5) forest owners perception of cost of provision and market based instruments, 5) the diversity of policy instruments in use for enhancing the provision of forest ecosystem services, and 6) institutional aspects affecting the performance of selected economic instruments across the case studies.
To reach these results NEWFOREX researchers worked extensively with stakeholders and undertook analytical, applied research using a set of empirical surveys among potential beneficiaries (citizens, buyers) and providers (forest owners) of forest ecosystem services. These took place in several EU case studies and a developing country case study in Brazil. The researcher focused in particular, but not exclusively, on key externalities: Carbon sequestration, biodiversity protection, watershed services and recreation services. The surveys were designed as far as possible to allow for comparative analyses and detailed results supporting the achievement of the objectives and relevant policies in the case areas. Addressing the demand and supply side simultaneously is a unique and innovative stroke of the NEWFOREX project.
NEWFOREX have had considerable more success in data collection than the most optimistic estimates of the original project proposal. Thus, already now and even more as we look ahead into the coming months many results and novel empirical insights are being and will be published in scientific journals most of which has already been widely disseminated in numerous stakeholder meetings, policy conference and research conferences and events. The first of the large empirical surveys, focusing on the valuation of ecosystem services, has completed most data analyses and publication and dissemination is already well on its way, but more is to come, in particular on the trans-boundary aspects of carbon mitigation policies. The second large empirical effort, the survey of forest owners and their options for enhancing provision, has been completed across no less than eight case studies. Results have already been widely disseminated and publication is immediately forthcoming in numerous ways as many scientific journals have asked for revisions of submitted papers, followed by publication.
More broadly, NEWFOREX has contributed to the constant challenge of developing improved survey designs and methods of analyses for and approaches to an integrated assessment of the values of forest externalities. NEWFOREX has produced ample evidence for European citizens’ willingness to pay for enhanced provision of several forest ecosystem services over a wide range including biodiversity protection, carbon sequestration, recreational aspects, groundwater recharge and many more. We have focused on the application and further development of methods of survey design and data modeling that have focused on the often inherently joint provision of these services as well as the distributional impacts of policies, recognizing that beneficiaries may often be quite heterogeneous in their assessment of values. Thus, NEWFOREX has paid specific attention to the variation of the willingness-to-pay across various judicial and spatial boundaries and groups of beneficiaries. Results have been obtained that clearly show the relevance of this for informing policy makers better about how the benefits deriving from the various forest externalities are distributed in the population of beneficiaries. This will open up options for targeting provision policies better and notably also for targeting the use of market based instruments to build on the support from the groups of beneficiaries. The potential impact is a larger efficiency in addressing the beneficiaries of forest ecosystem services.
We draw forward a specific example of how NEWFOREX has improved the methods to uncover and analyze the heterogeneity of preferences across citizens for specific forest ecosystem services. We show how this enabled us to shed important light on the distributional and essentially democratic impacts and aspects of environmental values. In both the Finnish and Danish cases, results showed considerable variation in preferences for enhancing specific recreational options. In the Finnish case, visitors to the Ruka-Kuusamo national park area attached no significant value to the potential expansion of recreational trails in the area, yet considered a reduction in the current level of trails a clear loss. In the Danish case, the researchers applied a novel discrete mixture preference model to obtain deep information on the distribution. They found that while additional access rights overall had a positive value, this result was created by a large minority deriving moderate to fairly high values from the option whereas a small majority in fact found increased access of low to moderate negative value – expressing concerns for recreational quality and biodiversity protection. Clearly such information is of policy relevance (See FIGURE 1).
[Insert Figure 1 around here]
NEWFOREX has evaluated a number of methods for assessing the cost of provision of forest ecosystem services. A central result is that current practices for assessing such costs in policy practice differ substantially across countries; reflecting difference in forest owner populations and forest management practices.
NEWFOREX has undertaken a very comprehensive survey of forest land owners covering part of six European countries and a region in Brazil. The survey results in combination with empirical models of forest production and forest economics have allowed NEWFOREX to test and evaluate a Further results include the successful application of stated preference methods in Brazil, Finland and Denmark to reveal forest land owners willingness to enter into conditional contracts targeting various ecosystem services. Results revealed substantial variation in forest owner opportunity costs for given contract types, e.g. among Brazilian smallholders in the Amazon (FIGURE 2). The different methods also allow an assessment of various contracting aspects and the role of transactions costs, additionality issues and many other things. Clearly, these variations in preferences can be used to inform policy design and in particular increase the targeting of polices to those groups and areas where win-win options are more likely. Thus, this is a novel contribution to the scientific field and at the same time has immediate and crucial policy relevance for the development of markets for forest externalities. The results will greatly enhance the basis for targeting the most relevant forest owners, when policy makers wish to enhance the provision of ecosystem services. The potential impact is thus a larger efficiency in addressing the socially optimal provision of forest ecosystem services. Thus, NEWFOREX has suggested practical approaches for assessing costs of provision from the direct costs to integrated cost assessments, taking into account e.g. transactions costs and spatial spill-over effects; taking into account the joint production economics of multifunctional forests.
[Insert Figure 2 around here]
NEWFOREX have investigated ongoing policy instruments for forest ecosystem service provision and have evaluated potentially new such instruments with the help of forest owners as well as the general public. Finally, NEWFOREX provided a general assessment of market-based methods across the key externalities in focus and the range of case studies in the project. This has resulted in guidelines linking i) the type of externality, ii) the forest management context and iii) the socio-economic context with iv) a suitable choice of market-based method for enhanced provision of the externality in question. This has been informed by empirical investigations among forest owners that evaluate different aspects of the design of mechanisms and market-based methods and their impacts on the cost efficiency of the mechanism design. The expected impact is to further pave the way for improved methods for marketing ecosystem services, which may also hold the promise of improved ownership and acceptance among stakeholders.
[Insert Figure 3 around here]
As a specific cross-country empirical result of value for policy makers we draw forward the following: One of the most important political aspects of any policy designed to enhance the provision of ecosystem services is the aspect of distribution of costs and benefits across those who demand and benefit from and those that supply the ecosystem service. In NEWFOREX we asked the public (and in some cases also the forest owners) about their view on this distribution for different ecosystem services. The results for recreational services are shown in FIGURE 3. The results spell out an important aspect often overlooked when debating policies like payment for ecosystem services: The issue of a legitimate design. We have many demands for such policies. We want them to be cost effective – coordinating efforts across people that can deliver the best value for money. They must ensure additionality – we don’t want to pay for things, we would have anyway. We want to encourage compliance and rule out undue rent opportunities. However, to gain public support, we also need the policies to be legitimate and acceptable in terms of, e.g. equity or ethical concerns, or with respect to the distribution of costs, benefits and rights. The results of NEWFOREX show that the answer to who should carry the cost depends quite a bit on the context. Only when – as in the national park area in Finland – there are obvious ways to have users pay, do a significant part of the public place their trust in this. There is generally highest support for society (that is all of us) to carry the costs jointly and compensate the forest owners for costs. This in general paves the way well, for the further development of economic instruments for enhancing the provision forest ecosystem services. This includes the argument made by the literature on payment for ecosystem services, which can be illustrated as in FIGURE 4. There may be situations where the forest owner’s costs of a change from current forest management to a different management system associated with bigger provision (smaller loss) of ecosystem services can be fully compensated (or more) by the beneficiaries of ecosystem services – resulting in a win-win scenario.
[Insert Figure 4 around here]
Substantial effort has been done by all project partners to engage a wide range of stakeholders in the project's activities. In respect of the nature of the work, numerous stakeholders in the case study regions participated in the definition of case studies' objectives and the development of corresponding surveys, as well as in the process of collecting policy information and examples and interpreting results. A successful high-level stakeholder board meeting was held in Copenhagen and numerous other stakeholder outreach activities undertaken at a broader European level. A final conference was held in Uppsala in May 2014. The results of NEWFOREX have been and still are being disseminated in numerous presentations for professionals, forest owners, policy makers and in written form in policy and scientific papers.
[Insert Figure 5 around here]
FIGURE 5 shows our approximate data on how different audiences have been targeted in our efforts to reach out towards various end user groups. Researchers are of course a major group, in particular as part of the effort to ensure and validate the quality of our results. However, decision makers and professionals working with and within the different policy processes and forest sector organizations together constitute the dominant group of our audience. Forest owners are also a visible group, but given the meta-policy target of our research it is not surprising that they are not more prominent. However, looking ahead we see more dissemination results focusing on forest owners when presenting the results of cost of provision assessments for their consideration.
[Insert Figure 6 around here]
FIGURE 6 shows a graph of the distribution of dissemination activities by type within the project period. As would be expected the oral presentations dominate as communication with stakeholders and presentations of intermediate results at international and national conference has been the main dissemination activity in this phase. The number of publications is, however, already significant and with more than 50 is certain to have a lasting impact and build the legacy of NEWFOREX. Many more publications will be forthcoming and furthermore, two book volumes of policy oriented short chapters on specific aspects of forest ecosystem services are being printed in the fall of 2014.
Project Results:
Introducing the scientific work effort and organization
The NEWFOREX project was organized in a matrix structure with three topical work packages running a cross a set of case studies. The three topical work packages were completely aligned with the objectives of NEWFOREX, and in all case studies work was undertaken that related to the different topical work packages and objectives. The work packages were:
Work package 2: New methods for valuation and assessment of forest externalities
Work package 3: Developing methods for cost of provision assessments
Work package 4: Assessing cost-efficient market-based methods
Across all research partners, who included the nine universities and research institutions, different researchers were involved in undertaking the actual research in the three work packages. The work was organized into a set of tasks, each with a designated task leader appointed from the partner circle. The task leader was responsible for coordinating the effort across partners and case studies. Furthermore, the researchers in each case study cooperated closely to make sure that research questions and issues addressed when targeting e.g. forest owners in qualitative or quantitative surveys would mirror or at least reflect the questions and issues addressed when targeting the citizens or user groups; and vice versa. To ensure this form of tight alignment a number of stakeholder interviews, expert interviews and focus group exercises were undertaken prior to the implementation of the actual full scale survey efforts. The tight alignment implies that in several of the case studies, the local research groups that are part of NEWFOREX have produced quite comprehensive research of value for several ongoing policy processes. We elaborate further on this aspect in the section below.
In the following, we produce a comprehensive work package wise description of how the main scientific results were produced and provide several examples of the main part of these.
The main research efforts and results obtained in Work package 2: New methods for valuation and assessment of forest externalities
The first task in work package 2 concerned the identification of the role of key externalities across all case studies, and was led by the partner METLA. The main objective of this task was to provide a detailed description of the role of the four key forest externalities (biodiversity, recreation, water and carbon sequestration) in the case studies. Furthermore, another important objective was to outline forest management actions that may increase or decrease the provision of these externalities in the specific case study area. This effort and the resulting report formed the basis for the further work in all work packages, but it also represented valuable new insights in itself. The first part of each case study’s contribution to the report gave a review of recent valuation studies related to the four key externalities as well as lessons learned from the earlier research. The review covered relevant valuation studies during the last 5-10 years published in national languages as well as in international publications. The second part of the case study contributions dealt with the relative importance and demand for various forest externalities in the case study areas. These were assessed using various information sources describing uses and consumption, e.g. in terms of recreational activities, water consumption etc., as well as policy documents and policy goal formulations.
Moreover, a description of the forest ownership structure in each case area, the property rights definitions and forms and the current use rights for forest externalities were presented. In each case study, 2-3 key externalities were identified as the most relevant ones for the forthcoming empirical valuation study. The researchers in each case study also described the actual location and the scale of the case study area as well as the current population in and around it and the key means of livelihood linked to the use of forest resources. Key stakeholders linked to forest externalities in the case study area were also listed The case study partners discussed what types of values were likely to be at stake in the area in terms of scale (local, regional, national or global) as well as quality (use values, non-use values, etc.). Moreover, public access to forest goods and services as well as potential non-users of these assets was discussed. In the fourth part of each report, the possible forest management scenarios (management changes) that may affect the provision of key forest externalities were described in considerable detail. The specific temporal and spatial scale in producing forest externalities was also elaborated.
All this compiled knowledge and insight was crucial for developing the valuation and assessment approaches within work package 2 (New methods for valuation and assessment of forest externalities), enabling the researchers to identify the relevant externalities to focus on, and to define the management change scenarios relevant to propose as possible changes to survey respondents. The effort also served the further elaboration in the other work packages. For example in work package 3 (Developing methods for cost of provision assessments), the information was valuable for addressing what were the relevant forest management changes to consider. These forest management changes could then be addressed through different methods for assessing the cost of provision for the resulting forest ecosystem services. The description of the role of different forest ecosystem services also formed a good basis for the work in work package 4 (Assessing cost-efficient market-based methods), in targeting the review of existing policies affecting or directly targeting forest ecosystem services.
The insights and knowledge obtained through this first activity also served as an important basis for the communication with stakeholder and for the framing of research questions. Thus, while it did not in itself result in specific research publications, almost all publications of NEWFOREX draw upon this effort in setting and describing case study context, explaining policy relevance and background and pin-pointing why their research questions are of interest and adequately framed and addressed.
The second task in work package 2 (New methods for valuation and assessment of forest externalities) concerned the design and implementation of a set of choice experiment based valuation instruments and surveys targeting relevant forest ecosystem services in relevant scenarios in five case study areas. This task was led by the partner EFI.
Thus, the main objective of this task was to develop valuation questionnaires for all case studies, and the work of this task was based on the findings and the selected case studies thoroughly described in the above first task and effort of work package 2.
It was crucial to ensure as aligned and as high a quality of these valuation instruments as possible, drawing on each partner’s special competences with respect to the case study areas and with respect to the design and analyses of valuation surveys and valuation data. In the first stage EFI developed a full scale questionnaire template based on and targeting the Mediterranean case study. This template was discussed thoroughly at the 3rd project meeting in Nancy among the case study partner, where also the questions common for and to be implemented in all case studies were defined. Finally, in an iterative process of writing, evaluating and rewriting, each case study researcher team a developed a valuation questionnaire targeting.
The complete set (for five case studies) of valuation questionnaires was presented in deliverable 2.2 “A full set of valuation survey instruments ready for implementation”. The common parts of the case study questionnaires focus particularly on issues relevant for analysing the distributional effects of enhancing ecosystem services in the different case study areas. Across case studies, all key ecosystem services identified were covered. The core valuation instrument in each case study questionnaire was carefully tailored for the specific context characterising the case study. This methodologically aligned and coordinated environmental valuation experiment running across five significant European case studies is a major achievement of the NEWFOREX project. The results obtained are described below and hold great potential for informing European environmental and forest policies at all decision levels.
Apart from the aspects related to the valuation of forest ecosystem services, the questionnaires also included carefully aligned questions to the public regarding their views on several policy aspects. These included questions on their view on the enhanced provision of selected forest ecosystem services, on the distribution of responsibilities across forest owners and notably about whom they thought should carry the costs of an enhanced provision of various forest ecosystem services. Finally, the citizens were also asked their opinion about who should be controlling and distributing funds to forest owners, given that society would be paying forest owners to enhance the provision of forest ecosystem services. The answers to these policy oriented questions formed a key input to some of the novel results produced in work package 4 (Assessing cost-efficient market-based methods).
A final effort regarding the construction of valuation instruments followed the consortiums response to the scientific review conducted after the first periodic report. In the review report, the scientific reviewer suggested to pursue more strictly an idea already embedded in the concept of trans-boundary evaluations as described in the original NEWFOREX proposal. We decided to pursue this idea and selected the case of climate change mitigation policies as the focus of the instrument. Thus, in the last half of the project, we developed a new valuation instrument targeting the preferences of European citizens for mitigating climate change (reducing net emissions of CO2) through the use of a specific set of policy initiatives implemented in one or the other out of the several countries in which the survey were undertaken. The results are very interesting and briefly touched upon below, but as we consider publication in a very high ranking journal, they are only described in tentative terms.
Versions of all the questionnaires are secured and stored centrally in the NEWFOREX intranet as they represent an important reference for the many publications currently being published and written as a result of their implementation. An example of how the questionnaires used visual aids to explain various environmental changes to respondents is shown in FIGURE 7.
[Insert Figure 7 around here]
The third task of work package 2 (New methods for valuation and assessment of forest externalities) concerned the first analyses of the integrated assessment of the values of forest ecosystem services in each of the different case studies. This task was led by METLA.
This effort included the production of the main valuation results of the five empirical valuation studies conducted in Spain, Italy, Poland, Denmark and Finland. Parts of the questionnaires and hence data sets were common to all case studies to allow for cross-case comparisons while specific parts of each questionnaire differ in order to meet the differences in country specific circumstances including geographical and legislative issues as well as the differences in the relative importance of the key externalities: recreation, biodiversity, carbon sequestration and water.
The full set of results produced in this effort can be found in the report and deliverable D2.3 “Report on the Analyses of Integrated Assessment of Values across Case Studies”. The report is a staggering 150 pages long, and below we therefore report only some examples of the results produced. The deliverable consists of a short introduction to the design of valuation studies and the mathematical descriptions and explanations of the applied econometric models. Subsequently, each case study report is presented as a separate chapter with more or less the same structure. The case study reports first explained the content of the surveys and study designs by describing the rationale of choosing the attributes for choice experiments addressing the changes in production of key externalities as well as the proposed forest management changes considered. These sections were followed by a summary of data collection and a short description of the applied econometric models. The result parts presented first the general results explaining attitudes towards and values of forest externalities when estimated in models targeting the main effects and attributes of the choice experiment surveys. This was followed by the main body of empirical results from the valuation studies i.e. the results of the various econometric models and specifications evaluated. Finally each case study outlined their main conclusions of their valuation study.
As an example of such a study we draw forward here the Boreal case study in which the choice experiment method was used to analyze foreign and domestic tourists’ demand for and willingness to pay for enhanced forest amenities, in particular landscape values and biodiversity, in private forests in the Ruka-Kuusamo area in northeastern Finland. The data were collected on-site during two main tourism seasons, winter-spring and summer-fall season, resulting in over 1100 completed questionnaires. The findings were several:
- The tourists are willing to pay for selected improvements in the quality of outdoor recreation environments through restrictions on forest management in the case study area.
- Both foreign and domestic tourists were willing to pay for improvements in the quality of the forest landscape, in terms of a less frequent occurrence of clear-cutting and site preparation areas along the routes, as well as for increased biodiversity.
- A majority of respondents agreed with the idea that private forest owners should be compensated for the lost income and extra costs of landscape management,
- …and that tourists should pay their share for preserving the landscape.
A major motivation for this study was to consider the prospects of developing a market-based mechanism to enhance the provision of landscape and recreational forest amenities and thereby to improve the conditions of an expanding nature-based tourism in the area mainly in private ownership. A map of the case study area can be seen in FIGURE 8.
[Insert Figure 8 around here]
Looking across all five case studies the results of NEWFOREX clearly documents that European citizens would assign great value to an enhanced provision of forest ecosystem services, but also that these differ much across the populations and depend strongly on the actual environmental changes proposed. The majority of people are willing to pay low to moderate amounts for various environmental changes, yet the mean estimates will inevitably be affected also by the groups among the European citizens who put much weight to and derive much value from forest ecosystem services, and their enhancement. In FIGURE 9, we illustrate this general distribution of peoples’ valuation using data from the Italian case study. As we can see, the majority of respondent are willing to pay little or only moderate amounts for a given environmental improvement. Yet, non-trivial groups are still willing to choose policy and scenario alternatives associated with fairly high costs – provided they also imply significant improvements in the provision of forest ecosystem services.
[Insert Figure 9 around here]
The pattern of peoples’ willingness to pay across spatial, urban-rural and many other boundaries was investigated further in the fourth task of work package 2 (New methods for valuation and assessment of forest externalities), which focused on the analyses of trans-boundary patterns in the values of externalities. The task was led by UCPH and the full set of results was reported in the deliverable report “D2.4 Comparative analyses of trans-boundary patterns of values”. This is again a fairly substantive report with a total of 119 pages, and here we only draw forward some of the results obtained and published in that report and currently also being published in numerous papers coming out in journals like Forest Policy and Economics, Journal of Environmental Planning and Management and Ecological Economics.
In the deliverable the case study researchers have analysed various trans-boundary or distributional effects of the values obtained by the choice experiment described in D2.2 and D2.3. First they compared the effect of specific parameters relevant for a socio-demographically oriented trans-boundary comparison, namely income, education, urban-rural divides and various measures related to the accessibility to the forest. We found that the rich part of the population in general wanted to pay higher amounts for enhanced provision of ecosystem services from forests, whereas the low income part of the populations in general wanted to pay lower amounts for a given improvement in ecosystem service provision. This suggested that in general, environmental policies enhancing forest ecosystem services would in absolute terms benefit the more well-off part of the population more than the less well-off part of the European citizens. For some case studies this differs by attributes, for others not.
Turning to other distributional patterns we found a weak tendency in some cases for education being positively related to biodiversity, probably due to an information effect for this attribute, where many people probably mainly derive non-use values, e.g. existence values from the enhanced protection of biodiversity, and this may be pre-conditioned by an insight into the issue of conservation and species protection. Variables related to the use and access policies (population density, visitor frequency, distance to the forests) showed little variance, though a weak tendency for the recreational improvements to be preferred more by people with easy access and the more non-use dominated attributes like biodiversity less preferred by people with frequent and easy access.
The case studies are very different, both in terms of the externalities being valued and the population valuing them. Therefore some of the trans-boundary effects being analysed are only relevant in specific context.
An example of a deeper and also methodologically innovative analysis is the analysis of the Danish citizens’ preferences for enhanced access in private forests. In Atlantic case researchers conducted a deeper analysis of the heterogeneity of these access preferences. We found that willingness to pay for access outside road and path differs between individuals in the population with a small majority having quite negative preferences for increased access and a small minority having a positive value, in the aggregate slightly higher in absolute values. See the resulting distribution and WTP measures in FIGURE 1. These differences were not explainable by socio-demographic characteristics, but instead the likelihood of a negative reaction to enhanced access correlated strongly with peoples’ tendency to think that we – the human race - in general should protect nature more (“tree huggers”) and peoples’ tendency to think that nature is robust and we have a right to use it (“tree cutters”). Analyses like this one are important to answer the policy question of who benefits from initiatives, and has clear policy relevance.
As explained earlier, the scientific reviewer suggested pursuing more strictly an idea already embedded in the concept of trans-boundary evaluations as described in the original NEWFOREX proposal. We decided to pursue this idea and selected the case of climate change mitigation policies as the focus of the instrument. Thus, in the last half of the project, we developed a new valuation instrument targeting the preferences of European citizens for mitigating climate change (reducing net emissions of CO2) through the use of a specific set of policy initiatives implemented in one or the other out of the five countries in which the survey were undertaken. Thus, we are able to conduct the exact same survey in five selected cases and compare WTP for reduced CO2 emissions to the atmosphere, and preference for in which country mitigation efforts should be undertaken. As CO2 is a public global good, one could argue that it should not matter to people where mitigation measures are undertaken: They will all benefit from the reduced emissions no matter where reductions are made. However, there may be associated co-benefits which would change that pattern. That is the aim of this extra study. Our initial findings are, that in fact across the different countries (Denmark, Germany, France, Spain and Italy), citizens share a reasonable well aligned view on their WTP for carbon mitigation in €/Mt. They also all agree fairly much that the preferred sector would be investments in renewable energy (solar, wind etc.), whereas they differ slightly in their preferences for ranking initiatives in the industry sector (energy efficiency), versus the forest sector and biomass use. They also all (with one exception) seem to prefer mitigation investments in any sector to be taken in their home country. No further results can be reported here, as we currently undertake the work needed to reach a high ranking journal with the results.
The fifth and final task of work package 2 (New methods for valuation and assessment of forest externalities) was a compilation of the work package’s contribution to the projects unifying deliverables, which to enhance end-user impact, was determined to be an integrated set of short texts collected into a publication of the European Forest Institute’s policy and research oriented book series “What Can Science Tell Us?”. The two volumes of this book will be published in the autumn of 2014. In this publication the project partners have pursued to describe the ways of valuing forest externalities that both take into account the joint production of externalities and allow for detailed analysis of preference heterogeneity across beneficiaries. The publication presents several examples of valuation studies in different parts of Europe conducted within NEWFOREX-project, and policy relevant highlights are made throughout the presentation of the different topics.
The contribution to the book volumes from work package 2 are visible in Deliverable 2.5 (some 43 pages) were organized in the following way: First the need and justification for monetary valuation of forest externalities and the main objectives typically driving the use of the results of such studies were presented and discussed. The next chapter includes a brief presentation of up-to-date methods of monetary valuation of forest externalities. The main part of the contribution is a set of chapters focusing on the four core forest externalities, i.e. water, carbon, recreation and biodiversity, and drawing upon the results of the NEWFOREX-project. Each chapter describes the special features of the forest externality that need to be taken into account in valuation studies, sums up key results of previous valuation studies including the used measures and indicators and finally, highlights the main results of the case studies obtained in NEWFOREX.
The chapter ”Valuing water externalities from forests” presents results from valuing ground water resources in Denmark. The study aimed at estimating the mean WTP of the Danish population for additional clean groundwater under the forests of the case area. The mean WTP for additional annual groundwater recharges amounting to 20,000,000 m3 or 40,000,000 m3 was estimated to equal 76.5€ and 104.4€ /year and household, respectively. The estimated willingness to pay measures of Danish households corresponds roughly to a willingness to pay of 6-8.8€/m3 of additional groundwater. This is not far from the costs that respondents have experienced paying for water consumption in the household. The results are illustrated in FIGURE 10.
[Insert Figure 10 around here]
The chapter on the valuation of carbon sequestration illustrated the main results of the Spanish case study region. In Catalonia people were asked about their preferences for atmospheric CO2 reduction, which would equal the annual emissions produced by a number of Catalan citizens ranging from 10,000 to 55,000 people. Considering that citizens of Catalonia emit around 7 t of CO2 per year/person, the total CO2 reduction provided by forests is in range from 70,000 to 385,000 t of CO2 per year, depending on the policy scenario. The study showed that citizens were on average willing to pay 0.00077 € for an additional quantity of CO2, equivalent to the annual emissions of an average Catalonian citizen, which means 0.00011 € per each additional t of CO2 reduced in the atmosphere. This result is in range with the values obtained in previous valuation studies in Spain.
The next chapter focusing of recreation benefits presents key results from Danish and Finnish case studies. The Danish case values recreational benefits from daytrips. In Denmark the majority of the forest area is privately owned and these forests are important for recreation for a growing urban population. The choice experiment method was used to measure demand for increased access to forests with three alternative levels: the current access rights, access outside roads and paths allowed on 50% of the area, and access on foot allowed everywhere on the forest floor.
The results show that people had diverse preferences for how much they valued this increased access rights in the forest – some were willing to pay for increased access whereas others believed it would be harmful for the nature and wildlife. The Danish population was remarkably split on this issue, as earlier shown in FIGURE 1: One group (accounting for some 51% of respondents) had a negative mean WTP of –42 €/year, whereas the mean WTP of the other half (49%) of the population was positive and as high as 70 €/year. The reasons behind the results link to be differences in attitudes regarding the issue of nature conservation versus recreational use of the forest environment.
The Finnish case study valued the recreational benefits linked to nature-based tourism in privately owned forests. The respondents consisting of national and international tourists were willing to pay for the improvements in the quality of the landscape. More precisely, if the quality of the landscape would be clearly improved so that traces of intensive forestry operations would not at all be visible along the outdoor routes, the visitors would be willing to pay more (12.17€/week) than if the quality would only increase slightly (10.82 €/week). Moreover, the visitor would be willing to pay for an increase in biodiversity (10.2 €/week) and claim a compensation for its decrease (36.8 €/week).The tourists’ willingness to pay for changes in recreational and environmental quality of the Ruka-Kuusamo nature tourism area in Finland are presented in the FIGURE 11.
[Insert Figure 11 around here]
One major motivation of this study was to consider prospects for a market-based mechanism (MBM), called Landscape and Recreational Values Trading, which has been proposed to improve environmental conditions of nature-based tourism areas in Finland. The results confirmed that at least one of the basic requirements of a new MBM was fulfilled, as tourists showed a significant WTP for enhanced forest amenities such as the landscape.
The chapter “Valuing biodiversity” presents and compares valuation approaches and results from Finland, Denmark, Poland, Italy and Spain. The attributes describing the level of biodiversity varied from amount of species to naturalness of forest environments. TABLE 1 presents the biodiversity attributes used in the studies, their change levels and respondents WTP for suggested changes across all the valuation studies undertaken in NEWFOREX.
[Insert Table 1 around here]
People’s underlying motives for preferences for environmental protection is closely linked to their overall perception of environment. Environmental attitudes, which can influence people’s WTP, were also measured in the case studies with a psychometric scale called the New Environmental Paradigm (NEP) Scale. The results from NEWFOREX confirm that people with higher environmental concerns are more willing to contribute to biodiversity protection.
The main research efforts and results obtained in Work package 3: Developing methods for cost of provision assessments
In a research effort like this, the first task was to evaluate the current empirical basis for assessing direct, opportunity and other types cost of provision in the case studies, notably with a view towards the role of joint provisions of externalities as stated in the main objectives of work package 3. Furthermore and on that basis the second early research effort was to initialize the work on cost of provision assessment methods and evaluations of these in a coherent way, and notably test methods for assessing direct cost of provision
The results of the first effort are presented in the comprehensive deliverable and report from the project with the title “D3.1 A report summarizing the existing knowledge basis for assessing the direct cost of provision in the case study areas” and compiles 88 pages of reviews, examples and illustrations of existing definitions and methods for modelling and assessing the cost of provision for forest externalities. In addition, a simple conceptual framework for non-industrial forest owners was developed as a basis for the following task on developing for forest owner surveys. Thus, this work targeted an integrated assessment taking into account that the forest externalities are produced jointly and related to management alternatives. Each case study partner provided key elements for assessing the cost of forest ecosystem service provision in their respective case study areas. Thus, the first part of this effort and the report D3.1 was devoted to setting up the definitions and concepts necessary to address the assessment of cost of provision for forest externalities in a coherent and rigid way. The second step outlined in the results was to focus on the different methods in relation to the context, practices and constraints of the individual case studies. Two main approaches for cost of provision assessments were developed at this stage, based on the existing practices and available models and methods: The first of these takes what can be described as a production technological or engineering approach which focus more on outcomes and objective measurable direct and opportunity costs and other costs. The second approach can be described as one focusing more on behavioural approaches and attempting to assess cost of provision through eliciting estimates from observed behaviour or from stated preference surveys and decision patterns. The third part of the effort and the D3.1 report focused on the development of a simple conceptual framework for addressing non-industrial forest owners, when assessing cost of provision. Cost assessment requires three elements: the reference case (or ‘business as usual’ case), the forest management scenarios relevant for bringing about different levels of forest ecosystem services, and the expected impacts and the cost drivers. Any survey targeting forest owners’ or any engineering analysis targeting cost of provision must have clear communications and definitions of these concepts to obtain valid results.
A main finding resulting from these efforts was that current methods and examples of assessing direct and other cost of provision differed significantly between case studies. In some case studies, there were several examples of assessment of e.g. direct and opportunity costs of providing various changes in forest management, linked to quantifiable changes in ecosystem service provision (e.g. Boreal, Atlantic and Mediterranean). In other case studies, this evidence was much scarcer, and methods much more indirect and based on scarce evidence and practices. This undoubtedly reflect variations also in the intensity of forest management practices, the degree of absentee forest owners in the regions, the differences in forest ownership patterns and the difficulties in identifying forest owners – not only for the authorities and researchers but also for private sector agents.
The major empirical effort of work package 3 (Developing methods for cost of provision assessments) was the collection of information either through qualitative interviews or through quantitative surveys among forest owners and in one particular case also forest extensions companies operating for and on behalf of forest owners. NEWFOREX has been extremely productive in this specific task and collected more information about forest owners’ and their views upon forest ecosystem service provision and policies related to this than any previous research effort. Once the key publications are out from NEWFOREX these data are of course available for other researchers and interested parties.
An important part of preparing for such a major empirical effort was to screen, evaluate and debate the possible approaches in and across the different case studies. Suggestions were developed and tested in small pilot samples, on experts and in focus groups using case tailored models of the integrated production changes proposed and the cost of provision assessment. Thus, the preliminary phase of survey preparation progressed by adapting the general framework for surveying non-industrial forest owners to the case specific characteristics. As an important part of the preparations and learning points needed for developing this survey, a pilot study was implemented in France during the first period to analyse how researchers can or cannot elicit the key factors involved in harvesting and marketing wood as well as in supplying environmental and social services. This French pilot study along with the findings in the selected case studies reported in D3.1 formed the basis for the development of the forest owner survey instruments and interview protocols. The different aspects considered and the conclusions drawn upon what to focus on in terms of hypothesis to be tested and how in terms of empirical method and experimental design for all the different case studies were all reported in “D3.2 A forest owner survey instrument and interview guide ready for implementation”, a comprehensive document of 76 pages. The report was structured in in four parts. The first part summarized the main insights from D3.1 considering the measurement of externalities, the role of BAU scenarios, and identification of forest management actions. The second part addressed several overall issues on implementing qualitative and quantitative surveys. In particular, data requirement for assessment of cost of provision based on current management (revealed cost assessment) and based on stated management choices (choice experiments) were considered. The third part summarized the implementation of the surveys in each case study area, focusing on the survey approach, sampling methods, externalities considered, management actions, and the hypotheses considered in the surveys. The final component of the report provided a brief overview and synthesis of case study survey instruments applied. The actual questionnaire instruments and protocols are available in an Annex report “D3.2 Annex: example questionnaire and interview guidelines” with a staggering 238 pages.
The report 3.2 shows how researchers prepared and refined the surveys and their empirical approaches for the case studies prior to collecting the empirical data. The surveys were based on a shared methodological development and some common principles and targets for the implementation, but the large differences in the forest owner populations and notably their accessibility had clear implications for the choice of method. Three key points would be addressed. Firstly, the availability of information concerning the forest owners’ knowledge about the costs related to the (integrated joint) production functions. This point is important for the estimation of the direct costs, the feedback costs, and the opportunity cost. Secondly, the forest owners experience with and perception of other types of costs, e.g. transaction costs, risk, coordination costs etc. This last type of cost is linked to a component of the valuation surveys that relies on the market-based mechanisms, for example a simulated experiment of environmental contracting and willingness to accept management restrictions for given compensations. Thirdly, the spatial interaction between forest owners will be important to assert to have a better idea of the possibilities of supplying more efficiently forest externalities.
In the end, the case study partners used relatively different survey approaches. This reflected the fact that the case study areas were very different with respect to forest type and management, owner structure as well as different foci of the case study partners’ surveys. While most studies applied quantitative surveys, the Mediterranean case study – as expected – used exclusively a qualitative interview approach as forest owners were hardly accessible or active in forest management in the Catalan region. Therefore, limited information on cost of changing management practices was available. The data collected in the case studies also represented different spatial scales, at least in a relative sense. The Boreal, Central European, Mediterranean, and the Mountainous case studies had a regional scale. The French pilot study sample referred to five different administrative regions. The Atlantic case study and the German survey was carried out at a national level.
The Central European, Mediterranean, Mountainous, as well as the Amazon case applied face-to-face interviews in order to cope with a context where the population is unfamiliar with surveys. Different versions of stratified sampling were applied in most of the case studies to select the forest owners to be included in the survey. In the Atlantic case study, it was preferred to contacted forest owners by ordinary mail presenting the purpose of the survey and addressing the respondents to a website where they could compile the questionnaire. An example of how a web-based choice exercise looks can be seen in FIGURE 12. The Atlantic sample included 308 respondents (response rate 32.6%). The Boreal case study focussed on the private forest owners in the Kuusamo municipality, who owned at least 7 hectare of forest. The survey was done by ordinary mail and the final number of completed responses was 471 (response rate 35.3%). In the Mountainous case study, overall 200 forest owners from the Veneto region were face to face interviewed by trained interviewers. The French pilot studied focussed on five administrative regions scattered across France: Lorraine in the Northeast, Pays de la Loire in the North-west, Bourgogne and Auvergne in the centre, and Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur in the south. The survey was carried out by ordinary mail. Overall, 590 questionnaires were returned (response rate 3.9%). The Amazon case study applied semi-structured questionnaires at the village and farm-household level, covering approximately 30% of the population of the two studied intervention areas: the protected areas Juma and Uatuma. Overall, 340 individuals were surveyed. The Central European case study – in addition to the survey carried out in framework of POLFOREX as described in D3.2 – included an experimental study testing the mechanisms of selecting privately owned forest areas that would provide ecosystem services. The analysis from Germany contained interesting aspects related to the supply side and the interaction between forest owners and the forest owner cooperatives. As far as the German study is regarded, 209 forest owners answered the questionnaire distributed among members of forest owners’ cooperatives.
[Insert Figure 12 around here]
As far as the methodologies were concerned, there were also differences across case studies. For instance, the Atlantic and Boreal case studies implemented a choice experiment analysis. The Boreal case study considered also an engineering approach as did the Atlantic case study – results of the latter was published already in 2013 in Forestry. The Amazon case study used the contingent valuation method.
The first major set results from the empirical data surveys are reported in deliverable “D3.3 studies on the application of cost of provision assessments and the relations to the main findings from the forest owner surveys”, which constitutes a massive 205 pages of results applying various methods for cost of provision assessments and presenting the major results of the forest owner surveys. In particular, the deliverable aimed to summarize the experiences from case studies on the application of cost of provision assessment methods. Furthermore, they presented and compared the main findings from cost of provision assessments based on the case studies’ forest owner surveys (including the estimates of the willingness to accept and its variation across cases, across the different geographical, judicial, social, and behavioural boundaries and participation patterns among the forest owners active or not in policy schemes targeting forest ecosystem services). Moreover, the results and the methods presented represent a form of toolbox where the different methods for costs assessment have been tested. The purpose was to offer to other researchers and practitioners a starting point to make regional and context-specific costs assessments in the future.
The main results presented in the D3.3 studies on the application of cost of provision assessments and the relations to the main findings from the forest owner surveys can be summarized as follows. Firstly, several methodologies were available to estimate the cost of provision of forest externalities. Methodologies and results differed across qualitative and quantitative surveys, as well as across analysis focusing on objective costs or perceived costs. For instance, in the Boreal case, the perceived costs as estimated using stated preference data resulted in measures up to ten times higher than the estimates obtained applying an engineering approach to cost of provision assessments. This is in stark contrast to the results of the Atlantic survey, where stated preference estimates of forest owners’ cost of provision perception were much closer to, in some cases even below, the corresponding cost of provision assessments obtained using engineering approaches. The reported results also reflect that the choice of the methodology to estimate costs of provision of environmental services was strongly influenced by several factors specific to each case study areas context. One of the most crucial factors concerned to respondent and hence survey data’s availability and quality, especially for individual level data. Asking for key information on forest owners such as income, timber revenues, as well as management and operational costs generally often resulted in a high rate of non-responses restricting the analysis. A second main limitation was the scarcity of data directly linked to environmental services. The level of externality provision could only be quantified indirectly by measuring management actions. Finally, the variety of contexts and the applied methods narrowed the possibilities of estimate cost comparisons between different case studies, yet it allowed for illustrating how different contexts can call for different approaches and measures.
Below, we draw forward a few examples of the many specific results reported in the 205 pages long deliverable. Looking across all results obtained we find considerable variation in the form and the content of results. This was brought about by the different priorities and perspectives specific to the different contexts in the case studies, which must be reflected in the setting up of the research objectives at the case study level. Even though similar externalities were considered in the case studies’ surveys, often they were not directly comparable due to differences in the relevant management actions related to a specific externality in a specific forest ecosystem context.
To illustrate, we draw forward the examples of the Boreal and Atlantic case study (see the TABLE 2, which contains intermediate results from the analyses. The final results are currently under revision for publication in well-reputed journals like Ecological Economics). The two applications of choice experiments (perceived costs) are not directly comparable. However, we find that in the Atlantic study the demand for compensation was high when it concerned increased public access to forests, whereas in the Boreal study, increasing the length of hiking and skiing routes did not have a significant effect on the demand for compensation. It should be mentioned that the Boreal case dealt with increasing length of (existing) routes in the forest, whereas the Atlantic case dealt with allowing a new type of access, namely access outside established road and paths. In both cases, restrictions on harvest (Atlantic: set aside an area as untouched forest; Boreal: no harvesting at all) were considered as costly restrictions. Generally, it emerged that the results depended on the design of the contract and that the compensation required by a forest owner to accept a contract increased with number of constraints included in the contracts.
[Insert Table 2 around here]
Moreover, estimated costs differed also within case study according to the methods used. For instance, in the Boreal case, the order of magnitude of the perceived costs per year calculated from the choice experiment data set was at least 10 times larger than the one obtained by the engineering cost method. Especially, the middle scenario result from the choice method gave an annual cost of provision for recreational services of 310.2 €/ha/year, almost 10 times the highest income loss computed with the second methodology (30.8 €/ha/year, with 4% discount rate). In France, using a heuristic method the estimated income loss was ranging approximately from 11 to 26 €/ha/year, but it included all types of amenities (preliminary result).
In the Central European case a slightly different methodological approach was taken, in which forest owners were asked if they would accept or not to undertake a specific set of actions targeting e.g. biodiversity protection or recreation, given a pre-set level of compensation. TABLE 3 illustrates the frequency with which forest owners expected to agree to enter such a contract. As is evident, very few forest owners would accept such contracts at the low end of compensations, and even at the high end of the range applied here, a significant minority of land owners would still refuse a contract offer.
[INSERT TABLE 3 AROUND HERE]
The results presented in D3.3 are being further refined in several forthcoming scientific publications. Several scientific papers are already under publications and many more are expected to be published either comparing different methods for cost assessment, or identifying the main factors influencing costs in the different CSP, both at the national and cross country levels. It is planned to carry out cross-case-study analysis related, for instance, to the determinants of the forest owners’ objectives across Europe or to the estimation and comparison of cost functions of amenities provision. These cross-case studies will shed more light on the spatial dimension of cost of provision of forest externalities at the European level. Dissemination papers targeting non-scientific readers are being written and the results have already contributed to various national policy processes. We believe that presenting the results both in scientific journal and in more popularized recipients will facilitate the dissemination process compared to the standard deliverable, since the contents and the language as well as the size are going to be tailor made to the reader.
Nevertheless given the large size of D3.3 and other deliverables of NEWFOREX, it was decided to have the deliverable following Task 3.5 to be in the form of a series of practice and policy oriented chapters outlining the learning points derived from the work in work package 3 “Developing methods for cost of provision assessments”. These will form an important part of the second volume in the ‘What Can Science Tell Us?’ series coming out of the NEWFOREX project. This will be printed in 2014, and is currently under copy editing.
The second volume in the book series “What Can Science tell us?” is focusing on the assessments of cost of provision together with the design and implementation of economic instruments, responding to two main questions: What are the cost components? And what is the appropriate choice of methods to capture partial or total costs? Concerning cost of provision, the contributions from work package 3 are structured into five chapters. First the needs to know costs of provision and the relations to economic instruments are discussed before giving more details in the following chapters. Almost all scientific partners in NEWFOREX participated in this effort.
The second chapter addresses the quantification and the identification of forest management measures to ensure the ecosystem service provision. The quantification of the provision of ecosystem services is really a challenging task as it forces us to choose the relevant indicators to insure the implementation of a given policy. To avoid explicitly dealing with the high costs of output measures or long time span between implementation of a provision measure and the outcome, many measures of ecosystem service provision is based on management actions, taking a baseline assessment (or “Business as usual” or no intervention) and evaluating identified management actions up against the BAU. These management actions have impacts on the provision of one or more ecosystem services and the issue addressed by cost of provision analysis is to identify the most cost-effective measure. Examples of actions are given for water, biodiversity, carbon and recreational services.
The third chapter underlines the necessity to look at private forest owners’ motivations and attitudes in the provision of ecosystem services as they determine the success of ecosystem service supply. Forest owners are not only in the categories of profit maximizers but also in the population of utility-maximizers, being influenced by their cultural environment. Forest owners can bear high opportunity costs in case of large divergence between their own interest and social one. It seems that ecosystem service like biodiversity conservation or landscape beauty tends to be perceived in the same way by forest owners and society. In that case, economic incentives are not as necessary to overcome higher costs and difficulties as when produce some specific interest either to forest owners (timber production, forest roads building…) or to society (public access, water quality…). Sometimes, non-economic tools like education or cooperation can increase the probability to implement new management actions favoring ecosystem services. The different concepts are very suitable for conceptual outlining of the conflicts or lack of same in specific contexts and are depicted in FIGURE 13.
[INSERT FIGURE 13 AROUND HERE]
In the fourth chapter, costs of provision are analyzed according to their components. The total costs of providing environmental services comprise direct costs, easily observable, and indirect costs that are more difficult to quantify. The direct costs includes all the expenses that can directly linked to the management action put in place for the provision of a specific environmental service, including both operational costs and investment costs. The three main indirect costs components are the opportunity costs, the transaction costs and the feedback costs. The opportunity cost represents the benefits from the most profitable feasible management alternative that the forest manager had to forgo to enhance the provision of a specific environmental service. Transaction costs comprise all the expenses linked to research and information, negotiation, and monitoring, in all the cases in which the provision of environmental services is implemented through public policies or coordination activities among forest owners. Feedback costs refer to the economic impacts of an enhance provision of a specific environmental service on other environmental services or on other land uses. Furthermore, it is important to distinguish between private and social costs of provision. The quantification of the former is important for accurately implement market based instruments: in this regard, it is important to account for the individual perception of private costs and the dynamic structure of the problem.
The last chapters contributed by this work package are a set of methodological chapters giving for each approach some illustrations and results from our case studies. Two main quantitative approaches are considered. Engineering approaches provide estimated opportunity costs for forest management aimed to enhance environmental services, using stand-level calculations of loss in net present value. Behavioural approaches focus on the forest owners’ decision process and perceived costs. This methodology has been applied to assess the costs of providing enhanced landscape values in Finland and enhanced biodiversity in Denmark. The quantitative behavioural approaches discussed here focus on one side on revealed cost assessment based on estimation of a cost function and on stated cost assessment based on choice experiments on the other side.
The engineering approach is illustrated with two different case studies based on cost estimates from managed forests in Finland and Denmark. These case studies are carried out by using computational, objective methods, at the stand-level estimating the opportunity costs of implementing specific management changes which enhance ecosystem services from the forest. The opportunity costs are represented by the difference in the net present value (NPV) between the adjusted management schedule enhancing the forest’s suitability for recreation and a conventional management regime (focusing solely on timber production). In the case of the Ruka-Kuusamo area for the calculation of opportunity costs for each stand relevant for landscape, two different scenarios were projected by Motti stand simulator. First, business-as-usual (BAU) management in which the stand was managed according to the prevailing silvicultural recommendations by the Finnish authorities and second, an adjusted management regime in which the stand was left unmanaged for the next 10 years. The average income loss/ha/10 years with two different discount rates (3% and 4%) are respectively 27 € and 143€, not leading to any substantial financial losses. In Denmark, the cost was related to conservation initiatives in link with Natura 2000 policies. The cost of a specific management restriction may be estimated based on the change in the net present value of the area before and after the restriction is imposed. The costs of a specific management change have been calculated as the difference in capital value between two scenarios, with and without the management change. The greatest loss of implementing the restriction (natural regeneration with reduced soil preparation and a prolonged harvest period for the overstorey ) arises when the age of the beech stand is close to the rotation age (here 110 years), since the additional costs of leaving the overstory longer and e.g. replant patches will be imminent. For lower site qualities, the restriction in regeneration method implies smaller losses. In FIGURE 14 we show an example of the opportunity cost of management changes calculated for the Danish case.
[INSERT FIGURE 14 AROUND HERE]
The cost function approach aims to assess the direct cost of the provision of environmental services based on stated cost information. The cost function approach has solid microeconomic foundations and it is derived from the firm theory. This methodology has been improved in order to account for the provision of environmental services in particular for the agricultural sector. The cost function approach aiming to estimate the costs of the joint production of environmental services has not yet been applied in the forestry sector. Within the NEWFOREX project, a first attempt to estimate a forest management cost function was put in place using the information on the annual gross management costs and the annual timber production provided by 133 Danish forest owners. It was assumed that the forest owners produced two outputs from the forest: timber and biodiversity protection. Estimation results suggested that setting aside a certain share for biodiversity protection has a significant positive influence on the gross management cost. Moreover, the estimated coefficient can be directly interpreted as the cost elasticity respect to biodiversity. It emerged that by increasing the size of the protected area by 1% would increase the cost by less than 0.21%, suggesting the presence of economies of scale regarding biodiversity protection. But the cost approach relies intensely on data availability and data quality. This is at present limiting its applicability in forest sector.
The stated cost of provision approach is the topic of a chapter on its own. The stated cost approach is useful for assessing the total costs as experienced by the forest owner. The approach can gather direct, opportunity and transaction costs (for the owner) – adjusted for the potential benefits experienced by the forest owner. A significant strength is that new policies or proposed management changes can be evaluated before they are implemented in practice. A weakness of the method is the hypothetical setting it relies on. This may induce strategic answering, meaning in this case that landowners might overstate their compensation requirements. As a means of integrating the interests of tourism entrepreneurs and forest owners, the Landscape and Recreational Values Trading (LRVT) scheme has been proposed in Finland. Private forest owners would make temporary, voluntary contracts whereby they commit to enhance the provision of landscape and recreational values in their forests for a monetary compensation. The expected costs are important information regarding the viability of the LRVT scheme. A survey data of 471 forest owners in the Ruka-Kuusamo tourism area has been done. The choice experiment approach was applied to assess the minimum compensation that the forest owners would be willing to accept for a temporary LRVT contract. Their compensation claims can be seen as the stated costs of provision of enhanced landscape and recreational amenities. To accept a conditional contract, the forest owners claim a compensation of 98.6 €/hectare/year irrespective of any specific management changes required. This constant ‘threshold value’ reflects the forest owner’s perceived cost of moving away from the current situation. A compensation of 30.0 €/hectare/year would be claimed if no regeneration cuttings were allowed, and expectedly a larger one (103.9 €/ha/year) would be required if no harvesting were allowed at all. Considering the coverage of the restrictions, the compensation claim increases by 5.4 €/percentage point/year. Accordingly, the compensation for restrictions affecting 5% of the forest area, for example, should be 27.0 €/ha/year.
A similar Choice experiment study was made to evaluate Danish forest owners’ demand for compensation for specific management changes on their property and related to NATURA 2000 policies. The management changes investigated here range from small-scale changes like leaving a number of trees per hectare for natural decay to comprehensive changes like setting aside areas as untouched forest, change in tree species from coniferous to broadleaved trees and increased access rights for the general public. The forest owners would select the alternative they preferred from two alternative contracts and the current situation with existing management regulations. A survey of 283 Danish forest owners was used to estimate how much the owners require in compensation if they were to accept a PES scheme involving the specified management changes. Similar to the Finnish case above, the Danish forest owners have a significant compensation claim (43.0 €/ha/year) for accepting a PES contract per se. As the compensation for each specific management change is added to this threshold value, the compensation claim for a contract which only entails a 75% broadleaved restriction becomes 43.0 + 7.0 = 51.0 €/ha/year.
On average, the forest owners are most reluctant to accept a PES scheme involving increased access for the general public in their forests. If they are to allow the public access on foot up to 15 meters from roads and paths, they require 17.2 €/ha/year in compensation, and 34.4 €/ha/year to allow access on foot for the public everywhere on the forest floor. Moreover, 69% of the respondents stated that even if they received an appropriate amount of compensation they would still not be willing to allow access everywhere in the forest.
It is worth noting that there is significant heterogeneity in forest owners’ preferences for all of the ecosystem services. Part of this is linked to the fact that many forest owners already provide some of these services on their property on a voluntary basis. This is the case especially in Finland, where access for traditional recreational use of the nature is an everyman’s right, but also in Denmark with a different recreational tradition. This means that part of the forest owners may accept a contract of the provision of these services without experiencing major additional costs.
A final activity completed in the third period is the application of an economic experiment addressing procurement actions and their potential use in furthering cooperation among land owners. Procurement auctions are one of several policy tools available to incentivise the provision of ecosystem services and biodiversity conservation. Successful biodiversity conservation often requires a landscape-scale approach and the spatial coordination of participation, for example in the creation of wildlife corridors. We conducted an experiment on procurement auctions for ecosystem services to explore two features of procurement auctions in a forest landscape—the pricing mechanism (uniform vs. discriminatory) and availability of communication (chat) between potential sellers. We modify the experimental design developed by Reeson and co-workers in 2011 by introducing uncertainty (and hence heterogeneity) in the production value of forest sites as well as an automated, endogenous stopping rule. We find that discriminatory pricing yields to greater environmental benefits per government dollar spent, chiefly due to better coordination between owners of adjacent plots. Chat also facilitates such coordination but also seems to encourage collusion in sustaining high prices for the most environmentally attractive plots. These two effects offset each other, making chat neutral from the viewpoint of maximizing environmental effect per dollar spent.
The main research efforts and results obtained in Work package 4: Assessing cost-efficient market-based methods
The first task of this work package was to review existing economic instruments and other policy measures in use in case studies for enhancing the provision of forest ecosystem services – directly or indirectly. The focus was furthermore to provide quite detailed information about the formal experiences related to their implementation in the case study countries or regions. For this purpose, the work package leading team (from CTFC) developed a factsheet form for eliciting the information on the basic features of the policy instruments, the stakeholders involved in their development and implementation, as well as basic information on the experiences related to the implementation of the mechanisms. Case study partners were asked to fill in these factsheet forms with the information on the most relevant policy instruments in the case studies. In addition, information about other policy instruments was collected in a more descriptive form. All this information was recompiled in the deliverable D4.1 “Report on the currently applied market-based methods in the case studies”. Moreover, a literature review of the theoretical strengths and limitations of different economic instruments and other policy instruments, together with the empirical insights from their implementation in other related sectors was conducted and included in the deliverable D4.1.
In the Atlantic urbanized case study (run by UCPH), the input to D4.1 was compiled with a broad and inclusive approach, but also with a focus on the features special to this case. These included the recreational services, which are in high focus in the urbanised regions, and where distributions of property rights are key to the divide between marketed and non-marketed services, e.g. horseback riding vs. MTB-cycling. Another feature special to the case is the existence of instruments and initiatives oriented towards the protection of groundwater as an important drinking water resource.
In the Boreal case study (run by METLA), the focus was on the market-based mechanisms related to recreational and nature value trading, focusing thus on recreation and biodiversity. Overall, man-months resources were used as expected.
In the Central European case study (run by UWAR), the focus was on the instruments applicable on the territory of the Bialowieza National Park. The case study country is special in the sense that a dominant part of the Polish forest area is owned by the state, which greatly reduces the variation in policy instruments as well as the spatial impacts of those instruments actually directed towards private land and forest owners.
In the Mediterranean case study (run by CTFC), the focus was on the public subsidies and grants for sustainable forest management, grants to forest reserves and grants to forest defence groups, all aiming to enhance biodiversity and diminish the risks of forest fires. Other mechanisms analysed included NGO-led land stewardship activities, which are a novel experience in the region. Due to the lack of reliable primary information, the CTFC team had conducted targeted face-to-face interviews with the stakeholders involved in the design and/or implementation of these mechanisms.
In the Mountainous case study in northern Italy (run by UNIPD), the focus was on the instruments related to the regulation of mushroom picking activities, and also to water quality. These instruments concerned the balance between alpine and mountainous meadows and grazing lands and the management of mountain forests, which in many cases are either owned on community basis or by numerous small-holder private forest owners.
In the Tropical case study (run by CIFOR), the focus was on the Bolsa Floresta program, which is a PES like instrument implemented by NGOs with the support of the Brazilian state. The program seeks to reduce the negative impact of rural settlements in the Amazon, notable the forest degradation and deforestation impacts. It furthermore aims to establish other sources of income for the rural population than those arising from deforestation based agricultural practices.
In addition to these contributions, the University of Hamburg created a database on questionnaires out of the field of marketing of environmental and recreational services of forests and economic environmental assessment. The database served project-internally as a tool to develop questionnaires and is a part of the project output available from the consortium.
Though the major empirical surveys targeting forest owners and citizens were focusing in particular on the values and cost of provision of forest ecosystem services, NEWFOREX researchers also took the opportunity to develop a targeted survey instrument component eliciting information on the perceptions of the citizens (potential buyers) and forest owners (providers) regarding various market-based methods and their implementation. These components formed an integral part of valuation surveys conducted in work package 2 and of forest owner surveys conducted in work package 3. The components are documented in D4.2 “Documentation and description of the survey components on market-based methods”.
Another major result produced in work package 4 is a coherent assessment of the selected policy instruments across case studies, notably the socalled market-based instruments. For this purpose, NEWFOREX’s researchers developed an assessment framework, based on the institutional analysis and development framework elaborated by E. Ostrom, which assumes that the performance of a specific market-based mechanism depends on (i) the ecosystem service in question; (ii) the actors affected by the instrument, or those involved in its implementation and design; (iii) the interplay between this mechanism and other related policies and instruments; and (iv) the instrument design.
This framework was applied to the selected market-based mechanisms all case studies except for the Polish one (due to the specifics of the mechanisms existing in Poland). It turned out that this assessment framework was able to reveal tensions and bottlenecks in the implementation of the seemingly successful market-based mechanisms (e.g. mature forest reserves in Catalonia), indicating possible avenues for their improvement. The results of this research effort were reported in D4.3: “Report on analyses of case study experiences and survey results regarding market-based methods”.
Most recently, the work in this task focused on cross-country institutional analysis of the mechanisms, and the preliminary results of such assessment have been presented at the Final Newforex Conference in Uppsala in May 2014. The scientific publication on this topic is currently under preparation. The most important findings of these analyses are summarised below:
- Actors’ networking capacity, consensus regarding the problem and its solution, and concordance of values are important determinants of the success of policy mechanisms and schemes.
- Existing institutions (both at local and at an international level) on the one hand provide support for the new schemes, but on the other hand can also constrain their design and limit their applicability and implementation potential. Lack of integration with other sectoral policies creates tensions and weakens the performance of some schemes.
- The environmental effectiveness, economic efficiency and additionality of many schemes are highly questionable, although in some cases can be solvable by redesigning the schemes.
- Despite these serious shortcomings, in overall the experience with the schemes is perceived as positive with space for improvements. Yet, coordinated effort among actors at different levels is required to increase the overall governance quality of the incentive schemes.
The fourth research endeavour of work package 4 “Assessing cost-efficient market-based methods” build upon the data obtained through the valuation survey and forest owner surveys. As such, it consists of two parts: firstly, of the part concerning the attitudes of potential forest service buyers (or beneficiaries) towards the issue of who should pay for the improved provision of forest goods and services (forming part of the valuation survey); and secondly, of the part concerning forest owners’ attitudes towards and experiences with market-based mechanisms existing in the case study regions.
The first part dealing with the buyer’s opinions was implemented fully in all the case studies except for Brazil (where the valuation survey was not implemented), and a comparative analysis of opinions on the preferred methods for paying for the common externalities (e.g. biodiversity, carbon sequestration, recreation) had been performed and is included in the above mentioned deliverable. One of the major results of this opinion survey is that in general the respondents in all the analysed countries prefer that the government, i.e. the public essentially, bears the additional costs associated with improvements in ecosystem service provision, regardless of which ecosystem services are in question. The results are even more reinforced when the ecosystem services in focus are global and of a public good nature (e.g. carbon sequestration). On the contrary, for services that are rather local with a strong use value (e.g. recreation), people tend to better accept that forest visitors themselves would contribute to their enhancement. The two FIGUREs 15 and 16 below exemplify these results.
[Insert Figures 15 and 16 around here]
The second part dealing with the forest owners’ perceptions was delayed due to an overall delay in the implementation of forest owners’ survey, and has commenced in early 2013. The questions addressed to forest owners in different case studies covered the issues related to the motivations for forest ownership/management, knowledge of market-based mechanisms, previous experience with the mechanisms, as well as issues related to mechanism design (contract length, promoted activities, requested compensation etc.). The most significant results of these sections are the following:
- Participation in public schemes is larger than in private or public-private ones, but this may be explained by the fact that the public schemes predominate in all the analysed countries;
- Participation rates tend to be larger if the schemes address more than a single objective, mainly combining timber (or traditional production) with the enhancement of other ecosystem services;
- Participation rates in activity-enhancing schemes (implying active forest management) tend to be higher than in activity-capping schemes (e.g. imposing limits on forest exploitation).
As in the other work packages the fifth and final task was to provide unifying guidelines for policymakers for choosing and designing market-based methods. This task is the final, significant and unifying deliverable of this work package. The large demand for dissemination already experienced in NEWFOREX spurred the decision to make a joint publication with the results of all the work packages as part of EFI’s “What Science Can Tell Us?” series. In this respect, the WP4 contributed with the following sections corresponding to Volume II of the publication:
- Why do we need to know the costs of provision and the relation to economic instruments (A. Stegner, I. Prokofieva, P. Gatto, D. Pettenella)
- Quantification of environmental services and measures of provision (S. Wunder, J. Adildtrup, B.J. Thorsen)
- The role of private forest owner motivations and attitudes in the provision of ecosystem services (E. Gorriz, S.E. Vedel, A. Stegner)
- From traditional regulation to economic instruments (I. Prokofieva, S. Wunder)
- MBI implementation: shifting the role and power from the public to the private sector through the voluntary instruments (D. Pettenella)
- Novel contractual approaches and tool design (S. Wunder, I. Prokofieva)
- Examples of novel instruments for enhancing forest ecosystem services (I. Prokofieva)
- Private forest owners’ perspectives and preferences on policy instruments for the provision of ecosystem services. Case study examples (E. Gorriz, F. Schubert, U. Mantau)
- Public’s view on who should pay for the provision of ecosystem services (R. Mavsar, I. Prokofieva)
The most important messages that can be extracted based on WP4 results are summarised below:
- In view of the majority of public, government should be responsible for covering the increased costs of enhanced provision of ecosystem services. Nevertheless, a share of population accepts that some ecosystem services – especially locally important ones and those providing direct benefits to the people (such as recreation, or landscape aesthetics) – can be covered by forest visitors.
- Important preconditions for forest owners’ participation in policy instruments are: alignment with values and forest management orientation of landowners, feasibility of policy instrument implementation on the targeted lands, information on targeted owners, owner’s trust in intermediaries and coordination with local authorities and foresters, flexible contracts and practical support by responsible forest agents, acceptable cost-sharing and workload from forest owner’s point of view, experience of forest owners from the participation in other policy instruments. The more of these preconditions are filled, the higher is the expected participation rate.
- Existing policies and organisational structures condition the design and the success of policy instruments. The design of the schemes is frequently conditioned by the nature of the actors involved in their development and implementation; as well as the relations between the implementation bodies and main affected stakeholders.
- The existence of fundamentally conflicting policy goals, as well as tensions between different branches of public bodies also hinders the success of some of the schemes. This often calls for negotiated and consensus-based solutions with the involvement of all affected parties. In some cases, it may imply that the public bodies need to give up part of their competences to private agents (e.g. those related to the implementation or supervision of the mechanisms), or to engage private agents in funding ecosystem services related initiatives.
Potential Impact:
This part of the report falls in several chapters.
- First we briefly summarize some of the overall highlights of the NEWFOREX project in relation to the potential wider societal impacts and notably impacts and highlights of relevance for policies
- We then briefly outline the interaction with society in the actual undertaking of the project, e.g. the meetings with stakeholders and end-users
- Finally we outline how we have worked and continue to work with the dissemination of results to the broader public and special interest end users.
We note that below a number of summary statistics are given on gender issues, junior vs senior researcher involvement, educational relevance, etc. etc. We refer the reader also to these data. Furthermore, as part of the final reporting, a number of deliverables in the projects work package 5 “Dissemination and stakeholder interaction” have been submitted which includes deliverables outlining stakeholder involvement, dissemination activities, societal impacts, the final conferences and so on. All of those are together much more comprehensive than the below.
The overall societal impacts targeted by NEWFOREX
The forests of Europe provide numerous goods and services for the benefit of Europe’s citizens. Wood is the most prominent, but game, cork, mushrooms and greenery are also traded in significant volumes. However, many forest goods and especially services are not marketed, but still of great value. Forests play an essential role in water resource management from local to regional levels. Forests are crucial for the preservation of biodiversity; many threatened terrestrial species depend upon forest habitats for survival. Forests’ ability to sequester and store carbon is crucial to the mitigation of climate change. In addition, forests form an important part of landscape amenities, cultural heritage, and are of great recreational value.
Since the 1990s, the term ‘ecosystem services’ has been used as an umbrella term for various goods, services and functions. A much cited study by Costanza and his co-workers, published in 1997 in Nature attempted to assess the total value of the world’s ecosystem services and natural capital; the number found in fact exceeded the total gross national product of the world. Yet, the study has been widely criticized for putting an absolute value on something that cannot be fully substituted, thus extrapolating economic valuation beyond its meaning: a tool for evaluating well-defined choices of ecosystem management and protection. Hence, the single bottom-line number still leaves important questions unanswered:
- How far can ecosystems be exploited, modified, and degraded before net welfare losses are registered?
- Can societies gain from enhancing the protection of biodiversity and habitats and the provision of ecosystem services?
- What methods and policy measures may be used for determining and pursuing the answer to these questions?
Several ongoing international agreements and policy developments relate to the latter question, including the Convention on Biodiversity and the newly started Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (www.ipbes.net) , the European Union supported work on The Economics of Ecosystem and Biodiversity (TEEB) leading to the current EU MAES process, focusing on the mapping and assessment of ecosystem services. In direct and indirect ways also the post-Kyoto Conference of the Parties (COP) process has address also this question, e.g. in the discussions of REDD+.
To pursue the answers to these more crucial questions, science needs to provide several pieces of knowledge needed, which relate to underlying policy relevant questions. Based on new analyses from a larger EU-project on forest ecosystem services, this and the accompanying volume provide new insights and examples needed to answer such questions:
What will be the value for society of a specific enhancement of ecosystem service provisions in a specific spatial context, and how are benefits distributed? This calls for the further development of environmental valuation techniques and analyses that allow us to estimate also values of non-marketed ecosystem services. Many of these are best characterized as externalities, in the sense that the positive or negative impacts determined by the landowners’ management decisions fall on other off-land agents.
What will be the costs of enhancing ecosystem provisions in specific contexts? Enhancing the provision of e.g. recreational opportunities may come at costs in terms of lost forest production but also costs relevant for society in terms of reductions in other ecosystem services. These needs to be assessed and again the variation across different contexts and owner types are of interest for policy makers.
What will be suitable policy instruments for society to balance costs and benefits in the best possible way in each context? To address the overall issue of reaching a sustainable balance between use and protection of our natural ecosystems, we need intelligent choice of policies. We present new insights into the view that both the public and forest owners have on the design of such instruments.
We highlight here below some of the many new insights and lessons learned from our research, that provide new, improved and context relevant answers to the overall questions.
Quantification of and goal setting for non-marketed forest ecosystem services
- Any policy targeting ecosystem service should have clear and measurable goals for ecosystem service quantities at least for two reasons: To ensure that what is being delivered is what has value and to allow society to monitor the efficiency of policies
- In goal setting, it should be remembered that any policy will likely affect several ecosystem service and therefore multiple policies may be needed for balance
The valuation of non-marketed forest ecosystem services (ES)
- Using improved methods we add documentation for the impressive value of non-marketed forest ecosystem services – yet we argue that to make valuation studies policy relevant, focus should turn away from total economic values to value distributions
- Environmental policies have distributional effects: Some people win more than others – and others again may lose. We demonstrate with case studies that these differences are not trivial and likely to be highly policy relevant
- Identifying who values ecosystem service how much can inform policy instrument design in order to gain legitimacy and direct costs to where values are harvested.
The cost of provision for non-marketed forest ecosystem services (ES)
- We demonstrate the benefits of applying multiple methods for assessing the cost of provision – capital budgeting techniques widely used can be further informed by methods taking forest owner perceptions into account
- We document that European private forest owners are generally positive towards the provision of ecosystem service from their forests
- We document how differences in forest owner objectives spill over over to major heterogeneity their perceived cost of providing further ecosystem services. This opens up options for improved cost efficient policy designs
Economic Instruments non-marketed forest ecosystem services (ES)
- We demonstrate that many formal aspects of contract matter and that loss of decision right is costly, thus instruments should be designed to limit these where possible and carefully consider aspects like exit options, time frame etc
- We document that participation rates in voluntary economic instruments increase when transactions costs can be controlled, e.g. larger forest properties, higher educated and forest owners with experience from other instruments are more likely to enter a new instrument
- We document that forest extension companies can be instrumental in reducing transactions costs and stimulate participation from owners who face steep transaction costs
- We find that ecosystem service targeted instruments are more likely to attract forest owners if they are aligned with forest owner values – for example instruments requiring action (infrastructure, establishing new nature, restoration) are seen more positive than instruments requiring inaction (passive conservation) – policy instruments can be designed to benefit from this
- We document that the majority citizens of several European countries support the view that cost of ecosystem service provision should in general be carried by society or identified users
Interacting with stakeholders within the project life
Substantial effort has been done by all project partners to engage a wide range of stakeholders in the project's activities. In respect of the nature of the work, numerous stakeholders in the case study regions participated in the definition of case studies' objectives and the development of corresponding surveys, as well as in the process of collecting policy information and examples and interpreting results. The project partners CEPF and EUSTAFOR also represent key stakeholders and have been involved in project design in several project meetings and provided comments on research plans and implementation in the first reporting period.
Following the data collection and during initial analyses, particular attention was given to present preliminary project results to relevant stakeholders at regional and pan-European level, and to discuss with them the adequate format of presenting the final project findings and recommendations. The findings were later used to develop the form and content of the NEWFOREX book volumes in the “What Can Science Tell Us?” series. A successful high-level stakeholder board meeting was held in Copenhagen and numerous other stakeholder outreach activities undertaken at a broader European level. The coordinator presented ongoing and results at international high-level meetings in Bruxelles (e.g. the ThinkForest event at the European Parliament) and for European associations general meetings, e.g. the CEPF annual meetings.
In the last project period, the main objective was to further strengthen the involvement of stakeholders and the dissemination activities at all levels (regional, national, pan-European). However, the focus of the stakeholder involvement shifted towards the presentation and discussion of the project’s main findings and recommendations. Particular attention was given to equally address the needs of all relevant stakeholder groups. NEWFOREX researchers have been presenting their work in numerous national policy processes in the last period as documented in the list of dissemination activities below in the final report format.
We also undertook and internal training session focusing on the art of scientific writing and efficient dissemination of research, which was held in the 9th project meeting in Barcelona. Finally, we co-arranged the 48th Biennial Conference of the Scandinavian Society of Forest Economics in Uppsala in May 2014 and used this as a set-up for the final scientific conference of NEWFOREX. Following the conclusion of the project, several papers and presentations was also given at the World Conference on Environmental and Resource Economics in Istanbul, Turkey, 29th June, 2nd July 2014.
The results of NEWFOREX have been and still are being disseminated in numerous presentations for professionals, forest owners, policy makers and in written form in policy and scientific papers. FIGURE 5 shows our approximate data on how different audiences have been targeted in our efforts to reach out towards various end user groups. Researchers are of course a major group, in particular as part of the effort to ensure and validate the quality of our results. However, decision makers and professionals working with and within the different policy processes and forest sector organizations together constitute the dominant group of our audience. Forest owners are also a visible group, but given the meta-policy target of our research it is not surprising that they are not more prominent. However, looking ahead we see more dissemination results focusing on forest owners when presenting the results of cost of provision assessments for their consideration.
[Insert Figure 5 around here]
Dissemination
The main objective of the dissemination plans that NEWFOREX has pursued has been to ensure that relevant target groups and end users will benefit the most from project’s outputs. Simultaneously, this should also guarantee the highest impact of the results achieved in the frame of the NEWFOREX project. Work package 5 of NEWFOREX was specifically designated to ensure a focus on stakeholder involvement and dissemination in several forms. All consortium members, and in particular those responsible for the implementation of the case studies, had a key role in dissemination and interaction with stakeholders and media at the regional level. Furthermore, EUSTAFOR and CEPF were responsible for the dissemination of the project’s outputs through their member networks also in countries, which are not represented within the NEWFOREX consortium. To that end NEWFOREX topics have several times been presented in the organization’s newsletters and been presented at relevant meetings in the organization’s networks.
Target audiences
To adequately plan the dissemination activities, first the main target groups and end users were identified. Once the groups had been identified, for each of them its specific requirements, background, and fields of interest and expectations concerning the outputs of NEWFOREX was evaluated, recognizing that there is no “one-fits-all” solution, in terms of dissemination modes. To select an appropriate mix of dissemination modes and efforts, a dialogue with several of the different target groups was established in the early stage of the project. Some of the main target audiences identified in the NEWFOREX project were:
• Forest practitioners
• Forest owners
• Regional, National and European level policy makers
• Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs)
• Scientific community
Considering the wide range of identified target audiences, their specific characteristics and needs, the Dissemination plan should ensure that the appropriate and most effective methods of dissemination will be used for each of them. This implies that the project results should be synthesised and presented in different formats targeted to specific needs of the end user groups. In this sense, the project language (English) may be a barrier to disseminate project results, especially to forest practitioners and regional policy makers. Therefore, selected activities targeted at end-users in the case studies regions will also be undertaken in local languages.
Furthermore, the dissemination activities for different target groups should be made in a wording they are familiar with. To sum up, for each of the target audiences, the following questions should be considered by NEWFOREX researchers prior to dissemination activities:
• How can they benefit from NEWFOREX project?
• What are the dissemination means that should be employed to reach that particular audience?
Dissemination tools and channels
Targeted dissemination activities were applied in NEWFOREX, so that knowledge gathered in the project could be utilized in different ways, which would help achieving the highest possible impact of the project outcomes. Outputs were synthesised and presented in different formats, targeted to specific needs of the users. The dissemination activities included scientific and professional journal articles; policy briefs, informal briefings for national and EU policy makers and other key stakeholders, seminars and workshops.
In addition, the case study partners arranged and/or participated in series of workshops for and with forest owners, relevant policy-makers and staff members in relevant public agencies in the partners’ countries. At these workshops, project research plans, projects results were presented, discussed and put in a local context, using cases and issues of local relevance. The effect of this activity has been to bridge effectively the gap between science and actual policy-making, decision-makers, forest managers and users. In some countries like Finland, Germany and Denmark, we have already seen NEWFOREX knowledge play directly into national or regional policy processes.
The NEWFOREX website has been used as a window to discuss and present the NEWFOREX results, project related publications and other outputs, though with considerable delay due to lags in publication processes as well as deliverable acceptance processes. The dissemination of information through the project website included relevant news and information about milestones or products, and also about relevant policy developments at a European level or in the Member States when relevant. Lastly, the website also served to alert interested parties about the project’s progress, new developments and milestones, and provides downloadable intermediate and final project results. Visit statistics are available as:
• From July 2010 to May 2011 the website has had between 714 and 1093 visits every month with a total number of 10,202 visits for the entire existence of the website.
• From June 2011 to November 2012 the website has had between 1,230 and 3,094 visits every month with a total number of 35,820 visits for the entire existence of the website.
• From December 2012 to May 2014 the website has had between 650 and 6,910 visits per month with a total number of 30,695 visits in this period.
Finally, the last project meeting was combined with an open international science and stakeholder conference arranged together with the Scandinavian Society of Forest Economics (SSFE) in Uppsala, Sweden. Furthermore, immediately after the project ended, several researchers from NEWFOREX presented key findings of the project at the well-reputed World Conference on Environmental and Resource Economics in Istanbul Turkey. Several of the papers are coming out in proceedings, and many more in papers in different journals.
Targeting Policy makers
The NEWFOREX project aimed to provide policy makers information and improved understanding of the provision of forest externalities. Therefore, it is important that the NEWFOREX consortium establishing contacts to high level decision makers.
NEWFOREX dissemination efforts targeted European Parliament members, Commission officials and other key stakeholders in Brussels through the participation in several larger Bruxelles based events, workshops and seminar. Targeting the national policy makers, agencies and authorities responsible for implementing and designing national policies related to forests and rural development was pursued through national language publications, press releases and several participations in seminars and expert groups around national forest and environmental policies.
Scientific community
NEWFOREX also aimed to provide high quality contributions of interest for the scientific community, and the consortium members are already publishing and presenting various findings of the project in prominent, academically recognised and highly rated journals. This activity will continue for several years, we foresee, as the data gathered by NEWFOREX represents a massive pool of potential knowledge and insights.
Forest practitioners and owners
Publishing in professional journals has been and continue to be of particular importance to NEWFOREX in reaching forest practitioners and forest owners. Project partners are already and will continue to publish a number of popular articles in national professional journals, in their local languages. These journals include, e.g. the Danish ‘Skoven’, the Finnish ‘Metsälehti’, the German ‘Allgemeine Forst Zeitung’, the Spanish ‘Montes’, and the French journal ‘Revue Forestière Francaise’.
General audience
As scientific papers are being published, we find that the general press with a science interest will pick these up, following press releases, and publish popular articles in national or regional newspapers. Consortium partners having contacts to journalists have continuously been encouraged to utilize the contacts in order to raise awareness on the topic tackled by the NEWFOREX project.
Education field
Several NEWFOREX consortium partners are actively involved in education programmes at different universities. This has ensured that NEWFOREX results are being integrated into educational programmes, courses and seminars dealing with forest economics, environmental economics management, environmental policy and related subjects. It should be noted that a couple of consortium partners are involved or even coordinating the two EU-supported Erasmus Mundus MSc courses related to the sustainable use of forests around the world: the E.M. MSc in Sustainable Tropical Forestry coordinated by UCPH (http://www.sutrofor.net) and the E.M. MSc in Sustainable Forest and Nature Management also coordinated by UCPH (http://www.sufonama.net). These programmes each year involve 100-150 international top-level students, which may benefit quickly from progress made in NEWFOREX.
Already several sub-results are being used in MSc classes, but in particular we foresee that several chapters of the forthcoming ‘What Can Science Tell Us?’ volumes are of clear relevance and quite easily accessible for university and high school level introductory courses.
Dissemination Activities Report
In total the NEWFOREX consortium has conducted and is conducting 182 dissemination and publications activities within its project life and it the immediate months after, as describedin Deliverable D5.3 on Dissemination. Thus, the list below only include articles that were actually published within the project period, and not the many papers, book chapters etc., that are still in press or in stages of review and revision. Mostly these dissemination was in the form of presentations (63%) and publications (28%). FIGURE 6 shows a graph of the distribution of dissemination activities by type within and right after the project period. As would be expected the oral presentations dominate as communication with stakeholders and presentations of intermediate results at international and national conference has been the main dissemination activity in this phase. The number of publications is, however, already significant and is certain to have a lasting impact as the more than 50 papers get published and build the legacy of NEWFOREX. Many publications are just forthcoming and furthermore, two book volumes of policy oriented short chapters on specific aspects of forest ecosystem services are being printed in the fall of 2014. These are not in the current statistics
[Insert Figure 6 around here]
The activities were mainly conducted at the international (60%) and national level (27%), which reflects the cross-European and international relevance of the results.
[Insert Figure 17 around here]
FIGURE 5 shows our approximate data on how different audiences have been targeted in our efforts to reach out towards various end user groups. Researchers are of course a major group, in particular as part of the effort to ensure and validate the quality of our results. However, decision makers and professionals working with and within the different policy processes and forest sector organizations together constitute the dominant group of our audience. Forest owners are also a visible group, but given the meta-policy target of our research it is not surprising that they are not more prominent. However, looking ahead we see more dissemination results focusing on forest owners when presenting the results of cost of provision assessments for their consideration.
[Insert Figure 5 around here]
Future dissemination activities
The NEWFOREX project ended in May 2014. Nevertheless, it is expected that dissemination activities will continue. Also during this period the consortium members are committed to continue following common dissemination procedures (see Annex 1 of deliverable D5.3) which specify the dissemination procedure and sets the basic standards for co-authorship; where the later follow the internationally accepted Vancouver guidelines for co-authorship.
OPEN ACCESS actions: We aim to publish our research in well-reputed journals and books where we expect the highest scientific impact and audience. This is not always - or perhaps even rarely - in general open access journals. They are, however, usually all Romero green or yellow, and therefore we pursue a clear strategy of securing open access to papers by placing pre-prints and similar in open repositories like 'Researchgate.net'. We place them there, once the final paper is published and we make appropriate citations and links to the original paper, thereby acknowledging the final version in the Journal, yet allowing a broader readership and impact.
List of Websites:
www.newforex.org
Note that this summary and the following full report make extensive use of the FIGUREs attached to the report as pictures.
The EU FP7 project NEWFOREX focused on the issue forest ecosystem services and the improved provision of these. It is well-known to most people that forest provides many other goods and services to people than those traded in the market place. Where timber and fuel wood are prominent among the marketed goods, there are numerous and often major groups of goods and services that are not marketed. These include mushrooms, berries and other goods collected for free, recreational services at large, carbon sequestration, the protection of biodiversity and many other things. These goods and services remain externalities of forest production.
Methods for assessing these values have been under development for the last three decades, yet remain in incomplete use with considerable room for improvement. In particular the understanding of who benefits from the provision of forest ecosystem services has not been studied in any detail in spite of the obvious policy relevance. Furthermore, as forest owners are not rewarded for the value of these externalities they may make decisions providing less non-marketed ecosystem services than optimal; this represents what economists call a market failure. Because of the market failure, it is likely that we as a society can increase welfare, if we develop ways to enhance their provision. If Society asks forest owners to change their forest management practices to provide more ecosystem services, they will incur costs in different forms, and methods to assess these become important. Furthermore, it stress the need to consider how society can design its policies for enhanced ecosystem service provision and begs the question of who should carry the costs of an enhanced provision.
The three main objectives of NEWFOREX reflected these issues and were specifically:
1. To provide methods for valuing forest externalities, which handle the jointly produced externalities in an integrated way, where specific attention will be given to the question: Who benefits? This is important as it is among the beneficiaries that likely ‘buyers’ are to be found.
2. To develop a methodology for assessing the cost of provision for externalities. We experiment with methods in order to take into account trans-boundary effects of forest management, and transactions and opportunity costs.
3. To assess several market-based methods for enhancing the provision of forest externalities, including e.g. payment schemes provision, certification or (re-)definition of property rights, and point towards new potentials for improved policy instruments.
Numerous results have been obtained regarding the insights into 1) drivers of demand for forest ecosystem services across the case studies, 2) the conditions under which they may be supplied, 3) how benefits and values are distributed among the population in the case study regions, 4) awareness and knowledge about provision costs, 5) forest owners perception of cost of provision and market based instruments, 5) the diversity of policy instruments in use for enhancing the provision of forest ecosystem services, and 6) institutional aspects affecting the performance of selected economic instruments across the case studies.
To reach these results NEWFOREX researchers worked extensively with stakeholders and undertook analytical, applied research using a set of empirical surveys among potential beneficiaries (citizens, buyers) and providers (forest owners) of forest ecosystem services. These took place in several EU case studies and a developing country case study in Brazil. The researcher focused in particular, but not exclusively, on key externalities: Carbon sequestration, biodiversity protection, watershed services and recreation services. The surveys were designed as far as possible to allow for comparative analyses and detailed results supporting the achievement of the objectives and relevant policies in the case areas. Addressing the demand and supply side simultaneously is a unique and innovative stroke of the NEWFOREX project.
NEWFOREX has produced ample evidence for European citizens’ willingness to pay for enhanced provision of several forest ecosystem services over a wide range including biodiversity protection, carbon sequestration, recreational aspects, groundwater recharge and many more. Furthermore, NEWFOREX has provided examples of how a better modelling of the heterogeneity of preferences across citizens for specific forest ecosystem services can shed important light on the distributional and essentially democratic impacts and aspects of environmental values. For example both in the Finnish and Danish cases, results showed considerable variation in preferences for enhancing specific recreational options. In the Danish case, the researchers applied a novel discrete mixture preference model to obtain deep information on the distribution. They found that while additional access rights overall had a positive value, this result was created by a large minority deriving moderate to fairly high values from the option whereas a small majority in fact found increased access of low to moderate negative value – expressing concerns for recreational quality and biodiversity protection. Clearly such information is of policy relevance (See FIGURE 1).
[Insert Figure 1 around here]
NEWFOREX has undertaken a very comprehensive survey of forest land owners covering part of six European countries and a region in Brazil. The survey results in combination with empirical models of forest production and forest economics have allowed NEWFOREX to test and evaluate a number of methods for assessing the cost of provision of forest ecosystem services. A central result is that current practices for assessing such costs in policy practice differ substantially across countries; reflecting difference in forest owner populations and forest management practices. Further results include the successful application of stated preference methods in Brazil, Finland and Denmark to reveal forest land owners willingness to enter into conditional contracts targeting various ecosystem services. Results revealed substantial variation in forest owner opportunity costs for given contract types, e.g. among Brazilian smallholders in the Amazon (FIGURE 2). The different methods also allow an assessment of various contracting aspects and the role of transactions costs, additionality issues and many other things. Clearly, these variations in preferences can be used to inform policy design and in particular increase the targeting of polices to those groups and areas where win-win options are more likely.
[Insert Figure 2 around here]
NEWFOREX have investigated ongoing policy instruments for forest ecosystem service provision and have evaluated potentially new such instruments with the help of forest owners as well as the general public. One of the most important political aspects of any policy designed to enhance the provision of ecosystem services is the aspect of distribution of costs and benefits across those who demand and benefit from and those that supply the ecosystem service. In NEWFOREX we asked the public (and in some cases also the forest owners) about their view on this distribution for different ecosystem services. The results for recreational services are shown in FIGURE 3. The results spell out an important aspect often overlooked when debating policies like payment for ecosystem services: The issue of a legitimate design. We have many demands for such policies. We want them to be cost effective – coordinating efforts across people that can deliver the best value for money. They must ensure additionality – we don’t want to pay for things, we would have anyway. We want to encourage compliance and rule out undue rent opportunities. However, to gain public support, we also need the policies to be legitimate and acceptable in terms of, e.g. equity or ethical concerns, or with respect to the distribution of costs, benefits and rights. The results of NEWFOREX show that the answer to who should carry the cost depends quite a bit on the context. Only when – as in the national park area in Finland – there are obvious ways to have users pay, do a significant part of the public place their trust in this. There is generally highest support for society (that is all of us) to carry the costs jointly and compensate the forest owners for costs.
[Insert Figure 3 around here]
The results of NEWFOREX have been and still are being disseminated in numerous presentations for professionals, forest owners, policy makers and in written form in policy and scientific papers. Furthermore, two book volumes of policy oriented short chapters on specific aspects of forest ecosystem services are being printed in the fall of 2014.
Project Context and Objectives:
The EU FP7 project NEWFOREX focused on the issue forest ecosystem services and the improved provision of these. It is well-known to most people that forest provides many other goods and services to people than those traded in the market place. Where timber and fuel wood are prominent among the marketed goods, there are numerous and often major groups of goods and services that are not marketed. These include mushrooms, berries and other goods collected for free, recreational services at large, carbon sequestration, the protection of biodiversity and many other things. These goods and services remain externalities of forest production.
Methods for assessing these values have been under development for the last three decades, yet remain in incomplete use with considerable room for improvement. In particular the understanding of who benefits from the provision of forest ecosystem services has not been studied in any detail in spite of the obvious policy relevance. Furthermore, as forest owners are not rewarded for the value of these externalities they may make decisions providing less non-marketed ecosystem services than optimal; this represents what economists call a market failure. Because of the market failure, it is likely that we as a society can increase welfare, if we develop ways to enhance their provision. If Society asks forest owners to change their forest management practices to provide more ecosystem services, they will incur costs in different forms, and methods to assess these become important. Furthermore, it stress the need to consider how society can design its policies for enhanced ecosystem service provision and begs the question of who should carry the costs of an enhanced provision.
The three main objectives of NEWFOREX reflected these issues and were specifically:
1. To provide methods for valuing forest externalities, which handle the jointly produced externalities in an integrated way, where specific attention will be given to the question: Who benefits? This is important as it is among the beneficiaries that likely ‘buyers’ are to be found.
2. To develop a methodology for assessing the cost of provision for externalities. We experiment with methods in order to take into account trans-boundary effects of forest management, and transactions and opportunity costs.
3. To assess several market-based methods for enhancing the provision of forest externalities, including e.g. payment schemes provision, certification or (re-)definition of property rights, and point towards new potentials for improved policy instruments.
In pursuing and reaching all these three objectives, NEWFOREX researchers have obtained numerous results regarding and insights into 1) drivers of demand for forest ecosystem services across the case studies, 2) the conditions under which they may be supplied, 3) how benefits and values are distributed among the population in the case study regions, 4) awareness and knowledge about provision costs, 5) forest owners perception of cost of provision and market based instruments, 5) the diversity of policy instruments in use for enhancing the provision of forest ecosystem services, and 6) institutional aspects affecting the performance of selected economic instruments across the case studies.
To reach these results NEWFOREX researchers worked extensively with stakeholders and undertook analytical, applied research using a set of empirical surveys among potential beneficiaries (citizens, buyers) and providers (forest owners) of forest ecosystem services. These took place in several EU case studies and a developing country case study in Brazil. The researcher focused in particular, but not exclusively, on key externalities: Carbon sequestration, biodiversity protection, watershed services and recreation services. The surveys were designed as far as possible to allow for comparative analyses and detailed results supporting the achievement of the objectives and relevant policies in the case areas. Addressing the demand and supply side simultaneously is a unique and innovative stroke of the NEWFOREX project.
NEWFOREX have had considerable more success in data collection than the most optimistic estimates of the original project proposal. Thus, already now and even more as we look ahead into the coming months many results and novel empirical insights are being and will be published in scientific journals most of which has already been widely disseminated in numerous stakeholder meetings, policy conference and research conferences and events. The first of the large empirical surveys, focusing on the valuation of ecosystem services, has completed most data analyses and publication and dissemination is already well on its way, but more is to come, in particular on the trans-boundary aspects of carbon mitigation policies. The second large empirical effort, the survey of forest owners and their options for enhancing provision, has been completed across no less than eight case studies. Results have already been widely disseminated and publication is immediately forthcoming in numerous ways as many scientific journals have asked for revisions of submitted papers, followed by publication.
More broadly, NEWFOREX has contributed to the constant challenge of developing improved survey designs and methods of analyses for and approaches to an integrated assessment of the values of forest externalities. NEWFOREX has produced ample evidence for European citizens’ willingness to pay for enhanced provision of several forest ecosystem services over a wide range including biodiversity protection, carbon sequestration, recreational aspects, groundwater recharge and many more. We have focused on the application and further development of methods of survey design and data modeling that have focused on the often inherently joint provision of these services as well as the distributional impacts of policies, recognizing that beneficiaries may often be quite heterogeneous in their assessment of values. Thus, NEWFOREX has paid specific attention to the variation of the willingness-to-pay across various judicial and spatial boundaries and groups of beneficiaries. Results have been obtained that clearly show the relevance of this for informing policy makers better about how the benefits deriving from the various forest externalities are distributed in the population of beneficiaries. This will open up options for targeting provision policies better and notably also for targeting the use of market based instruments to build on the support from the groups of beneficiaries. The potential impact is a larger efficiency in addressing the beneficiaries of forest ecosystem services.
We draw forward a specific example of how NEWFOREX has improved the methods to uncover and analyze the heterogeneity of preferences across citizens for specific forest ecosystem services. We show how this enabled us to shed important light on the distributional and essentially democratic impacts and aspects of environmental values. In both the Finnish and Danish cases, results showed considerable variation in preferences for enhancing specific recreational options. In the Finnish case, visitors to the Ruka-Kuusamo national park area attached no significant value to the potential expansion of recreational trails in the area, yet considered a reduction in the current level of trails a clear loss. In the Danish case, the researchers applied a novel discrete mixture preference model to obtain deep information on the distribution. They found that while additional access rights overall had a positive value, this result was created by a large minority deriving moderate to fairly high values from the option whereas a small majority in fact found increased access of low to moderate negative value – expressing concerns for recreational quality and biodiversity protection. Clearly such information is of policy relevance (See FIGURE 1).
[Insert Figure 1 around here]
NEWFOREX has evaluated a number of methods for assessing the cost of provision of forest ecosystem services. A central result is that current practices for assessing such costs in policy practice differ substantially across countries; reflecting difference in forest owner populations and forest management practices.
NEWFOREX has undertaken a very comprehensive survey of forest land owners covering part of six European countries and a region in Brazil. The survey results in combination with empirical models of forest production and forest economics have allowed NEWFOREX to test and evaluate a Further results include the successful application of stated preference methods in Brazil, Finland and Denmark to reveal forest land owners willingness to enter into conditional contracts targeting various ecosystem services. Results revealed substantial variation in forest owner opportunity costs for given contract types, e.g. among Brazilian smallholders in the Amazon (FIGURE 2). The different methods also allow an assessment of various contracting aspects and the role of transactions costs, additionality issues and many other things. Clearly, these variations in preferences can be used to inform policy design and in particular increase the targeting of polices to those groups and areas where win-win options are more likely. Thus, this is a novel contribution to the scientific field and at the same time has immediate and crucial policy relevance for the development of markets for forest externalities. The results will greatly enhance the basis for targeting the most relevant forest owners, when policy makers wish to enhance the provision of ecosystem services. The potential impact is thus a larger efficiency in addressing the socially optimal provision of forest ecosystem services. Thus, NEWFOREX has suggested practical approaches for assessing costs of provision from the direct costs to integrated cost assessments, taking into account e.g. transactions costs and spatial spill-over effects; taking into account the joint production economics of multifunctional forests.
[Insert Figure 2 around here]
NEWFOREX have investigated ongoing policy instruments for forest ecosystem service provision and have evaluated potentially new such instruments with the help of forest owners as well as the general public. Finally, NEWFOREX provided a general assessment of market-based methods across the key externalities in focus and the range of case studies in the project. This has resulted in guidelines linking i) the type of externality, ii) the forest management context and iii) the socio-economic context with iv) a suitable choice of market-based method for enhanced provision of the externality in question. This has been informed by empirical investigations among forest owners that evaluate different aspects of the design of mechanisms and market-based methods and their impacts on the cost efficiency of the mechanism design. The expected impact is to further pave the way for improved methods for marketing ecosystem services, which may also hold the promise of improved ownership and acceptance among stakeholders.
[Insert Figure 3 around here]
As a specific cross-country empirical result of value for policy makers we draw forward the following: One of the most important political aspects of any policy designed to enhance the provision of ecosystem services is the aspect of distribution of costs and benefits across those who demand and benefit from and those that supply the ecosystem service. In NEWFOREX we asked the public (and in some cases also the forest owners) about their view on this distribution for different ecosystem services. The results for recreational services are shown in FIGURE 3. The results spell out an important aspect often overlooked when debating policies like payment for ecosystem services: The issue of a legitimate design. We have many demands for such policies. We want them to be cost effective – coordinating efforts across people that can deliver the best value for money. They must ensure additionality – we don’t want to pay for things, we would have anyway. We want to encourage compliance and rule out undue rent opportunities. However, to gain public support, we also need the policies to be legitimate and acceptable in terms of, e.g. equity or ethical concerns, or with respect to the distribution of costs, benefits and rights. The results of NEWFOREX show that the answer to who should carry the cost depends quite a bit on the context. Only when – as in the national park area in Finland – there are obvious ways to have users pay, do a significant part of the public place their trust in this. There is generally highest support for society (that is all of us) to carry the costs jointly and compensate the forest owners for costs. This in general paves the way well, for the further development of economic instruments for enhancing the provision forest ecosystem services. This includes the argument made by the literature on payment for ecosystem services, which can be illustrated as in FIGURE 4. There may be situations where the forest owner’s costs of a change from current forest management to a different management system associated with bigger provision (smaller loss) of ecosystem services can be fully compensated (or more) by the beneficiaries of ecosystem services – resulting in a win-win scenario.
[Insert Figure 4 around here]
Substantial effort has been done by all project partners to engage a wide range of stakeholders in the project's activities. In respect of the nature of the work, numerous stakeholders in the case study regions participated in the definition of case studies' objectives and the development of corresponding surveys, as well as in the process of collecting policy information and examples and interpreting results. A successful high-level stakeholder board meeting was held in Copenhagen and numerous other stakeholder outreach activities undertaken at a broader European level. A final conference was held in Uppsala in May 2014. The results of NEWFOREX have been and still are being disseminated in numerous presentations for professionals, forest owners, policy makers and in written form in policy and scientific papers.
[Insert Figure 5 around here]
FIGURE 5 shows our approximate data on how different audiences have been targeted in our efforts to reach out towards various end user groups. Researchers are of course a major group, in particular as part of the effort to ensure and validate the quality of our results. However, decision makers and professionals working with and within the different policy processes and forest sector organizations together constitute the dominant group of our audience. Forest owners are also a visible group, but given the meta-policy target of our research it is not surprising that they are not more prominent. However, looking ahead we see more dissemination results focusing on forest owners when presenting the results of cost of provision assessments for their consideration.
[Insert Figure 6 around here]
FIGURE 6 shows a graph of the distribution of dissemination activities by type within the project period. As would be expected the oral presentations dominate as communication with stakeholders and presentations of intermediate results at international and national conference has been the main dissemination activity in this phase. The number of publications is, however, already significant and with more than 50 is certain to have a lasting impact and build the legacy of NEWFOREX. Many more publications will be forthcoming and furthermore, two book volumes of policy oriented short chapters on specific aspects of forest ecosystem services are being printed in the fall of 2014.
Project Results:
Introducing the scientific work effort and organization
The NEWFOREX project was organized in a matrix structure with three topical work packages running a cross a set of case studies. The three topical work packages were completely aligned with the objectives of NEWFOREX, and in all case studies work was undertaken that related to the different topical work packages and objectives. The work packages were:
Work package 2: New methods for valuation and assessment of forest externalities
Work package 3: Developing methods for cost of provision assessments
Work package 4: Assessing cost-efficient market-based methods
Across all research partners, who included the nine universities and research institutions, different researchers were involved in undertaking the actual research in the three work packages. The work was organized into a set of tasks, each with a designated task leader appointed from the partner circle. The task leader was responsible for coordinating the effort across partners and case studies. Furthermore, the researchers in each case study cooperated closely to make sure that research questions and issues addressed when targeting e.g. forest owners in qualitative or quantitative surveys would mirror or at least reflect the questions and issues addressed when targeting the citizens or user groups; and vice versa. To ensure this form of tight alignment a number of stakeholder interviews, expert interviews and focus group exercises were undertaken prior to the implementation of the actual full scale survey efforts. The tight alignment implies that in several of the case studies, the local research groups that are part of NEWFOREX have produced quite comprehensive research of value for several ongoing policy processes. We elaborate further on this aspect in the section below.
In the following, we produce a comprehensive work package wise description of how the main scientific results were produced and provide several examples of the main part of these.
The main research efforts and results obtained in Work package 2: New methods for valuation and assessment of forest externalities
The first task in work package 2 concerned the identification of the role of key externalities across all case studies, and was led by the partner METLA. The main objective of this task was to provide a detailed description of the role of the four key forest externalities (biodiversity, recreation, water and carbon sequestration) in the case studies. Furthermore, another important objective was to outline forest management actions that may increase or decrease the provision of these externalities in the specific case study area. This effort and the resulting report formed the basis for the further work in all work packages, but it also represented valuable new insights in itself. The first part of each case study’s contribution to the report gave a review of recent valuation studies related to the four key externalities as well as lessons learned from the earlier research. The review covered relevant valuation studies during the last 5-10 years published in national languages as well as in international publications. The second part of the case study contributions dealt with the relative importance and demand for various forest externalities in the case study areas. These were assessed using various information sources describing uses and consumption, e.g. in terms of recreational activities, water consumption etc., as well as policy documents and policy goal formulations.
Moreover, a description of the forest ownership structure in each case area, the property rights definitions and forms and the current use rights for forest externalities were presented. In each case study, 2-3 key externalities were identified as the most relevant ones for the forthcoming empirical valuation study. The researchers in each case study also described the actual location and the scale of the case study area as well as the current population in and around it and the key means of livelihood linked to the use of forest resources. Key stakeholders linked to forest externalities in the case study area were also listed The case study partners discussed what types of values were likely to be at stake in the area in terms of scale (local, regional, national or global) as well as quality (use values, non-use values, etc.). Moreover, public access to forest goods and services as well as potential non-users of these assets was discussed. In the fourth part of each report, the possible forest management scenarios (management changes) that may affect the provision of key forest externalities were described in considerable detail. The specific temporal and spatial scale in producing forest externalities was also elaborated.
All this compiled knowledge and insight was crucial for developing the valuation and assessment approaches within work package 2 (New methods for valuation and assessment of forest externalities), enabling the researchers to identify the relevant externalities to focus on, and to define the management change scenarios relevant to propose as possible changes to survey respondents. The effort also served the further elaboration in the other work packages. For example in work package 3 (Developing methods for cost of provision assessments), the information was valuable for addressing what were the relevant forest management changes to consider. These forest management changes could then be addressed through different methods for assessing the cost of provision for the resulting forest ecosystem services. The description of the role of different forest ecosystem services also formed a good basis for the work in work package 4 (Assessing cost-efficient market-based methods), in targeting the review of existing policies affecting or directly targeting forest ecosystem services.
The insights and knowledge obtained through this first activity also served as an important basis for the communication with stakeholder and for the framing of research questions. Thus, while it did not in itself result in specific research publications, almost all publications of NEWFOREX draw upon this effort in setting and describing case study context, explaining policy relevance and background and pin-pointing why their research questions are of interest and adequately framed and addressed.
The second task in work package 2 (New methods for valuation and assessment of forest externalities) concerned the design and implementation of a set of choice experiment based valuation instruments and surveys targeting relevant forest ecosystem services in relevant scenarios in five case study areas. This task was led by the partner EFI.
Thus, the main objective of this task was to develop valuation questionnaires for all case studies, and the work of this task was based on the findings and the selected case studies thoroughly described in the above first task and effort of work package 2.
It was crucial to ensure as aligned and as high a quality of these valuation instruments as possible, drawing on each partner’s special competences with respect to the case study areas and with respect to the design and analyses of valuation surveys and valuation data. In the first stage EFI developed a full scale questionnaire template based on and targeting the Mediterranean case study. This template was discussed thoroughly at the 3rd project meeting in Nancy among the case study partner, where also the questions common for and to be implemented in all case studies were defined. Finally, in an iterative process of writing, evaluating and rewriting, each case study researcher team a developed a valuation questionnaire targeting.
The complete set (for five case studies) of valuation questionnaires was presented in deliverable 2.2 “A full set of valuation survey instruments ready for implementation”. The common parts of the case study questionnaires focus particularly on issues relevant for analysing the distributional effects of enhancing ecosystem services in the different case study areas. Across case studies, all key ecosystem services identified were covered. The core valuation instrument in each case study questionnaire was carefully tailored for the specific context characterising the case study. This methodologically aligned and coordinated environmental valuation experiment running across five significant European case studies is a major achievement of the NEWFOREX project. The results obtained are described below and hold great potential for informing European environmental and forest policies at all decision levels.
Apart from the aspects related to the valuation of forest ecosystem services, the questionnaires also included carefully aligned questions to the public regarding their views on several policy aspects. These included questions on their view on the enhanced provision of selected forest ecosystem services, on the distribution of responsibilities across forest owners and notably about whom they thought should carry the costs of an enhanced provision of various forest ecosystem services. Finally, the citizens were also asked their opinion about who should be controlling and distributing funds to forest owners, given that society would be paying forest owners to enhance the provision of forest ecosystem services. The answers to these policy oriented questions formed a key input to some of the novel results produced in work package 4 (Assessing cost-efficient market-based methods).
A final effort regarding the construction of valuation instruments followed the consortiums response to the scientific review conducted after the first periodic report. In the review report, the scientific reviewer suggested to pursue more strictly an idea already embedded in the concept of trans-boundary evaluations as described in the original NEWFOREX proposal. We decided to pursue this idea and selected the case of climate change mitigation policies as the focus of the instrument. Thus, in the last half of the project, we developed a new valuation instrument targeting the preferences of European citizens for mitigating climate change (reducing net emissions of CO2) through the use of a specific set of policy initiatives implemented in one or the other out of the several countries in which the survey were undertaken. The results are very interesting and briefly touched upon below, but as we consider publication in a very high ranking journal, they are only described in tentative terms.
Versions of all the questionnaires are secured and stored centrally in the NEWFOREX intranet as they represent an important reference for the many publications currently being published and written as a result of their implementation. An example of how the questionnaires used visual aids to explain various environmental changes to respondents is shown in FIGURE 7.
[Insert Figure 7 around here]
The third task of work package 2 (New methods for valuation and assessment of forest externalities) concerned the first analyses of the integrated assessment of the values of forest ecosystem services in each of the different case studies. This task was led by METLA.
This effort included the production of the main valuation results of the five empirical valuation studies conducted in Spain, Italy, Poland, Denmark and Finland. Parts of the questionnaires and hence data sets were common to all case studies to allow for cross-case comparisons while specific parts of each questionnaire differ in order to meet the differences in country specific circumstances including geographical and legislative issues as well as the differences in the relative importance of the key externalities: recreation, biodiversity, carbon sequestration and water.
The full set of results produced in this effort can be found in the report and deliverable D2.3 “Report on the Analyses of Integrated Assessment of Values across Case Studies”. The report is a staggering 150 pages long, and below we therefore report only some examples of the results produced. The deliverable consists of a short introduction to the design of valuation studies and the mathematical descriptions and explanations of the applied econometric models. Subsequently, each case study report is presented as a separate chapter with more or less the same structure. The case study reports first explained the content of the surveys and study designs by describing the rationale of choosing the attributes for choice experiments addressing the changes in production of key externalities as well as the proposed forest management changes considered. These sections were followed by a summary of data collection and a short description of the applied econometric models. The result parts presented first the general results explaining attitudes towards and values of forest externalities when estimated in models targeting the main effects and attributes of the choice experiment surveys. This was followed by the main body of empirical results from the valuation studies i.e. the results of the various econometric models and specifications evaluated. Finally each case study outlined their main conclusions of their valuation study.
As an example of such a study we draw forward here the Boreal case study in which the choice experiment method was used to analyze foreign and domestic tourists’ demand for and willingness to pay for enhanced forest amenities, in particular landscape values and biodiversity, in private forests in the Ruka-Kuusamo area in northeastern Finland. The data were collected on-site during two main tourism seasons, winter-spring and summer-fall season, resulting in over 1100 completed questionnaires. The findings were several:
- The tourists are willing to pay for selected improvements in the quality of outdoor recreation environments through restrictions on forest management in the case study area.
- Both foreign and domestic tourists were willing to pay for improvements in the quality of the forest landscape, in terms of a less frequent occurrence of clear-cutting and site preparation areas along the routes, as well as for increased biodiversity.
- A majority of respondents agreed with the idea that private forest owners should be compensated for the lost income and extra costs of landscape management,
- …and that tourists should pay their share for preserving the landscape.
A major motivation for this study was to consider the prospects of developing a market-based mechanism to enhance the provision of landscape and recreational forest amenities and thereby to improve the conditions of an expanding nature-based tourism in the area mainly in private ownership. A map of the case study area can be seen in FIGURE 8.
[Insert Figure 8 around here]
Looking across all five case studies the results of NEWFOREX clearly documents that European citizens would assign great value to an enhanced provision of forest ecosystem services, but also that these differ much across the populations and depend strongly on the actual environmental changes proposed. The majority of people are willing to pay low to moderate amounts for various environmental changes, yet the mean estimates will inevitably be affected also by the groups among the European citizens who put much weight to and derive much value from forest ecosystem services, and their enhancement. In FIGURE 9, we illustrate this general distribution of peoples’ valuation using data from the Italian case study. As we can see, the majority of respondent are willing to pay little or only moderate amounts for a given environmental improvement. Yet, non-trivial groups are still willing to choose policy and scenario alternatives associated with fairly high costs – provided they also imply significant improvements in the provision of forest ecosystem services.
[Insert Figure 9 around here]
The pattern of peoples’ willingness to pay across spatial, urban-rural and many other boundaries was investigated further in the fourth task of work package 2 (New methods for valuation and assessment of forest externalities), which focused on the analyses of trans-boundary patterns in the values of externalities. The task was led by UCPH and the full set of results was reported in the deliverable report “D2.4 Comparative analyses of trans-boundary patterns of values”. This is again a fairly substantive report with a total of 119 pages, and here we only draw forward some of the results obtained and published in that report and currently also being published in numerous papers coming out in journals like Forest Policy and Economics, Journal of Environmental Planning and Management and Ecological Economics.
In the deliverable the case study researchers have analysed various trans-boundary or distributional effects of the values obtained by the choice experiment described in D2.2 and D2.3. First they compared the effect of specific parameters relevant for a socio-demographically oriented trans-boundary comparison, namely income, education, urban-rural divides and various measures related to the accessibility to the forest. We found that the rich part of the population in general wanted to pay higher amounts for enhanced provision of ecosystem services from forests, whereas the low income part of the populations in general wanted to pay lower amounts for a given improvement in ecosystem service provision. This suggested that in general, environmental policies enhancing forest ecosystem services would in absolute terms benefit the more well-off part of the population more than the less well-off part of the European citizens. For some case studies this differs by attributes, for others not.
Turning to other distributional patterns we found a weak tendency in some cases for education being positively related to biodiversity, probably due to an information effect for this attribute, where many people probably mainly derive non-use values, e.g. existence values from the enhanced protection of biodiversity, and this may be pre-conditioned by an insight into the issue of conservation and species protection. Variables related to the use and access policies (population density, visitor frequency, distance to the forests) showed little variance, though a weak tendency for the recreational improvements to be preferred more by people with easy access and the more non-use dominated attributes like biodiversity less preferred by people with frequent and easy access.
The case studies are very different, both in terms of the externalities being valued and the population valuing them. Therefore some of the trans-boundary effects being analysed are only relevant in specific context.
An example of a deeper and also methodologically innovative analysis is the analysis of the Danish citizens’ preferences for enhanced access in private forests. In Atlantic case researchers conducted a deeper analysis of the heterogeneity of these access preferences. We found that willingness to pay for access outside road and path differs between individuals in the population with a small majority having quite negative preferences for increased access and a small minority having a positive value, in the aggregate slightly higher in absolute values. See the resulting distribution and WTP measures in FIGURE 1. These differences were not explainable by socio-demographic characteristics, but instead the likelihood of a negative reaction to enhanced access correlated strongly with peoples’ tendency to think that we – the human race - in general should protect nature more (“tree huggers”) and peoples’ tendency to think that nature is robust and we have a right to use it (“tree cutters”). Analyses like this one are important to answer the policy question of who benefits from initiatives, and has clear policy relevance.
As explained earlier, the scientific reviewer suggested pursuing more strictly an idea already embedded in the concept of trans-boundary evaluations as described in the original NEWFOREX proposal. We decided to pursue this idea and selected the case of climate change mitigation policies as the focus of the instrument. Thus, in the last half of the project, we developed a new valuation instrument targeting the preferences of European citizens for mitigating climate change (reducing net emissions of CO2) through the use of a specific set of policy initiatives implemented in one or the other out of the five countries in which the survey were undertaken. Thus, we are able to conduct the exact same survey in five selected cases and compare WTP for reduced CO2 emissions to the atmosphere, and preference for in which country mitigation efforts should be undertaken. As CO2 is a public global good, one could argue that it should not matter to people where mitigation measures are undertaken: They will all benefit from the reduced emissions no matter where reductions are made. However, there may be associated co-benefits which would change that pattern. That is the aim of this extra study. Our initial findings are, that in fact across the different countries (Denmark, Germany, France, Spain and Italy), citizens share a reasonable well aligned view on their WTP for carbon mitigation in €/Mt. They also all agree fairly much that the preferred sector would be investments in renewable energy (solar, wind etc.), whereas they differ slightly in their preferences for ranking initiatives in the industry sector (energy efficiency), versus the forest sector and biomass use. They also all (with one exception) seem to prefer mitigation investments in any sector to be taken in their home country. No further results can be reported here, as we currently undertake the work needed to reach a high ranking journal with the results.
The fifth and final task of work package 2 (New methods for valuation and assessment of forest externalities) was a compilation of the work package’s contribution to the projects unifying deliverables, which to enhance end-user impact, was determined to be an integrated set of short texts collected into a publication of the European Forest Institute’s policy and research oriented book series “What Can Science Tell Us?”. The two volumes of this book will be published in the autumn of 2014. In this publication the project partners have pursued to describe the ways of valuing forest externalities that both take into account the joint production of externalities and allow for detailed analysis of preference heterogeneity across beneficiaries. The publication presents several examples of valuation studies in different parts of Europe conducted within NEWFOREX-project, and policy relevant highlights are made throughout the presentation of the different topics.
The contribution to the book volumes from work package 2 are visible in Deliverable 2.5 (some 43 pages) were organized in the following way: First the need and justification for monetary valuation of forest externalities and the main objectives typically driving the use of the results of such studies were presented and discussed. The next chapter includes a brief presentation of up-to-date methods of monetary valuation of forest externalities. The main part of the contribution is a set of chapters focusing on the four core forest externalities, i.e. water, carbon, recreation and biodiversity, and drawing upon the results of the NEWFOREX-project. Each chapter describes the special features of the forest externality that need to be taken into account in valuation studies, sums up key results of previous valuation studies including the used measures and indicators and finally, highlights the main results of the case studies obtained in NEWFOREX.
The chapter ”Valuing water externalities from forests” presents results from valuing ground water resources in Denmark. The study aimed at estimating the mean WTP of the Danish population for additional clean groundwater under the forests of the case area. The mean WTP for additional annual groundwater recharges amounting to 20,000,000 m3 or 40,000,000 m3 was estimated to equal 76.5€ and 104.4€ /year and household, respectively. The estimated willingness to pay measures of Danish households corresponds roughly to a willingness to pay of 6-8.8€/m3 of additional groundwater. This is not far from the costs that respondents have experienced paying for water consumption in the household. The results are illustrated in FIGURE 10.
[Insert Figure 10 around here]
The chapter on the valuation of carbon sequestration illustrated the main results of the Spanish case study region. In Catalonia people were asked about their preferences for atmospheric CO2 reduction, which would equal the annual emissions produced by a number of Catalan citizens ranging from 10,000 to 55,000 people. Considering that citizens of Catalonia emit around 7 t of CO2 per year/person, the total CO2 reduction provided by forests is in range from 70,000 to 385,000 t of CO2 per year, depending on the policy scenario. The study showed that citizens were on average willing to pay 0.00077 € for an additional quantity of CO2, equivalent to the annual emissions of an average Catalonian citizen, which means 0.00011 € per each additional t of CO2 reduced in the atmosphere. This result is in range with the values obtained in previous valuation studies in Spain.
The next chapter focusing of recreation benefits presents key results from Danish and Finnish case studies. The Danish case values recreational benefits from daytrips. In Denmark the majority of the forest area is privately owned and these forests are important for recreation for a growing urban population. The choice experiment method was used to measure demand for increased access to forests with three alternative levels: the current access rights, access outside roads and paths allowed on 50% of the area, and access on foot allowed everywhere on the forest floor.
The results show that people had diverse preferences for how much they valued this increased access rights in the forest – some were willing to pay for increased access whereas others believed it would be harmful for the nature and wildlife. The Danish population was remarkably split on this issue, as earlier shown in FIGURE 1: One group (accounting for some 51% of respondents) had a negative mean WTP of –42 €/year, whereas the mean WTP of the other half (49%) of the population was positive and as high as 70 €/year. The reasons behind the results link to be differences in attitudes regarding the issue of nature conservation versus recreational use of the forest environment.
The Finnish case study valued the recreational benefits linked to nature-based tourism in privately owned forests. The respondents consisting of national and international tourists were willing to pay for the improvements in the quality of the landscape. More precisely, if the quality of the landscape would be clearly improved so that traces of intensive forestry operations would not at all be visible along the outdoor routes, the visitors would be willing to pay more (12.17€/week) than if the quality would only increase slightly (10.82 €/week). Moreover, the visitor would be willing to pay for an increase in biodiversity (10.2 €/week) and claim a compensation for its decrease (36.8 €/week).The tourists’ willingness to pay for changes in recreational and environmental quality of the Ruka-Kuusamo nature tourism area in Finland are presented in the FIGURE 11.
[Insert Figure 11 around here]
One major motivation of this study was to consider prospects for a market-based mechanism (MBM), called Landscape and Recreational Values Trading, which has been proposed to improve environmental conditions of nature-based tourism areas in Finland. The results confirmed that at least one of the basic requirements of a new MBM was fulfilled, as tourists showed a significant WTP for enhanced forest amenities such as the landscape.
The chapter “Valuing biodiversity” presents and compares valuation approaches and results from Finland, Denmark, Poland, Italy and Spain. The attributes describing the level of biodiversity varied from amount of species to naturalness of forest environments. TABLE 1 presents the biodiversity attributes used in the studies, their change levels and respondents WTP for suggested changes across all the valuation studies undertaken in NEWFOREX.
[Insert Table 1 around here]
People’s underlying motives for preferences for environmental protection is closely linked to their overall perception of environment. Environmental attitudes, which can influence people’s WTP, were also measured in the case studies with a psychometric scale called the New Environmental Paradigm (NEP) Scale. The results from NEWFOREX confirm that people with higher environmental concerns are more willing to contribute to biodiversity protection.
The main research efforts and results obtained in Work package 3: Developing methods for cost of provision assessments
In a research effort like this, the first task was to evaluate the current empirical basis for assessing direct, opportunity and other types cost of provision in the case studies, notably with a view towards the role of joint provisions of externalities as stated in the main objectives of work package 3. Furthermore and on that basis the second early research effort was to initialize the work on cost of provision assessment methods and evaluations of these in a coherent way, and notably test methods for assessing direct cost of provision
The results of the first effort are presented in the comprehensive deliverable and report from the project with the title “D3.1 A report summarizing the existing knowledge basis for assessing the direct cost of provision in the case study areas” and compiles 88 pages of reviews, examples and illustrations of existing definitions and methods for modelling and assessing the cost of provision for forest externalities. In addition, a simple conceptual framework for non-industrial forest owners was developed as a basis for the following task on developing for forest owner surveys. Thus, this work targeted an integrated assessment taking into account that the forest externalities are produced jointly and related to management alternatives. Each case study partner provided key elements for assessing the cost of forest ecosystem service provision in their respective case study areas. Thus, the first part of this effort and the report D3.1 was devoted to setting up the definitions and concepts necessary to address the assessment of cost of provision for forest externalities in a coherent and rigid way. The second step outlined in the results was to focus on the different methods in relation to the context, practices and constraints of the individual case studies. Two main approaches for cost of provision assessments were developed at this stage, based on the existing practices and available models and methods: The first of these takes what can be described as a production technological or engineering approach which focus more on outcomes and objective measurable direct and opportunity costs and other costs. The second approach can be described as one focusing more on behavioural approaches and attempting to assess cost of provision through eliciting estimates from observed behaviour or from stated preference surveys and decision patterns. The third part of the effort and the D3.1 report focused on the development of a simple conceptual framework for addressing non-industrial forest owners, when assessing cost of provision. Cost assessment requires three elements: the reference case (or ‘business as usual’ case), the forest management scenarios relevant for bringing about different levels of forest ecosystem services, and the expected impacts and the cost drivers. Any survey targeting forest owners’ or any engineering analysis targeting cost of provision must have clear communications and definitions of these concepts to obtain valid results.
A main finding resulting from these efforts was that current methods and examples of assessing direct and other cost of provision differed significantly between case studies. In some case studies, there were several examples of assessment of e.g. direct and opportunity costs of providing various changes in forest management, linked to quantifiable changes in ecosystem service provision (e.g. Boreal, Atlantic and Mediterranean). In other case studies, this evidence was much scarcer, and methods much more indirect and based on scarce evidence and practices. This undoubtedly reflect variations also in the intensity of forest management practices, the degree of absentee forest owners in the regions, the differences in forest ownership patterns and the difficulties in identifying forest owners – not only for the authorities and researchers but also for private sector agents.
The major empirical effort of work package 3 (Developing methods for cost of provision assessments) was the collection of information either through qualitative interviews or through quantitative surveys among forest owners and in one particular case also forest extensions companies operating for and on behalf of forest owners. NEWFOREX has been extremely productive in this specific task and collected more information about forest owners’ and their views upon forest ecosystem service provision and policies related to this than any previous research effort. Once the key publications are out from NEWFOREX these data are of course available for other researchers and interested parties.
An important part of preparing for such a major empirical effort was to screen, evaluate and debate the possible approaches in and across the different case studies. Suggestions were developed and tested in small pilot samples, on experts and in focus groups using case tailored models of the integrated production changes proposed and the cost of provision assessment. Thus, the preliminary phase of survey preparation progressed by adapting the general framework for surveying non-industrial forest owners to the case specific characteristics. As an important part of the preparations and learning points needed for developing this survey, a pilot study was implemented in France during the first period to analyse how researchers can or cannot elicit the key factors involved in harvesting and marketing wood as well as in supplying environmental and social services. This French pilot study along with the findings in the selected case studies reported in D3.1 formed the basis for the development of the forest owner survey instruments and interview protocols. The different aspects considered and the conclusions drawn upon what to focus on in terms of hypothesis to be tested and how in terms of empirical method and experimental design for all the different case studies were all reported in “D3.2 A forest owner survey instrument and interview guide ready for implementation”, a comprehensive document of 76 pages. The report was structured in in four parts. The first part summarized the main insights from D3.1 considering the measurement of externalities, the role of BAU scenarios, and identification of forest management actions. The second part addressed several overall issues on implementing qualitative and quantitative surveys. In particular, data requirement for assessment of cost of provision based on current management (revealed cost assessment) and based on stated management choices (choice experiments) were considered. The third part summarized the implementation of the surveys in each case study area, focusing on the survey approach, sampling methods, externalities considered, management actions, and the hypotheses considered in the surveys. The final component of the report provided a brief overview and synthesis of case study survey instruments applied. The actual questionnaire instruments and protocols are available in an Annex report “D3.2 Annex: example questionnaire and interview guidelines” with a staggering 238 pages.
The report 3.2 shows how researchers prepared and refined the surveys and their empirical approaches for the case studies prior to collecting the empirical data. The surveys were based on a shared methodological development and some common principles and targets for the implementation, but the large differences in the forest owner populations and notably their accessibility had clear implications for the choice of method. Three key points would be addressed. Firstly, the availability of information concerning the forest owners’ knowledge about the costs related to the (integrated joint) production functions. This point is important for the estimation of the direct costs, the feedback costs, and the opportunity cost. Secondly, the forest owners experience with and perception of other types of costs, e.g. transaction costs, risk, coordination costs etc. This last type of cost is linked to a component of the valuation surveys that relies on the market-based mechanisms, for example a simulated experiment of environmental contracting and willingness to accept management restrictions for given compensations. Thirdly, the spatial interaction between forest owners will be important to assert to have a better idea of the possibilities of supplying more efficiently forest externalities.
In the end, the case study partners used relatively different survey approaches. This reflected the fact that the case study areas were very different with respect to forest type and management, owner structure as well as different foci of the case study partners’ surveys. While most studies applied quantitative surveys, the Mediterranean case study – as expected – used exclusively a qualitative interview approach as forest owners were hardly accessible or active in forest management in the Catalan region. Therefore, limited information on cost of changing management practices was available. The data collected in the case studies also represented different spatial scales, at least in a relative sense. The Boreal, Central European, Mediterranean, and the Mountainous case studies had a regional scale. The French pilot study sample referred to five different administrative regions. The Atlantic case study and the German survey was carried out at a national level.
The Central European, Mediterranean, Mountainous, as well as the Amazon case applied face-to-face interviews in order to cope with a context where the population is unfamiliar with surveys. Different versions of stratified sampling were applied in most of the case studies to select the forest owners to be included in the survey. In the Atlantic case study, it was preferred to contacted forest owners by ordinary mail presenting the purpose of the survey and addressing the respondents to a website where they could compile the questionnaire. An example of how a web-based choice exercise looks can be seen in FIGURE 12. The Atlantic sample included 308 respondents (response rate 32.6%). The Boreal case study focussed on the private forest owners in the Kuusamo municipality, who owned at least 7 hectare of forest. The survey was done by ordinary mail and the final number of completed responses was 471 (response rate 35.3%). In the Mountainous case study, overall 200 forest owners from the Veneto region were face to face interviewed by trained interviewers. The French pilot studied focussed on five administrative regions scattered across France: Lorraine in the Northeast, Pays de la Loire in the North-west, Bourgogne and Auvergne in the centre, and Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur in the south. The survey was carried out by ordinary mail. Overall, 590 questionnaires were returned (response rate 3.9%). The Amazon case study applied semi-structured questionnaires at the village and farm-household level, covering approximately 30% of the population of the two studied intervention areas: the protected areas Juma and Uatuma. Overall, 340 individuals were surveyed. The Central European case study – in addition to the survey carried out in framework of POLFOREX as described in D3.2 – included an experimental study testing the mechanisms of selecting privately owned forest areas that would provide ecosystem services. The analysis from Germany contained interesting aspects related to the supply side and the interaction between forest owners and the forest owner cooperatives. As far as the German study is regarded, 209 forest owners answered the questionnaire distributed among members of forest owners’ cooperatives.
[Insert Figure 12 around here]
As far as the methodologies were concerned, there were also differences across case studies. For instance, the Atlantic and Boreal case studies implemented a choice experiment analysis. The Boreal case study considered also an engineering approach as did the Atlantic case study – results of the latter was published already in 2013 in Forestry. The Amazon case study used the contingent valuation method.
The first major set results from the empirical data surveys are reported in deliverable “D3.3 studies on the application of cost of provision assessments and the relations to the main findings from the forest owner surveys”, which constitutes a massive 205 pages of results applying various methods for cost of provision assessments and presenting the major results of the forest owner surveys. In particular, the deliverable aimed to summarize the experiences from case studies on the application of cost of provision assessment methods. Furthermore, they presented and compared the main findings from cost of provision assessments based on the case studies’ forest owner surveys (including the estimates of the willingness to accept and its variation across cases, across the different geographical, judicial, social, and behavioural boundaries and participation patterns among the forest owners active or not in policy schemes targeting forest ecosystem services). Moreover, the results and the methods presented represent a form of toolbox where the different methods for costs assessment have been tested. The purpose was to offer to other researchers and practitioners a starting point to make regional and context-specific costs assessments in the future.
The main results presented in the D3.3 studies on the application of cost of provision assessments and the relations to the main findings from the forest owner surveys can be summarized as follows. Firstly, several methodologies were available to estimate the cost of provision of forest externalities. Methodologies and results differed across qualitative and quantitative surveys, as well as across analysis focusing on objective costs or perceived costs. For instance, in the Boreal case, the perceived costs as estimated using stated preference data resulted in measures up to ten times higher than the estimates obtained applying an engineering approach to cost of provision assessments. This is in stark contrast to the results of the Atlantic survey, where stated preference estimates of forest owners’ cost of provision perception were much closer to, in some cases even below, the corresponding cost of provision assessments obtained using engineering approaches. The reported results also reflect that the choice of the methodology to estimate costs of provision of environmental services was strongly influenced by several factors specific to each case study areas context. One of the most crucial factors concerned to respondent and hence survey data’s availability and quality, especially for individual level data. Asking for key information on forest owners such as income, timber revenues, as well as management and operational costs generally often resulted in a high rate of non-responses restricting the analysis. A second main limitation was the scarcity of data directly linked to environmental services. The level of externality provision could only be quantified indirectly by measuring management actions. Finally, the variety of contexts and the applied methods narrowed the possibilities of estimate cost comparisons between different case studies, yet it allowed for illustrating how different contexts can call for different approaches and measures.
Below, we draw forward a few examples of the many specific results reported in the 205 pages long deliverable. Looking across all results obtained we find considerable variation in the form and the content of results. This was brought about by the different priorities and perspectives specific to the different contexts in the case studies, which must be reflected in the setting up of the research objectives at the case study level. Even though similar externalities were considered in the case studies’ surveys, often they were not directly comparable due to differences in the relevant management actions related to a specific externality in a specific forest ecosystem context.
To illustrate, we draw forward the examples of the Boreal and Atlantic case study (see the TABLE 2, which contains intermediate results from the analyses. The final results are currently under revision for publication in well-reputed journals like Ecological Economics). The two applications of choice experiments (perceived costs) are not directly comparable. However, we find that in the Atlantic study the demand for compensation was high when it concerned increased public access to forests, whereas in the Boreal study, increasing the length of hiking and skiing routes did not have a significant effect on the demand for compensation. It should be mentioned that the Boreal case dealt with increasing length of (existing) routes in the forest, whereas the Atlantic case dealt with allowing a new type of access, namely access outside established road and paths. In both cases, restrictions on harvest (Atlantic: set aside an area as untouched forest; Boreal: no harvesting at all) were considered as costly restrictions. Generally, it emerged that the results depended on the design of the contract and that the compensation required by a forest owner to accept a contract increased with number of constraints included in the contracts.
[Insert Table 2 around here]
Moreover, estimated costs differed also within case study according to the methods used. For instance, in the Boreal case, the order of magnitude of the perceived costs per year calculated from the choice experiment data set was at least 10 times larger than the one obtained by the engineering cost method. Especially, the middle scenario result from the choice method gave an annual cost of provision for recreational services of 310.2 €/ha/year, almost 10 times the highest income loss computed with the second methodology (30.8 €/ha/year, with 4% discount rate). In France, using a heuristic method the estimated income loss was ranging approximately from 11 to 26 €/ha/year, but it included all types of amenities (preliminary result).
In the Central European case a slightly different methodological approach was taken, in which forest owners were asked if they would accept or not to undertake a specific set of actions targeting e.g. biodiversity protection or recreation, given a pre-set level of compensation. TABLE 3 illustrates the frequency with which forest owners expected to agree to enter such a contract. As is evident, very few forest owners would accept such contracts at the low end of compensations, and even at the high end of the range applied here, a significant minority of land owners would still refuse a contract offer.
[INSERT TABLE 3 AROUND HERE]
The results presented in D3.3 are being further refined in several forthcoming scientific publications. Several scientific papers are already under publications and many more are expected to be published either comparing different methods for cost assessment, or identifying the main factors influencing costs in the different CSP, both at the national and cross country levels. It is planned to carry out cross-case-study analysis related, for instance, to the determinants of the forest owners’ objectives across Europe or to the estimation and comparison of cost functions of amenities provision. These cross-case studies will shed more light on the spatial dimension of cost of provision of forest externalities at the European level. Dissemination papers targeting non-scientific readers are being written and the results have already contributed to various national policy processes. We believe that presenting the results both in scientific journal and in more popularized recipients will facilitate the dissemination process compared to the standard deliverable, since the contents and the language as well as the size are going to be tailor made to the reader.
Nevertheless given the large size of D3.3 and other deliverables of NEWFOREX, it was decided to have the deliverable following Task 3.5 to be in the form of a series of practice and policy oriented chapters outlining the learning points derived from the work in work package 3 “Developing methods for cost of provision assessments”. These will form an important part of the second volume in the ‘What Can Science Tell Us?’ series coming out of the NEWFOREX project. This will be printed in 2014, and is currently under copy editing.
The second volume in the book series “What Can Science tell us?” is focusing on the assessments of cost of provision together with the design and implementation of economic instruments, responding to two main questions: What are the cost components? And what is the appropriate choice of methods to capture partial or total costs? Concerning cost of provision, the contributions from work package 3 are structured into five chapters. First the needs to know costs of provision and the relations to economic instruments are discussed before giving more details in the following chapters. Almost all scientific partners in NEWFOREX participated in this effort.
The second chapter addresses the quantification and the identification of forest management measures to ensure the ecosystem service provision. The quantification of the provision of ecosystem services is really a challenging task as it forces us to choose the relevant indicators to insure the implementation of a given policy. To avoid explicitly dealing with the high costs of output measures or long time span between implementation of a provision measure and the outcome, many measures of ecosystem service provision is based on management actions, taking a baseline assessment (or “Business as usual” or no intervention) and evaluating identified management actions up against the BAU. These management actions have impacts on the provision of one or more ecosystem services and the issue addressed by cost of provision analysis is to identify the most cost-effective measure. Examples of actions are given for water, biodiversity, carbon and recreational services.
The third chapter underlines the necessity to look at private forest owners’ motivations and attitudes in the provision of ecosystem services as they determine the success of ecosystem service supply. Forest owners are not only in the categories of profit maximizers but also in the population of utility-maximizers, being influenced by their cultural environment. Forest owners can bear high opportunity costs in case of large divergence between their own interest and social one. It seems that ecosystem service like biodiversity conservation or landscape beauty tends to be perceived in the same way by forest owners and society. In that case, economic incentives are not as necessary to overcome higher costs and difficulties as when produce some specific interest either to forest owners (timber production, forest roads building…) or to society (public access, water quality…). Sometimes, non-economic tools like education or cooperation can increase the probability to implement new management actions favoring ecosystem services. The different concepts are very suitable for conceptual outlining of the conflicts or lack of same in specific contexts and are depicted in FIGURE 13.
[INSERT FIGURE 13 AROUND HERE]
In the fourth chapter, costs of provision are analyzed according to their components. The total costs of providing environmental services comprise direct costs, easily observable, and indirect costs that are more difficult to quantify. The direct costs includes all the expenses that can directly linked to the management action put in place for the provision of a specific environmental service, including both operational costs and investment costs. The three main indirect costs components are the opportunity costs, the transaction costs and the feedback costs. The opportunity cost represents the benefits from the most profitable feasible management alternative that the forest manager had to forgo to enhance the provision of a specific environmental service. Transaction costs comprise all the expenses linked to research and information, negotiation, and monitoring, in all the cases in which the provision of environmental services is implemented through public policies or coordination activities among forest owners. Feedback costs refer to the economic impacts of an enhance provision of a specific environmental service on other environmental services or on other land uses. Furthermore, it is important to distinguish between private and social costs of provision. The quantification of the former is important for accurately implement market based instruments: in this regard, it is important to account for the individual perception of private costs and the dynamic structure of the problem.
The last chapters contributed by this work package are a set of methodological chapters giving for each approach some illustrations and results from our case studies. Two main quantitative approaches are considered. Engineering approaches provide estimated opportunity costs for forest management aimed to enhance environmental services, using stand-level calculations of loss in net present value. Behavioural approaches focus on the forest owners’ decision process and perceived costs. This methodology has been applied to assess the costs of providing enhanced landscape values in Finland and enhanced biodiversity in Denmark. The quantitative behavioural approaches discussed here focus on one side on revealed cost assessment based on estimation of a cost function and on stated cost assessment based on choice experiments on the other side.
The engineering approach is illustrated with two different case studies based on cost estimates from managed forests in Finland and Denmark. These case studies are carried out by using computational, objective methods, at the stand-level estimating the opportunity costs of implementing specific management changes which enhance ecosystem services from the forest. The opportunity costs are represented by the difference in the net present value (NPV) between the adjusted management schedule enhancing the forest’s suitability for recreation and a conventional management regime (focusing solely on timber production). In the case of the Ruka-Kuusamo area for the calculation of opportunity costs for each stand relevant for landscape, two different scenarios were projected by Motti stand simulator. First, business-as-usual (BAU) management in which the stand was managed according to the prevailing silvicultural recommendations by the Finnish authorities and second, an adjusted management regime in which the stand was left unmanaged for the next 10 years. The average income loss/ha/10 years with two different discount rates (3% and 4%) are respectively 27 € and 143€, not leading to any substantial financial losses. In Denmark, the cost was related to conservation initiatives in link with Natura 2000 policies. The cost of a specific management restriction may be estimated based on the change in the net present value of the area before and after the restriction is imposed. The costs of a specific management change have been calculated as the difference in capital value between two scenarios, with and without the management change. The greatest loss of implementing the restriction (natural regeneration with reduced soil preparation and a prolonged harvest period for the overstorey ) arises when the age of the beech stand is close to the rotation age (here 110 years), since the additional costs of leaving the overstory longer and e.g. replant patches will be imminent. For lower site qualities, the restriction in regeneration method implies smaller losses. In FIGURE 14 we show an example of the opportunity cost of management changes calculated for the Danish case.
[INSERT FIGURE 14 AROUND HERE]
The cost function approach aims to assess the direct cost of the provision of environmental services based on stated cost information. The cost function approach has solid microeconomic foundations and it is derived from the firm theory. This methodology has been improved in order to account for the provision of environmental services in particular for the agricultural sector. The cost function approach aiming to estimate the costs of the joint production of environmental services has not yet been applied in the forestry sector. Within the NEWFOREX project, a first attempt to estimate a forest management cost function was put in place using the information on the annual gross management costs and the annual timber production provided by 133 Danish forest owners. It was assumed that the forest owners produced two outputs from the forest: timber and biodiversity protection. Estimation results suggested that setting aside a certain share for biodiversity protection has a significant positive influence on the gross management cost. Moreover, the estimated coefficient can be directly interpreted as the cost elasticity respect to biodiversity. It emerged that by increasing the size of the protected area by 1% would increase the cost by less than 0.21%, suggesting the presence of economies of scale regarding biodiversity protection. But the cost approach relies intensely on data availability and data quality. This is at present limiting its applicability in forest sector.
The stated cost of provision approach is the topic of a chapter on its own. The stated cost approach is useful for assessing the total costs as experienced by the forest owner. The approach can gather direct, opportunity and transaction costs (for the owner) – adjusted for the potential benefits experienced by the forest owner. A significant strength is that new policies or proposed management changes can be evaluated before they are implemented in practice. A weakness of the method is the hypothetical setting it relies on. This may induce strategic answering, meaning in this case that landowners might overstate their compensation requirements. As a means of integrating the interests of tourism entrepreneurs and forest owners, the Landscape and Recreational Values Trading (LRVT) scheme has been proposed in Finland. Private forest owners would make temporary, voluntary contracts whereby they commit to enhance the provision of landscape and recreational values in their forests for a monetary compensation. The expected costs are important information regarding the viability of the LRVT scheme. A survey data of 471 forest owners in the Ruka-Kuusamo tourism area has been done. The choice experiment approach was applied to assess the minimum compensation that the forest owners would be willing to accept for a temporary LRVT contract. Their compensation claims can be seen as the stated costs of provision of enhanced landscape and recreational amenities. To accept a conditional contract, the forest owners claim a compensation of 98.6 €/hectare/year irrespective of any specific management changes required. This constant ‘threshold value’ reflects the forest owner’s perceived cost of moving away from the current situation. A compensation of 30.0 €/hectare/year would be claimed if no regeneration cuttings were allowed, and expectedly a larger one (103.9 €/ha/year) would be required if no harvesting were allowed at all. Considering the coverage of the restrictions, the compensation claim increases by 5.4 €/percentage point/year. Accordingly, the compensation for restrictions affecting 5% of the forest area, for example, should be 27.0 €/ha/year.
A similar Choice experiment study was made to evaluate Danish forest owners’ demand for compensation for specific management changes on their property and related to NATURA 2000 policies. The management changes investigated here range from small-scale changes like leaving a number of trees per hectare for natural decay to comprehensive changes like setting aside areas as untouched forest, change in tree species from coniferous to broadleaved trees and increased access rights for the general public. The forest owners would select the alternative they preferred from two alternative contracts and the current situation with existing management regulations. A survey of 283 Danish forest owners was used to estimate how much the owners require in compensation if they were to accept a PES scheme involving the specified management changes. Similar to the Finnish case above, the Danish forest owners have a significant compensation claim (43.0 €/ha/year) for accepting a PES contract per se. As the compensation for each specific management change is added to this threshold value, the compensation claim for a contract which only entails a 75% broadleaved restriction becomes 43.0 + 7.0 = 51.0 €/ha/year.
On average, the forest owners are most reluctant to accept a PES scheme involving increased access for the general public in their forests. If they are to allow the public access on foot up to 15 meters from roads and paths, they require 17.2 €/ha/year in compensation, and 34.4 €/ha/year to allow access on foot for the public everywhere on the forest floor. Moreover, 69% of the respondents stated that even if they received an appropriate amount of compensation they would still not be willing to allow access everywhere in the forest.
It is worth noting that there is significant heterogeneity in forest owners’ preferences for all of the ecosystem services. Part of this is linked to the fact that many forest owners already provide some of these services on their property on a voluntary basis. This is the case especially in Finland, where access for traditional recreational use of the nature is an everyman’s right, but also in Denmark with a different recreational tradition. This means that part of the forest owners may accept a contract of the provision of these services without experiencing major additional costs.
A final activity completed in the third period is the application of an economic experiment addressing procurement actions and their potential use in furthering cooperation among land owners. Procurement auctions are one of several policy tools available to incentivise the provision of ecosystem services and biodiversity conservation. Successful biodiversity conservation often requires a landscape-scale approach and the spatial coordination of participation, for example in the creation of wildlife corridors. We conducted an experiment on procurement auctions for ecosystem services to explore two features of procurement auctions in a forest landscape—the pricing mechanism (uniform vs. discriminatory) and availability of communication (chat) between potential sellers. We modify the experimental design developed by Reeson and co-workers in 2011 by introducing uncertainty (and hence heterogeneity) in the production value of forest sites as well as an automated, endogenous stopping rule. We find that discriminatory pricing yields to greater environmental benefits per government dollar spent, chiefly due to better coordination between owners of adjacent plots. Chat also facilitates such coordination but also seems to encourage collusion in sustaining high prices for the most environmentally attractive plots. These two effects offset each other, making chat neutral from the viewpoint of maximizing environmental effect per dollar spent.
The main research efforts and results obtained in Work package 4: Assessing cost-efficient market-based methods
The first task of this work package was to review existing economic instruments and other policy measures in use in case studies for enhancing the provision of forest ecosystem services – directly or indirectly. The focus was furthermore to provide quite detailed information about the formal experiences related to their implementation in the case study countries or regions. For this purpose, the work package leading team (from CTFC) developed a factsheet form for eliciting the information on the basic features of the policy instruments, the stakeholders involved in their development and implementation, as well as basic information on the experiences related to the implementation of the mechanisms. Case study partners were asked to fill in these factsheet forms with the information on the most relevant policy instruments in the case studies. In addition, information about other policy instruments was collected in a more descriptive form. All this information was recompiled in the deliverable D4.1 “Report on the currently applied market-based methods in the case studies”. Moreover, a literature review of the theoretical strengths and limitations of different economic instruments and other policy instruments, together with the empirical insights from their implementation in other related sectors was conducted and included in the deliverable D4.1.
In the Atlantic urbanized case study (run by UCPH), the input to D4.1 was compiled with a broad and inclusive approach, but also with a focus on the features special to this case. These included the recreational services, which are in high focus in the urbanised regions, and where distributions of property rights are key to the divide between marketed and non-marketed services, e.g. horseback riding vs. MTB-cycling. Another feature special to the case is the existence of instruments and initiatives oriented towards the protection of groundwater as an important drinking water resource.
In the Boreal case study (run by METLA), the focus was on the market-based mechanisms related to recreational and nature value trading, focusing thus on recreation and biodiversity. Overall, man-months resources were used as expected.
In the Central European case study (run by UWAR), the focus was on the instruments applicable on the territory of the Bialowieza National Park. The case study country is special in the sense that a dominant part of the Polish forest area is owned by the state, which greatly reduces the variation in policy instruments as well as the spatial impacts of those instruments actually directed towards private land and forest owners.
In the Mediterranean case study (run by CTFC), the focus was on the public subsidies and grants for sustainable forest management, grants to forest reserves and grants to forest defence groups, all aiming to enhance biodiversity and diminish the risks of forest fires. Other mechanisms analysed included NGO-led land stewardship activities, which are a novel experience in the region. Due to the lack of reliable primary information, the CTFC team had conducted targeted face-to-face interviews with the stakeholders involved in the design and/or implementation of these mechanisms.
In the Mountainous case study in northern Italy (run by UNIPD), the focus was on the instruments related to the regulation of mushroom picking activities, and also to water quality. These instruments concerned the balance between alpine and mountainous meadows and grazing lands and the management of mountain forests, which in many cases are either owned on community basis or by numerous small-holder private forest owners.
In the Tropical case study (run by CIFOR), the focus was on the Bolsa Floresta program, which is a PES like instrument implemented by NGOs with the support of the Brazilian state. The program seeks to reduce the negative impact of rural settlements in the Amazon, notable the forest degradation and deforestation impacts. It furthermore aims to establish other sources of income for the rural population than those arising from deforestation based agricultural practices.
In addition to these contributions, the University of Hamburg created a database on questionnaires out of the field of marketing of environmental and recreational services of forests and economic environmental assessment. The database served project-internally as a tool to develop questionnaires and is a part of the project output available from the consortium.
Though the major empirical surveys targeting forest owners and citizens were focusing in particular on the values and cost of provision of forest ecosystem services, NEWFOREX researchers also took the opportunity to develop a targeted survey instrument component eliciting information on the perceptions of the citizens (potential buyers) and forest owners (providers) regarding various market-based methods and their implementation. These components formed an integral part of valuation surveys conducted in work package 2 and of forest owner surveys conducted in work package 3. The components are documented in D4.2 “Documentation and description of the survey components on market-based methods”.
Another major result produced in work package 4 is a coherent assessment of the selected policy instruments across case studies, notably the socalled market-based instruments. For this purpose, NEWFOREX’s researchers developed an assessment framework, based on the institutional analysis and development framework elaborated by E. Ostrom, which assumes that the performance of a specific market-based mechanism depends on (i) the ecosystem service in question; (ii) the actors affected by the instrument, or those involved in its implementation and design; (iii) the interplay between this mechanism and other related policies and instruments; and (iv) the instrument design.
This framework was applied to the selected market-based mechanisms all case studies except for the Polish one (due to the specifics of the mechanisms existing in Poland). It turned out that this assessment framework was able to reveal tensions and bottlenecks in the implementation of the seemingly successful market-based mechanisms (e.g. mature forest reserves in Catalonia), indicating possible avenues for their improvement. The results of this research effort were reported in D4.3: “Report on analyses of case study experiences and survey results regarding market-based methods”.
Most recently, the work in this task focused on cross-country institutional analysis of the mechanisms, and the preliminary results of such assessment have been presented at the Final Newforex Conference in Uppsala in May 2014. The scientific publication on this topic is currently under preparation. The most important findings of these analyses are summarised below:
- Actors’ networking capacity, consensus regarding the problem and its solution, and concordance of values are important determinants of the success of policy mechanisms and schemes.
- Existing institutions (both at local and at an international level) on the one hand provide support for the new schemes, but on the other hand can also constrain their design and limit their applicability and implementation potential. Lack of integration with other sectoral policies creates tensions and weakens the performance of some schemes.
- The environmental effectiveness, economic efficiency and additionality of many schemes are highly questionable, although in some cases can be solvable by redesigning the schemes.
- Despite these serious shortcomings, in overall the experience with the schemes is perceived as positive with space for improvements. Yet, coordinated effort among actors at different levels is required to increase the overall governance quality of the incentive schemes.
The fourth research endeavour of work package 4 “Assessing cost-efficient market-based methods” build upon the data obtained through the valuation survey and forest owner surveys. As such, it consists of two parts: firstly, of the part concerning the attitudes of potential forest service buyers (or beneficiaries) towards the issue of who should pay for the improved provision of forest goods and services (forming part of the valuation survey); and secondly, of the part concerning forest owners’ attitudes towards and experiences with market-based mechanisms existing in the case study regions.
The first part dealing with the buyer’s opinions was implemented fully in all the case studies except for Brazil (where the valuation survey was not implemented), and a comparative analysis of opinions on the preferred methods for paying for the common externalities (e.g. biodiversity, carbon sequestration, recreation) had been performed and is included in the above mentioned deliverable. One of the major results of this opinion survey is that in general the respondents in all the analysed countries prefer that the government, i.e. the public essentially, bears the additional costs associated with improvements in ecosystem service provision, regardless of which ecosystem services are in question. The results are even more reinforced when the ecosystem services in focus are global and of a public good nature (e.g. carbon sequestration). On the contrary, for services that are rather local with a strong use value (e.g. recreation), people tend to better accept that forest visitors themselves would contribute to their enhancement. The two FIGUREs 15 and 16 below exemplify these results.
[Insert Figures 15 and 16 around here]
The second part dealing with the forest owners’ perceptions was delayed due to an overall delay in the implementation of forest owners’ survey, and has commenced in early 2013. The questions addressed to forest owners in different case studies covered the issues related to the motivations for forest ownership/management, knowledge of market-based mechanisms, previous experience with the mechanisms, as well as issues related to mechanism design (contract length, promoted activities, requested compensation etc.). The most significant results of these sections are the following:
- Participation in public schemes is larger than in private or public-private ones, but this may be explained by the fact that the public schemes predominate in all the analysed countries;
- Participation rates tend to be larger if the schemes address more than a single objective, mainly combining timber (or traditional production) with the enhancement of other ecosystem services;
- Participation rates in activity-enhancing schemes (implying active forest management) tend to be higher than in activity-capping schemes (e.g. imposing limits on forest exploitation).
As in the other work packages the fifth and final task was to provide unifying guidelines for policymakers for choosing and designing market-based methods. This task is the final, significant and unifying deliverable of this work package. The large demand for dissemination already experienced in NEWFOREX spurred the decision to make a joint publication with the results of all the work packages as part of EFI’s “What Science Can Tell Us?” series. In this respect, the WP4 contributed with the following sections corresponding to Volume II of the publication:
- Why do we need to know the costs of provision and the relation to economic instruments (A. Stegner, I. Prokofieva, P. Gatto, D. Pettenella)
- Quantification of environmental services and measures of provision (S. Wunder, J. Adildtrup, B.J. Thorsen)
- The role of private forest owner motivations and attitudes in the provision of ecosystem services (E. Gorriz, S.E. Vedel, A. Stegner)
- From traditional regulation to economic instruments (I. Prokofieva, S. Wunder)
- MBI implementation: shifting the role and power from the public to the private sector through the voluntary instruments (D. Pettenella)
- Novel contractual approaches and tool design (S. Wunder, I. Prokofieva)
- Examples of novel instruments for enhancing forest ecosystem services (I. Prokofieva)
- Private forest owners’ perspectives and preferences on policy instruments for the provision of ecosystem services. Case study examples (E. Gorriz, F. Schubert, U. Mantau)
- Public’s view on who should pay for the provision of ecosystem services (R. Mavsar, I. Prokofieva)
The most important messages that can be extracted based on WP4 results are summarised below:
- In view of the majority of public, government should be responsible for covering the increased costs of enhanced provision of ecosystem services. Nevertheless, a share of population accepts that some ecosystem services – especially locally important ones and those providing direct benefits to the people (such as recreation, or landscape aesthetics) – can be covered by forest visitors.
- Important preconditions for forest owners’ participation in policy instruments are: alignment with values and forest management orientation of landowners, feasibility of policy instrument implementation on the targeted lands, information on targeted owners, owner’s trust in intermediaries and coordination with local authorities and foresters, flexible contracts and practical support by responsible forest agents, acceptable cost-sharing and workload from forest owner’s point of view, experience of forest owners from the participation in other policy instruments. The more of these preconditions are filled, the higher is the expected participation rate.
- Existing policies and organisational structures condition the design and the success of policy instruments. The design of the schemes is frequently conditioned by the nature of the actors involved in their development and implementation; as well as the relations between the implementation bodies and main affected stakeholders.
- The existence of fundamentally conflicting policy goals, as well as tensions between different branches of public bodies also hinders the success of some of the schemes. This often calls for negotiated and consensus-based solutions with the involvement of all affected parties. In some cases, it may imply that the public bodies need to give up part of their competences to private agents (e.g. those related to the implementation or supervision of the mechanisms), or to engage private agents in funding ecosystem services related initiatives.
Potential Impact:
This part of the report falls in several chapters.
- First we briefly summarize some of the overall highlights of the NEWFOREX project in relation to the potential wider societal impacts and notably impacts and highlights of relevance for policies
- We then briefly outline the interaction with society in the actual undertaking of the project, e.g. the meetings with stakeholders and end-users
- Finally we outline how we have worked and continue to work with the dissemination of results to the broader public and special interest end users.
We note that below a number of summary statistics are given on gender issues, junior vs senior researcher involvement, educational relevance, etc. etc. We refer the reader also to these data. Furthermore, as part of the final reporting, a number of deliverables in the projects work package 5 “Dissemination and stakeholder interaction” have been submitted which includes deliverables outlining stakeholder involvement, dissemination activities, societal impacts, the final conferences and so on. All of those are together much more comprehensive than the below.
The overall societal impacts targeted by NEWFOREX
The forests of Europe provide numerous goods and services for the benefit of Europe’s citizens. Wood is the most prominent, but game, cork, mushrooms and greenery are also traded in significant volumes. However, many forest goods and especially services are not marketed, but still of great value. Forests play an essential role in water resource management from local to regional levels. Forests are crucial for the preservation of biodiversity; many threatened terrestrial species depend upon forest habitats for survival. Forests’ ability to sequester and store carbon is crucial to the mitigation of climate change. In addition, forests form an important part of landscape amenities, cultural heritage, and are of great recreational value.
Since the 1990s, the term ‘ecosystem services’ has been used as an umbrella term for various goods, services and functions. A much cited study by Costanza and his co-workers, published in 1997 in Nature attempted to assess the total value of the world’s ecosystem services and natural capital; the number found in fact exceeded the total gross national product of the world. Yet, the study has been widely criticized for putting an absolute value on something that cannot be fully substituted, thus extrapolating economic valuation beyond its meaning: a tool for evaluating well-defined choices of ecosystem management and protection. Hence, the single bottom-line number still leaves important questions unanswered:
- How far can ecosystems be exploited, modified, and degraded before net welfare losses are registered?
- Can societies gain from enhancing the protection of biodiversity and habitats and the provision of ecosystem services?
- What methods and policy measures may be used for determining and pursuing the answer to these questions?
Several ongoing international agreements and policy developments relate to the latter question, including the Convention on Biodiversity and the newly started Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (www.ipbes.net) , the European Union supported work on The Economics of Ecosystem and Biodiversity (TEEB) leading to the current EU MAES process, focusing on the mapping and assessment of ecosystem services. In direct and indirect ways also the post-Kyoto Conference of the Parties (COP) process has address also this question, e.g. in the discussions of REDD+.
To pursue the answers to these more crucial questions, science needs to provide several pieces of knowledge needed, which relate to underlying policy relevant questions. Based on new analyses from a larger EU-project on forest ecosystem services, this and the accompanying volume provide new insights and examples needed to answer such questions:
What will be the value for society of a specific enhancement of ecosystem service provisions in a specific spatial context, and how are benefits distributed? This calls for the further development of environmental valuation techniques and analyses that allow us to estimate also values of non-marketed ecosystem services. Many of these are best characterized as externalities, in the sense that the positive or negative impacts determined by the landowners’ management decisions fall on other off-land agents.
What will be the costs of enhancing ecosystem provisions in specific contexts? Enhancing the provision of e.g. recreational opportunities may come at costs in terms of lost forest production but also costs relevant for society in terms of reductions in other ecosystem services. These needs to be assessed and again the variation across different contexts and owner types are of interest for policy makers.
What will be suitable policy instruments for society to balance costs and benefits in the best possible way in each context? To address the overall issue of reaching a sustainable balance between use and protection of our natural ecosystems, we need intelligent choice of policies. We present new insights into the view that both the public and forest owners have on the design of such instruments.
We highlight here below some of the many new insights and lessons learned from our research, that provide new, improved and context relevant answers to the overall questions.
Quantification of and goal setting for non-marketed forest ecosystem services
- Any policy targeting ecosystem service should have clear and measurable goals for ecosystem service quantities at least for two reasons: To ensure that what is being delivered is what has value and to allow society to monitor the efficiency of policies
- In goal setting, it should be remembered that any policy will likely affect several ecosystem service and therefore multiple policies may be needed for balance
The valuation of non-marketed forest ecosystem services (ES)
- Using improved methods we add documentation for the impressive value of non-marketed forest ecosystem services – yet we argue that to make valuation studies policy relevant, focus should turn away from total economic values to value distributions
- Environmental policies have distributional effects: Some people win more than others – and others again may lose. We demonstrate with case studies that these differences are not trivial and likely to be highly policy relevant
- Identifying who values ecosystem service how much can inform policy instrument design in order to gain legitimacy and direct costs to where values are harvested.
The cost of provision for non-marketed forest ecosystem services (ES)
- We demonstrate the benefits of applying multiple methods for assessing the cost of provision – capital budgeting techniques widely used can be further informed by methods taking forest owner perceptions into account
- We document that European private forest owners are generally positive towards the provision of ecosystem service from their forests
- We document how differences in forest owner objectives spill over over to major heterogeneity their perceived cost of providing further ecosystem services. This opens up options for improved cost efficient policy designs
Economic Instruments non-marketed forest ecosystem services (ES)
- We demonstrate that many formal aspects of contract matter and that loss of decision right is costly, thus instruments should be designed to limit these where possible and carefully consider aspects like exit options, time frame etc
- We document that participation rates in voluntary economic instruments increase when transactions costs can be controlled, e.g. larger forest properties, higher educated and forest owners with experience from other instruments are more likely to enter a new instrument
- We document that forest extension companies can be instrumental in reducing transactions costs and stimulate participation from owners who face steep transaction costs
- We find that ecosystem service targeted instruments are more likely to attract forest owners if they are aligned with forest owner values – for example instruments requiring action (infrastructure, establishing new nature, restoration) are seen more positive than instruments requiring inaction (passive conservation) – policy instruments can be designed to benefit from this
- We document that the majority citizens of several European countries support the view that cost of ecosystem service provision should in general be carried by society or identified users
Interacting with stakeholders within the project life
Substantial effort has been done by all project partners to engage a wide range of stakeholders in the project's activities. In respect of the nature of the work, numerous stakeholders in the case study regions participated in the definition of case studies' objectives and the development of corresponding surveys, as well as in the process of collecting policy information and examples and interpreting results. The project partners CEPF and EUSTAFOR also represent key stakeholders and have been involved in project design in several project meetings and provided comments on research plans and implementation in the first reporting period.
Following the data collection and during initial analyses, particular attention was given to present preliminary project results to relevant stakeholders at regional and pan-European level, and to discuss with them the adequate format of presenting the final project findings and recommendations. The findings were later used to develop the form and content of the NEWFOREX book volumes in the “What Can Science Tell Us?” series. A successful high-level stakeholder board meeting was held in Copenhagen and numerous other stakeholder outreach activities undertaken at a broader European level. The coordinator presented ongoing and results at international high-level meetings in Bruxelles (e.g. the ThinkForest event at the European Parliament) and for European associations general meetings, e.g. the CEPF annual meetings.
In the last project period, the main objective was to further strengthen the involvement of stakeholders and the dissemination activities at all levels (regional, national, pan-European). However, the focus of the stakeholder involvement shifted towards the presentation and discussion of the project’s main findings and recommendations. Particular attention was given to equally address the needs of all relevant stakeholder groups. NEWFOREX researchers have been presenting their work in numerous national policy processes in the last period as documented in the list of dissemination activities below in the final report format.
We also undertook and internal training session focusing on the art of scientific writing and efficient dissemination of research, which was held in the 9th project meeting in Barcelona. Finally, we co-arranged the 48th Biennial Conference of the Scandinavian Society of Forest Economics in Uppsala in May 2014 and used this as a set-up for the final scientific conference of NEWFOREX. Following the conclusion of the project, several papers and presentations was also given at the World Conference on Environmental and Resource Economics in Istanbul, Turkey, 29th June, 2nd July 2014.
The results of NEWFOREX have been and still are being disseminated in numerous presentations for professionals, forest owners, policy makers and in written form in policy and scientific papers. FIGURE 5 shows our approximate data on how different audiences have been targeted in our efforts to reach out towards various end user groups. Researchers are of course a major group, in particular as part of the effort to ensure and validate the quality of our results. However, decision makers and professionals working with and within the different policy processes and forest sector organizations together constitute the dominant group of our audience. Forest owners are also a visible group, but given the meta-policy target of our research it is not surprising that they are not more prominent. However, looking ahead we see more dissemination results focusing on forest owners when presenting the results of cost of provision assessments for their consideration.
[Insert Figure 5 around here]
Dissemination
The main objective of the dissemination plans that NEWFOREX has pursued has been to ensure that relevant target groups and end users will benefit the most from project’s outputs. Simultaneously, this should also guarantee the highest impact of the results achieved in the frame of the NEWFOREX project. Work package 5 of NEWFOREX was specifically designated to ensure a focus on stakeholder involvement and dissemination in several forms. All consortium members, and in particular those responsible for the implementation of the case studies, had a key role in dissemination and interaction with stakeholders and media at the regional level. Furthermore, EUSTAFOR and CEPF were responsible for the dissemination of the project’s outputs through their member networks also in countries, which are not represented within the NEWFOREX consortium. To that end NEWFOREX topics have several times been presented in the organization’s newsletters and been presented at relevant meetings in the organization’s networks.
Target audiences
To adequately plan the dissemination activities, first the main target groups and end users were identified. Once the groups had been identified, for each of them its specific requirements, background, and fields of interest and expectations concerning the outputs of NEWFOREX was evaluated, recognizing that there is no “one-fits-all” solution, in terms of dissemination modes. To select an appropriate mix of dissemination modes and efforts, a dialogue with several of the different target groups was established in the early stage of the project. Some of the main target audiences identified in the NEWFOREX project were:
• Forest practitioners
• Forest owners
• Regional, National and European level policy makers
• Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs)
• Scientific community
Considering the wide range of identified target audiences, their specific characteristics and needs, the Dissemination plan should ensure that the appropriate and most effective methods of dissemination will be used for each of them. This implies that the project results should be synthesised and presented in different formats targeted to specific needs of the end user groups. In this sense, the project language (English) may be a barrier to disseminate project results, especially to forest practitioners and regional policy makers. Therefore, selected activities targeted at end-users in the case studies regions will also be undertaken in local languages.
Furthermore, the dissemination activities for different target groups should be made in a wording they are familiar with. To sum up, for each of the target audiences, the following questions should be considered by NEWFOREX researchers prior to dissemination activities:
• How can they benefit from NEWFOREX project?
• What are the dissemination means that should be employed to reach that particular audience?
Dissemination tools and channels
Targeted dissemination activities were applied in NEWFOREX, so that knowledge gathered in the project could be utilized in different ways, which would help achieving the highest possible impact of the project outcomes. Outputs were synthesised and presented in different formats, targeted to specific needs of the users. The dissemination activities included scientific and professional journal articles; policy briefs, informal briefings for national and EU policy makers and other key stakeholders, seminars and workshops.
In addition, the case study partners arranged and/or participated in series of workshops for and with forest owners, relevant policy-makers and staff members in relevant public agencies in the partners’ countries. At these workshops, project research plans, projects results were presented, discussed and put in a local context, using cases and issues of local relevance. The effect of this activity has been to bridge effectively the gap between science and actual policy-making, decision-makers, forest managers and users. In some countries like Finland, Germany and Denmark, we have already seen NEWFOREX knowledge play directly into national or regional policy processes.
The NEWFOREX website has been used as a window to discuss and present the NEWFOREX results, project related publications and other outputs, though with considerable delay due to lags in publication processes as well as deliverable acceptance processes. The dissemination of information through the project website included relevant news and information about milestones or products, and also about relevant policy developments at a European level or in the Member States when relevant. Lastly, the website also served to alert interested parties about the project’s progress, new developments and milestones, and provides downloadable intermediate and final project results. Visit statistics are available as:
• From July 2010 to May 2011 the website has had between 714 and 1093 visits every month with a total number of 10,202 visits for the entire existence of the website.
• From June 2011 to November 2012 the website has had between 1,230 and 3,094 visits every month with a total number of 35,820 visits for the entire existence of the website.
• From December 2012 to May 2014 the website has had between 650 and 6,910 visits per month with a total number of 30,695 visits in this period.
Finally, the last project meeting was combined with an open international science and stakeholder conference arranged together with the Scandinavian Society of Forest Economics (SSFE) in Uppsala, Sweden. Furthermore, immediately after the project ended, several researchers from NEWFOREX presented key findings of the project at the well-reputed World Conference on Environmental and Resource Economics in Istanbul Turkey. Several of the papers are coming out in proceedings, and many more in papers in different journals.
Targeting Policy makers
The NEWFOREX project aimed to provide policy makers information and improved understanding of the provision of forest externalities. Therefore, it is important that the NEWFOREX consortium establishing contacts to high level decision makers.
NEWFOREX dissemination efforts targeted European Parliament members, Commission officials and other key stakeholders in Brussels through the participation in several larger Bruxelles based events, workshops and seminar. Targeting the national policy makers, agencies and authorities responsible for implementing and designing national policies related to forests and rural development was pursued through national language publications, press releases and several participations in seminars and expert groups around national forest and environmental policies.
Scientific community
NEWFOREX also aimed to provide high quality contributions of interest for the scientific community, and the consortium members are already publishing and presenting various findings of the project in prominent, academically recognised and highly rated journals. This activity will continue for several years, we foresee, as the data gathered by NEWFOREX represents a massive pool of potential knowledge and insights.
Forest practitioners and owners
Publishing in professional journals has been and continue to be of particular importance to NEWFOREX in reaching forest practitioners and forest owners. Project partners are already and will continue to publish a number of popular articles in national professional journals, in their local languages. These journals include, e.g. the Danish ‘Skoven’, the Finnish ‘Metsälehti’, the German ‘Allgemeine Forst Zeitung’, the Spanish ‘Montes’, and the French journal ‘Revue Forestière Francaise’.
General audience
As scientific papers are being published, we find that the general press with a science interest will pick these up, following press releases, and publish popular articles in national or regional newspapers. Consortium partners having contacts to journalists have continuously been encouraged to utilize the contacts in order to raise awareness on the topic tackled by the NEWFOREX project.
Education field
Several NEWFOREX consortium partners are actively involved in education programmes at different universities. This has ensured that NEWFOREX results are being integrated into educational programmes, courses and seminars dealing with forest economics, environmental economics management, environmental policy and related subjects. It should be noted that a couple of consortium partners are involved or even coordinating the two EU-supported Erasmus Mundus MSc courses related to the sustainable use of forests around the world: the E.M. MSc in Sustainable Tropical Forestry coordinated by UCPH (http://www.sutrofor.net) and the E.M. MSc in Sustainable Forest and Nature Management also coordinated by UCPH (http://www.sufonama.net). These programmes each year involve 100-150 international top-level students, which may benefit quickly from progress made in NEWFOREX.
Already several sub-results are being used in MSc classes, but in particular we foresee that several chapters of the forthcoming ‘What Can Science Tell Us?’ volumes are of clear relevance and quite easily accessible for university and high school level introductory courses.
Dissemination Activities Report
In total the NEWFOREX consortium has conducted and is conducting 182 dissemination and publications activities within its project life and it the immediate months after, as describedin Deliverable D5.3 on Dissemination. Thus, the list below only include articles that were actually published within the project period, and not the many papers, book chapters etc., that are still in press or in stages of review and revision. Mostly these dissemination was in the form of presentations (63%) and publications (28%). FIGURE 6 shows a graph of the distribution of dissemination activities by type within and right after the project period. As would be expected the oral presentations dominate as communication with stakeholders and presentations of intermediate results at international and national conference has been the main dissemination activity in this phase. The number of publications is, however, already significant and is certain to have a lasting impact as the more than 50 papers get published and build the legacy of NEWFOREX. Many publications are just forthcoming and furthermore, two book volumes of policy oriented short chapters on specific aspects of forest ecosystem services are being printed in the fall of 2014. These are not in the current statistics
[Insert Figure 6 around here]
The activities were mainly conducted at the international (60%) and national level (27%), which reflects the cross-European and international relevance of the results.
[Insert Figure 17 around here]
FIGURE 5 shows our approximate data on how different audiences have been targeted in our efforts to reach out towards various end user groups. Researchers are of course a major group, in particular as part of the effort to ensure and validate the quality of our results. However, decision makers and professionals working with and within the different policy processes and forest sector organizations together constitute the dominant group of our audience. Forest owners are also a visible group, but given the meta-policy target of our research it is not surprising that they are not more prominent. However, looking ahead we see more dissemination results focusing on forest owners when presenting the results of cost of provision assessments for their consideration.
[Insert Figure 5 around here]
Future dissemination activities
The NEWFOREX project ended in May 2014. Nevertheless, it is expected that dissemination activities will continue. Also during this period the consortium members are committed to continue following common dissemination procedures (see Annex 1 of deliverable D5.3) which specify the dissemination procedure and sets the basic standards for co-authorship; where the later follow the internationally accepted Vancouver guidelines for co-authorship.
OPEN ACCESS actions: We aim to publish our research in well-reputed journals and books where we expect the highest scientific impact and audience. This is not always - or perhaps even rarely - in general open access journals. They are, however, usually all Romero green or yellow, and therefore we pursue a clear strategy of securing open access to papers by placing pre-prints and similar in open repositories like 'Researchgate.net'. We place them there, once the final paper is published and we make appropriate citations and links to the original paper, thereby acknowledging the final version in the Journal, yet allowing a broader readership and impact.
List of Websites:
www.newforex.org
