June 2000 - Under the Clean Development Mechanism, developing countries will be able to produce certified emissions reductions (CERs, sometimes called offsets) through projects that reduce greenhouse gas emissions below business-as-usual levels. The challenges of setting up offset markets are...

Although private forest use in Brazil has been regulated at least since the Forest Code of 1965, cumulative deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon reached 653,000 km2 by 2003 (INPE 2004). Much of this deforestation is illegal. In 1999, the State Foundation of the Environment (FEMA) in Mato Grosso...

Conservation of high-biodiversity tropical forests is sometimes justified on the basis of assumed hydrological benefits - in particular, the reduction of flooding hazards for downstream floodplain populations. However, the"far-field"link between deforestation and distant flooding has been...

A"forest-hydrology-poverty nexus"hypothesis asserts that deforestation in poor upland areas simultaneously threatens biodiversity and increases the incidence of flooding, sedimentation, and other damaging hydrological processes. The authors use rough heuristics to assess the applicability of...

Rural roads promote economic development but also facilitate deforestation. To explore the tradeoffs between development and environmental damage posed by road building, the authors develop and estimate a spatially explicit model of land use. This model takes into account location and land...

A tradable development rights (TDR) program focusing on biodiversity conservation faces a crucial problem defining which areas of habitat should be considered equivalent. Restricting the trading domain to a narrow area could boost the range of biodiversity conserved but could increase the...

Using census data from the Censo Agropecuario 1995-96, the authors map indicators of current land use, and agricultural productivity across Brazil's Legal Amazon, These data permit geographical resolution about ten times finer than afforded by"municipio"data, used in previous studies. The...

The authors critically review the literature on the net domestic (within-country) economic benefits of protecting tropical forests, focusing on hydrological benefits and the production of nontimber forest products. (The review does not consider other important classes of benefits, including...