Alexander Pfaff

Alexander Pfaff
Duke University | DU

PhD

About

186
Publications
78,229
Reads
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14,433
Citations
Additional affiliations
July 1995 - June 2007
Columbia University
Position
  • Professor (Assistant)
September 1990 - June 1995
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Position
  • PhD Student
July 2007 - April 2016
Duke University
Position
  • Professor

Publications

Publications (186)
Article
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Experience tells us how to maximize debt-for-nature effectiveness
Article
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Marine protected areas (MPAs) are widely used for ocean conservation, yet the relative impacts of various types of MPAs are poorly understood. We estimated impacts on fish biomass from no-take and multiple-use (fished) MPAs, employing a rigorous matched counterfactual design with a global dataset of >14,000 surveys in and around 216 MPAs. Both no-t...
Article
This paper presents novel evidence of no crowding out, of either motivations or donations, among those terminated from an ongoing program of payments for ecosystem services (PES) in Colombia. PES programs have risen in number. However, claims about perverse impacts after programs end could inhibit their growth. PES end for different reasons ¬(plann...
Article
Payments for ecosystem services (PES) programs exist globally and at times shifting behaviors. Unlike protected areas, PES compensate land users raising local acceptance of conservation. Yet some worry that if payments are temporary, as is often the case, conservation behaviors can be reduced by PES, ‘crowded-out’ to be lower after payments than if...
Preprint
Full-text available
Protected areas (PAs), which restrict economic activities, are the leading land and marine policy for ecosystem conservation. Most contexts feature different types of protection that vary in their stringency of management. Using spatially detailed panel data for 1986-2018, we estimate PAs’ impacts upon forests in the Peruvian Amazon. Which type of...
Article
Concessions that grant logging rights to firms support economic development based on forest resources. Eco-certifications put sustainability restrictions on the operations of those concessions. For spatially detailed data, including many pre-treatment years, we use new difference-in-differences estimators to estimate 2002–2018 impacts upon Peruvian...
Article
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For over a century, starting with the work of Alfred Marshall (and also in resource economics), economic geography has emphasized the productivity of dense urban agglomerations. Yet little attention is paid to one key policy implication of economic geography's core mechanisms: Environmental policies can aid economic development, per se—not hurting...
Preprint
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Conservation incentives are increasing, globally, to support forests and the ecosystem services they provide (such as greenhouse-gas sequestration, species protection, and water quality). Paying forest managers to provide more ecosystem services to others can increase local acceptance of forest conservation, while also targeting local poverty. Emer...
Article
Brazil's ecological intergovernmental fiscal transfer (ICMS-E) is a conservation incentive for protected areas (PAs). It redistributes tax revenues to reward municipalities for hosting PAs. To quantify its impact on the creation of state and municipal PAs, we used panel regressions on a longitudinal municipality dataset that combined information on...
Article
Full-text available
Concessions that grant logging rights to firms support economic development, based on forest resources. Eco-certifications place sustainability restrictions on the operation of such logging concessions. Using a spatially detailed panel and new DID estimators, we estimate the 2002-2018 impacts on forests in the Peruvian Amazon of both logging conces...
Article
Globally, small-scale gold mining (SSGM) is an important economic option for many rural poor. It involves local uses of shared resources, like common-pool contexts for which self-governance has avoided ‘tragedies of the commons’. Yet even ideal local governance of SSGM is not societally efficient given non-local damages that suggest external interv...
Article
As programs with payments for ecosystem services (PES) have become more numerous, raising the need for and also the opportunity for rigorous evidence on their contributions, we examine shifts within Costa Rica's Pagos por Servicios Ambientales (PSA) program. The PSA was heralded from its initiation, despite demonstrations of low early impacts. We s...
Chapter
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Global transformation involved key trade-offs, and inequalities, as growing interactions drove economic growth but also degradation. Accelerations in consumption and interconnection have had trade-offs.
Article
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Policymakers’ incentives during election campaigns can lead to decisions that significantly affect deforestation. Yet this is rarely studied. For Brazil's Atlantic Forest, a highly biodiverse tropical forest, we link federal‐and‐state as well as municipal elections to annual deforestation between 1991 and 2014. Across 2253 municipalities, those wit...
Article
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The world's forests provide valuable contributions to people but continue to be threatened by agricultural expansion and other land uses. Counterfactual-based methods are increasingly used to evaluate forest conservation initiatives. This review synthesizes recent studies quantifying the impacts of such policies and programs. Extending past reviews...
Article
The Amazon Fund is the world's largest program to reduce emissions from deforestation and forest degradation (REDD+), funded with over US $1b donated by Norway and Germany between 2008 and 2017 to reward Brazil for prior deforestation reductions. Olhos D'Água da Amazônia is cited as a leading project success − with over one thousand small-to-medium...
Article
Over the past decade, the Brazilian federal government has offered a negative collective incentive to reduce deforestation by ‘blacklisting’ the municipalities in the Amazon with the highest deforestation rates. As for any unfunded mandate, the responses to blacklisting depend on both local incentives and local capacities. We evaluate a state progr...
Article
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The time is now For decades, scientists have been raising calls for societal changes that will reduce our impacts on nature. Though much conservation has occurred, our natural environment continues to decline under the weight of our consumption. Humanity depends directly on the output of nature; thus, this decline will affect us, just as it does th...
Article
Small-scale gold mining is important to rural livelihoods in the developing world but also a source of environmental externalities. Incentives for individual producers are the classic policy response for a socially efficient balance between livelihoods and the environment. Yet monitoring individual miners is ineffective, or it is very costly, espec...
Article
Significance As protected areas (PAs) are a leading conservation strategy, understanding what conditions affect their impacts is critical. We expect different government agencies to vary in their PA locations and management. We offer a test of whether PA impacts vary across agencies. For the Brazilian Amazon, we compare deforestation impacts for 3...
Preprint
Full-text available
In this chapter of the IBES Global Assesment on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services we explored how global transformation involved key tradeoffs, and inequalities, as growing interactions drove economic growth but also degradation. Accelerations in consumption & interconnection have had tradeoffs.
Preprint
Full-text available
In this Draft Chapter 2.1 of the IBES Global Assesment on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services we explored how global transformation involved key tradeoffs, and inequalities, as growing interactions drove economic growth but also degradation. Accelerations in consumption & interconnection have had tradeoffs.
Technical Report
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This report represents a critical assessment, the first in almost 15 years (since the release of the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment in 2005) and the first ever carried out by an intergovernmental body, of the status and trends of the natural world, the social implications of these trends, their direct and indirect causes, and, importantly, the act...
Article
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Protected areas (PAs) are fundamental for biodiversity conservation, yet their impacts on nearby residents are contested. We synthesized environmental and socioeconomic conditions of >87,000 children in >60,000 households situated either near or far from >600 PAs within 34 developing countries. We used quasi-experimental hierarchical regression to...
Article
Payments for ecosystem services (PES) programs are now high in number, if not always in impact. When groups of users pay groups of service providers, establishing PES involves collective action. We study the creation of collective PES institutions, and their continuation, as group coordination. We use framed lab-in-field experiments with hydroservi...
Technical Report
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The Belt and Road Initiative, due to its diverse and extensive infrastructure investments, poses a wide range of environmental risks. Some projects have easily identifiable and measurable impacts, such as energy projects’ greenhouse gas emissions. Others, such as transportation infrastructure, due to their vast geographic reach, generate more compl...
Article
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In this paper, we use geospatial data and difference-in-differences models to identify the deforestation effects, during 2000-2013, of the leading forest policies in the Peruvian Amazon: i) logging concessions, ii) third-party certification of concessions, and iii) Protected Areas (PAs). We find that on average logging concessions have no effect on...
Technical Report
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Este informe detalla el proceso y las conclusiones, así como algunas posibles implicaciones políticas, del proyecto de investigación "Ligando los Usuarios y Proveedores de Servicios Ambientales en México", realizado por investigadores de la Universidad de Duke en colaboración con la Comisión Nacional Forestal de México (CONAFOR) Y financiado princi...
Article
Managing natural-resource allocation and environmental externalities is a challenge. Institutional designs are central when improving water quality for downstream users, for instance, and when reallocating water quantities including for climate adaptation. Views differ on which institutions are best: states; markets; or informal institutions. For t...
Article
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To reduce SDG tradeoffs in infrastructure provision, and to inform searches for SDG synergies, the authors show that roads’ impacts on Brazilian Amazon forests varied significantly across frontiers. Impacts varied predictably with prior development – prior roads and prior deforestation – and, further, in a pattern that suggests a potential synergy...
Article
Significance Emerging evidence shows that the boundaries of protected areas (PAs) and their level of protection regularly change, yet little is known regarding the underlying causes of these legal changes and their impacts on ecosystems. For PA degazettements (i.e., protection removals) in the state of Rondônia in the Brazilian Amazon we show that...
Article
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Conservation programs have increased significantly, as has the evaluation of their impacts. However, the evaluation of their potential impacts beyond program borders has been scarce. Such spillovers can significantly reduce or increase net impacts. In this review, we discuss how conservation programs might affect outcomes beyond their borders and p...
Article
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Diarrheal disease (DD) due to contaminated water is a major cause of child mortality globally. Forests and wetlands can provide ecosystem services that help maintain water quality. To understand the connections between land cover and childhood DD, we compiled a database of 293,362 children in 35 countries with information on health, socioeconomic f...
Article
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Collective payments for ecosystem services (PES) programs make payments to groups, conditional on specified aggregate land-management outcomes. Such collective contracting may be well suited to settings with communal land tenure or decision-making. Given that collective contracting does not require costly individual-level information on outcomes, i...
Article
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When designing schemes such as conditional cash transfers or payments for ecosystem services, the choice of whom to select and whom to exclude is critical. We incentivize and measure actual contributions to an environmental public good to ascertain whether being excluded from a rebate can affect contributions and, if so, whether the rationale for e...
Article
Background The integrity of ocean ecosystems are currently under threat from a suite of anthropogenic drivers including climate change, over-fishing, land-based pollution, and resource exploitation. Recent research has shown that this degradation is likely to lead to negative, long-term livelihood, biodiversity, and economic impacts. In view of the...
Article
This study considers potential policy responses to the still very high levels of exposure to arsenic (As) caused by drinking water from shallow tubewells in rural Bangladesh. It examines a survey of 4,109 households in 76 villages of Araihazar upazila conducted two years after a national testing campaign swept through the area. The area is adjacent...
Article
A growing set of policies involve transfers conditioned upon socially desired actions, such as attending school or conserving forest. However, given a desire to maximize the impact of limited funds by avoiding transfers that do not change behavior, typically some potential recipients are excluded on the basis of their characteristics, their actions...
Article
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For protected areas (PAs), variation in forest impacts over space-including types of PA-are increasingly well documented, while shifts in impacts over time receive less attention. For Mexico, in the 1990s, PAs effectively were 'paper parks'. Thus, achieving impacts on the forest would require shifts over time in the politics of PA siting and PA imp...
Article
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The leading policy to conserve forest is protected areas (PAs). Yet, PAs are not a single tool: land users and uses vary by PA type; and public PA strategies vary in the extent of each type and in the determinants of impact for each type, i.e. siting and internal deforestation. Further, across regions and time, strategies respond to pressures (defo...
Article
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New infrastructure is needed globally to support economic development and improve human well-being. Investments that do not consider ecosystem services (ES) can eliminate these important societal benefits from nature, undermining the development benefits infrastructure is intended to provide. Such tradeoffs are acknowledged conceptually but in prac...
Article
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Protected areas are the leading forest conservation policy for species and ecoservices goals and they may feature in climate policy if countries with tropical forest rely on familiar tools. For Brazil's Legal Amazon, we estimate the average impact of protection upon deforestation and show how protected areas’ forest impacts vary significantly with...
Article
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Quasi-experimental methods increasingly are used to evaluate the impacts of conservation interventions by generating credible estimates of counterfactual baselines. These methods generally require large samples for statistical comparisons, presenting a challenge for evaluating innovative policies implemented within a few pioneering jurisdictions. S...
Article
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We estimate the effects on deforestation that have resulted from policy interactions between parks and payments and between park buffers and payments in Costa Rica between 2000 and 2005. We show that the characteristics of the areas where protected and unprotected lands are located differ significantly. Additionally, we find that land characteristi...
Article
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An important part of conservation practice is the empirical evaluation of program and policy impacts. Understanding why conservation programs succeed or fail is essential for designing cost-effective initiatives and for improving the livelihoods of natural resource users. The evidence we seek can be generated with modern impact evaluation designs....
Article
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Although developing countries have established scores of new protected areas over the past three decades, they often amount to little more than ‘‘paper parks’’ that are chronically short of the financial, human, and technical resources needed for effective management. It is not clear whether and how severely under-resourced parks affect deforestati...
Article
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Protected areas (PAs) are the leading forest conservation policy, so accurate evaluation of future PA impact is critical in conservation planning. Yet by necessity impact evaluations use past data. Here we argue that forward-looking plans should blend such evaluations with anticipation of shifts in threats. Applying improved methods to evaluate pas...
Article
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A national campaign of well testing through 2003 enabled households in rural Bangladesh to switch, at least for drinking, from high-arsenic wells to neighboring lower-arsenic wells. We study the well-switching dynamics over time by re-interviewing, in 2008, a randomly selected subset of households in the Araihazar region who had been interviewed in...
Article
As biomass fuel use in developing countries causes substantial harm to health and the environment, efficient stoves are candidates for subsidies to reduce emissions. In evaluating improved stoves' relative benefits, little attention has been given to who received which stove intervention due to choices that are made by agencies and households. Usin...
Article
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We offer a nationwide analysis of the initial years of Costa Rica’s PSA program, which pioneered environmental-services payments and inspired similar initiatives. Our estimates of this program’s impact on deforestation, between 1997 and 2000, range from zero to one-fifth of 1% per year (i.e., deforestation is avoided on, at most, 2 out of every 1,0...
Article
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We examine theoretically the emergence of participatory comanagement agreements that share between state and user the management of resources and the benefits from use. Going beyond user-user interactions, our state-user model addresses a critical question—when will comanagement arise?—in order to consider the right baseline for evaluating comanage...
Article
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Both theory and evidence regarding forest-relevant decisions by various agents suggest that there are significant constraints on the effectiveness of domestic policies for REDD (i.e., in facilitating a reduction in emissions from deforestation and forest degradation). Economic theory and empirical research identify many factors that affect the ince...
Article
An increasing number of policies condition transfers upon the taking of socially desired actions − such as donating blood, departing conflict or mitigating climate change. Many such incentives are targeted, i.e., they exclude individuals based on potential recipients' characteristics or actions. We hypothesize that: pro-sociality can be reduced by...
Article
A critical issue in the design of incentive mechanisms is the choice of whom to target. For forests, the leading rules are (1) target locations with high ecosystem-service density; (2) target additionality, i.e., locations where conservation would not occur without the incentive; and, (3) at least effectively reward previous private choices to cons...
Article
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Policies must balance forest conservation’s local costs with its benefits—local to global—in terms of biodiversity, the mitigation of climate change, and other eco-services such as water quality. The trade-offs with development vary across forest locations. We argue that considering location in three ways helps to predict policy impact and improve...