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Consequences of Protected Areas for Household Forest Extraction, Time Use, and Consumption: Evidence from Nepal

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Abstract

Many forest protected areas (PAs) are located in developing countries, where forests are a major source of food and fuel. Thus, biodiversity conservation may have unintended consequences on welfare of people in local communities. To explore this issue, we examine the effects of the new PAs in Nepal established during 1995–2003. Using the Nepal Living Standard Survey collected in 1995/1996 and 2003/2004, we evaluate the effects of these new PAs on household consumption, wood collection, and time use. Our estimates suggest that the establishment of PAs reduce the average wood collection by 20–40% compared to the period prior to PA establishment, with greater impact when PAs are strictly managed. We find evidence that households adjust to the new PAs with at least modest shifts to fuel purchased in market but not by using fuel conserving stoves, and that PAs are ineffective when climate makes fuelwood for heating essential or if households are in regions with large dependence on wood as a fuel. Finally, while wood collection reductions could lower household welfare, we find no evidence that PAs trigger either large decreases or increases in total consumption or consumption of food.

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Fig. 1

Source of shape file: World Database of Protected Area, Available at: www.protectedplanet.net. (Color figure online)

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Notes

  1. See also http://www.protectedplanet.net/.

  2. According to the World Bank Open Data development indicators (2018) on the terrestrial protected areas, higher income countries have 15.1% of land under protection, and lower income countries have 15.9% area under protection.

  3. Data extracted from the Nepalese census available in IPUMS. The closest substitute for firewood is dung (11.95% in 2001 and 12.55% in 2011).

  4. Category I includes strict nature reserves and wilderness areas, Category II includes national parks, Category III includes natural monuments and natural landmarks, Category IV includes wildlife reserves and wildlife sanctuaries, Category V includes protected landscapes/seascapes, and Category VI includes managed resource protected areas.

  5. We also hypothesized that treatment effects might be higher if households had extensive access to livestock (since dung is a common substitute for wood as a fuel) and in places with many community forests before the PA was established so they had access to an alternative. No results supported those hypotheses, so the analyses are not reported here to reduce tables.

  6. Only 30 households in this panel live near strict PAs, which prevents us from estimating Eq. (2).

  7. Forest cover loss data was extracted from Hansen et al.’s (2013) dataset (Fig. 2).

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Acknowledgements

We thank Erica Myers, Kathy Baylis, Carl Nelson, Payal Shah, Phillip Garcia, Hope Michelson, and Xian Fan Bak for their invaluable comments and suggestions. This paper has also benefited from comments by seminar and conference participants at the Agricultural and Applied Economics Association Meeting, Association of Environmental and Resource Economics Meeting, and Southern Economics Association Annual Meeting. We would like to thank Chet Bahadur Roka from Central Bureau of Statistics of Nepal for making the NLSS data available to us. All errors are our own. This work was supported in part by USDA-NIFA Multistate Hatch W4133 Grant #ILLU-470-353 and NSF Grant #1339944.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. The Eviction Lab, Department of Sociology, Princeton University, 177 Wallace Hall, Princeton, NJ, 81540, USA

    Aparna Howlader

  2. Department of Agricultural and Consumer Economics, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Champaign, IL, USA

    Amy W. Ando

  3. Resources for the Future, Washington, DC, USA

    Amy W. Ando

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  1. Aparna Howlader
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Correspondence to Aparna Howlader.

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Appendix

Appendix

See Figs. 6, 7, 8 and Tables 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22.

Fig. 6
figure 6

Growth of world protected area network

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Fig. 7
figure 7

Mean firewood consumption across treatment and control group A. Note: The data is extracted from NLSS and shows how mean consumption varies over protection status

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Fig. 8
figure 8

Mean firewood consumption across treatment and control group B. Note: The data is extracted from NLSS and shows how mean consumption varies over protection status

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Table 13 Means of variables for villages in treatment group and control group A
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Table 14 Means of variables for households in treatment group and control group A
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Table 15 Means of variables for villages in treatment group and control group B
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Table 16 Means of variables for households in treatment group and control group B
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Table 17 Means of variables for villages in treatment group and control group C
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Table 18 Means of variables for households in treatment group and control group C
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Table 19 Robustness checks for impacts of different types of protected areas
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Table 20 Sensitivity of results to definition of treatment
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Table 21 Panel group characteristics at baseline
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Table 22 Impact of protected area on firewood collection (panel data)
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Howlader, A., Ando, A.W. Consequences of Protected Areas for Household Forest Extraction, Time Use, and Consumption: Evidence from Nepal. Environ Resource Econ 75, 769–808 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10640-020-00407-2

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