Safety Nets, Gap Filling and Forests: A Global-Comparative Perspective

By Sven Wunder, J. Börner, G. Shively, M. Wyman. 2014

271 citations recorded by the source corpus.

In the forest–livelihoods literature, forests are widely perceived to provide both common safety nets to shocks and resources for seasonal gap-filling. We use a large global-comparative dataset to test these responses. We find households rank forest-extraction responses to shocks lower than most common alternatives. For seasonal gap-filling, forest extraction also has limited importance. The minority of households using forests for coping is asset-poor and lives in villages specialized on forests, in particular timber extraction. Overall, forest resources may be less important as a buffer between agricultural harvests and in times of unforeseen hardship than has been found in many case studies.

Subfields: Global and Planetary Change, Pollution, Soil Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/3f607d47447a0fbc0dff32e5d40face5c9b89038

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In Global and Planetary Change

In Pollution

A. Angelsen

In Soil Science

Citations in the corpus

Forests, Livelihoods, and Conservation: Broadening the Empirical Base (2014, background): “While “the supermarket of the wild” (Cavendish, 2000) is better stocked than we could expect from Section 3, surprisingly the corresponding “insurance company of the wild” sells less policies among rural smallholders than portrayed in the forest safety-net literature (Wunder et al., 2014).”
Environmental Income and Rural Livelihoods: A Global-Comparative Analysis (2014, background): “The role of forests for insurance and gap-filling among households in the PEN sample is explored in depth in Wunder et al. (2014).”
The Impacts of Climate Change on the Poor in Disadvantaged Regions (2018, background): “…as insurance and coping strategies for avoiding the income and subsistence losses associated with such shocks (McSweeney 2005; Carter et al. 2007; Narain, Gupta, and van’t Veld 2008; Debela et al. 2012; L opez-Feldman 2014; Wunder et al 2014; Angelsen and Dokken 2015; Hallegatte et al. 2015).”