Department of Economics, Andrew Young School of Policy Studies, Georgia State University, Atlanta, GA 30302-3992, USA.
Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2011 Aug 23;108(34):13913-8. doi: 10.1073/pnas.1011529108. Epub 2011 Aug 22.
Protected areas are the dominant approach to protecting biodiversity and the supply of ecosystem services. Because these protected areas are often placed in regions with widespread poverty and because they can limit agricultural development and exploitation of natural resources, concerns have been raised about their potential to create or reinforce poverty traps. Previous studies suggest that the protected area systems in Costa Rica and Thailand, on average, reduced deforestation and alleviated poverty. We examine these results in more detail by characterizing the heterogeneity of responses to protection conditional on observable characteristics. We find no evidence that protected areas trap historically poorer areas in poverty. In fact, we find that poorer areas at baseline seem to have the greatest levels of poverty reduction as a result of protection. However, we do find that the spatial characteristics associated with the most poverty alleviation are not necessarily the characteristics associated with the most avoided deforestation. We show how an understanding of these spatially heterogeneous responses to protection can be used to generate suitability maps that identify locations in which both environmental and poverty alleviation goals are most likely to be achieved.
保护区是保护生物多样性和生态系统服务供应的主要方法。由于这些保护区通常位于贫困广泛存在的地区，并且可能限制农业发展和自然资源的开发，因此人们对它们可能造成或加剧贫困陷阱的问题表示担忧。先前的研究表明，哥斯达黎加和泰国的保护区系统平均减少了森林砍伐和缓解了贫困。我们通过根据可观察特征来描述对保护的反应的异质性，更详细地研究了这些结果。我们没有发现证据表明保护区使历史上较贫困的地区陷入贫困陷阱。事实上，我们发现，与保护相关的最贫困地区的贫困程度似乎随着保护而降低最大。但是，我们确实发现，与最大程度减轻贫困相关的空间特征不一定与与最大程度避免森林砍伐相关的空间特征相吻合。我们展示了如何理解这些对保护的空间异质反应，可以用来生成适宜性图，确定最有可能实现环境和减轻贫困目标的位置。
