The Value of Tropical Forest to Local Communities: Complications, Caveats, and Cautions

By Douglas Sheil, Sven Wunder. 2002

269 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The methods used to value tropical forests have the potential to influence how policy makers and others perceive forest landsforestlands. A small number of valuation studies achieve real impact. These are generally succinct accounts supporting a specific perception. However, such reports risk being used to justify inappropriate actions. The end users of such results are rarely those who produced them and misunderstanding of key details is a concern. One defence is to ensure that the ultimate users appreciate shortcomings and common pitfalls. In this article, the authors aim to reduce such risks by discussing how valuation studies should be assessed and challenged by users. The authors consider two concise, high profile valuation papers here, by Peters and colleagues and by Godoy and colleagues. They illustrate a series of questions that should be asked, not only about the two papers, but also about any landscape valuation study. The article highlighted the many challenges faced in valuing tropical forest landsforestlands and in presenting and using results sensibly, and it offers some suggestions for improvement. Attention to compexitiescomplexities and clarity about uncertainties are required. Forest valuation must be pursued and promoted with caution.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Global and Planetary Change

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/f6aeea431c0fc2f7b452e9c295721f7a6fe21a2c

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Citations in the corpus

Forests, Livelihoods, and Conservation: Broadening the Empirical Base (2014, background): “See Sheil and Wunder (2002)”
Markets Drive the Specialization Strategies of Forest Peoples (2004, background): “Recently, more realistic assessments (Peters et al. 1989, Godoy and Bawa 1993, Simpson et al. 1996, Godoy et al. 2000, Sheil and Wunder 2002) have lowered these high expectations of the economic and conservation benefits of forest products.”
The management of tree genetic resources and the livelihoods of rural communities in the tropics: non-timber forest products, smallholder agroforestry practices and tree commodity crops (2014, background): “To support the NTFP sector on a proper evidence base without over- or under-stating value – as both these scenarios lead to inappropriate interventions – policy makers need to understand the caveats and subtleties involved in interpreting existing valuations (Sheil and Wunder, 2002).”
Commercialisation of non-timber forest products: A reality check (2007, unknown): “By the end of the century, the number of NTFP initiatives had grown rapidly, leading also to questions about their real impact (Sheil and Wunder, 2002).”
THE SCOPE FOR IMPROVING RURAL LIVELIHOODS THROUGH NON-TIMBER FOREST PRODUCTS: AN EVOLVING RESEARCH AGENDA (2005, background): “Starting with the (in)famous article by Peters et al. (1989) – which has since been widely criticised (see Sheil and Wunder, 2002) – it has been assumed that the commercial extraction of non-timber forest products (NTFPs) 1 from natural forests could simultaneously serve the goals of biodiversity…”
The importance of local forest benefits: Economic valuation of Non-Timber Forest Products in the Eastern Arc Mountains in Tanzania (2014, unknown): “…rates do not reflect the actual NTFP benefits that can be derived, because they will be constrained by physical access problems such as steep slopes, and because markets may not be sufficiently large (Sheil and Wunder, 2002) or prices not sufficiently high to cover extraction costs in remote areas.”
Agrobiodiversity for food security, health and income (2013, background): “The role of NTFP in providing marginalised communities with supplementary food and nutrition from harvest of fruits, leafy vegetables, mushrooms, edible shoots like bamboo and rattan (and other products, such as bush meat) has been confirmed (Wollenberg and Belcher 2001; Sheil and Wunder 2002).”