Trade-offs and synergies between carbon storage and livelihood benefits from forest commons

Forests provide multiple benefits at local to global scales. These include the global public good of carbon sequestration and local and national level contributions to livelihoods for more than half a billion users. Forest commons are a particularly important class of forests generating these multiple benefits. Institutional arrangements to govern forest commons are believed to substantially influence carbon storage and livelihood contributions, especially when they incorporate local knowledge and decentralized decision making. However, hypothesized relationships between institutional factors and multiple benefits have never been tested on data from multiple countries. By using original data on 80 forest…

• NS
  National Science Foundation

  Awards: CNH-0709545, 0709545, 0527138
• FF
  Ford Foundation
• JD
  John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation
• UO
  University of Michigan
• CO
  College of Pharmacy, University of Michigan