Finn Helles

• MSc, PhD, DSc
• Professor Emeritus at University of Copenhagen

Valuation studies about environmental goods, e.g. biodiversity, often use characteristics and indicators that seem ecologically sound. But ecological value and public value are not necessarily the same. Therefore, combining ecological indicators with public knowledge and language in framing valuation studies may improve the consistency of outcomes....

Forests are important to the livelihoods of hundreds of millions of people in developing countries. This study contributes to the emerging body of quantitative knowledge on the economic importance of forests to rural households through a study in the Nepal Himalaya. Qualitative contextual information was collected in six villages, followed by a str...

Forests contribute to livelihoods of rural people throughout the tropics. This paper adds to the emerging body of quantitative knowledge on absolute and relative economic importance, through both cash and subsistence income, of moist forests to households. Qualitative contextual information was collected in six villages in lowland Bolivia, followed...

Among the objectives of afforestation projects, carbon sequestration is attracting increasing political attention. Therefore, there is a need for understanding the carbon sequestration ‘mechanism’ and for ex-ante assessment of the sequestration potential of afforestation projects. Such assessment must be based on parameter estimates that are inhere...

Rural households throughout the Himalayas are regarded as dependent on non-timber forest products (NTFPs), but very few studies have quantified this dependency. This case study, undertaken in two villages in the Central Himalayan foot hills in Nepal, documents the absolute and relative importance of commercial NTFPs to rural household economies. Da...

A large number of people rely on medicinal plants for maintaining their health and treating diseases. Official data on medicinal plant markets are, however, virtually non-existent and available local-level case studies do not allow generalisations. This study investigates the market efficiency and benefit distribution in the Nepal–India medicinal p...

In this article, we investigate whether taxation of households’ production of marketed forest products in developing countries is likely to assist in achieving the general development objectives of resources conservation and poverty alleviation. Based on an empirical study on such taxation in a village in Tanzania, we develop and solve a theoretica...

Cambodia forms part of the Indo-Burma hotspot. Its extent of biodiversity, however, is subject to considerable uncertainty, as there has been little systematic collection of flora and fauna. During the Khmer Rouge regime institutions were banned, academics were prosecuted and written documentation systematically destroyed. Compared with neighbourin...

The Danish government gives a grant to consultant companies offering advisory services to private forest owners. The Danish Forest and Nature Agency and the consultant companies constitute a principal–agent system. The forest owner is not directly part of this relationship, but he has a main impact on it. The consultant companies have private infor...

In their recent paper, Tassone, Wesseler and Nesci conclude that the provision of subsidies for afforestation under Regulation (EEC) 2080/92 causes a substantial welfare economic loss to society. We do not find this conclusion supported and suggest that it rests upon an erroneous assumption.

The objective of this study is to develop a holistic (landscape) land-use model for protected area-buffer zone management. It is a multi-objective linear programming and goal-programming model, developed on the basis of a case study, the Royal Chitwan National Park (RCNP) in Nepal, which is also used to illustrate its performance through scenario a...

The economic impacts of various harvesting strategies in uneven-aged beech management in Denmark are analysed, using a matrix growth model and taking into account that sales prices fluctuate over time. A vector autoregressive (VAR(1)) model is estimated on the basis of price data 1957–1998 for various assortments and used for simulating price devel...

The right to hunt on a specific area is a complex leisure good including a number of elements, each of which is itself a tangible or intangible consumer good. This article examines factors influencing the price of area-specific hunting rentals as revealed through the accounts of 120 private Danish forest enterprises. Three hedonic models are presen...

Certification receives major attention in the debate about sustainable forest management, and in Bolivia a relatively wide experience exists regarding Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) certification of natural tropical forests. The present paper studies the conditions imposed on forest operators for getting certified, and the export prices of certif...

Conversion from even-aged management of beech (Fagus sylvatica) to target diameter harvesting was analysed by the use of diameter class models. Results were compared with traditional even-aged shelterwood natural regeneration regimes for a highly productive site. It was found that for discount rates from 0.5 to 3%, the profitability of the two silv...

In general, this report bears on the total forest area in Denmark, irrespective of ownership category and holding size. The reason is that from most points of perspective, almost all Danish forest holdings have the characteristics of small-scale forestry. Furthermore, the entire population is considered to be urban as only a small percentage is dep...

In 1989, the Danish Parliament announced a forest policy goal to double the forest area within 60–100 years. One of the objectives of this policy was to improve the recreational possibilities for the urban population. Therefore, focus has been on enhancing public afforestation projects close to urban centres with little nearby forest. We know from...

Performance of several optimisation models is compared, using genetic algorithms, simulated annealing, and mixed integer programming. They are applied to the multi-criteria problem of delineating conservation areas in a case forest in Lithuania, searching for the best trade-off between opportunity cost, connectivity, and proximity to swamps. The st...

The free market economy, to which East European countries are increasingly being exposed, implies that classical budgeting techniques in the form of the Faustmann approach present themselves as the tools of choice for forest investment analysis. One implication is that the choice of a proper discount rate (r) must be made as part of the basis for f...

The paper compares the contents of international assistance to the Lithuanian forest sector with the needs for assistance as perceived by different actors in the sector. A total of 56 planned of implemented projects are grouped into eight areas of assistance and ranked in order of economic magnitude. The results are interpreted as an expression of...

The grass cutting programme (GCP) of Royal Chitwan National Park (RCNP) has been very successful in gaining local people's acceptance of RCNP. The GCP is recognized internationally as a model for park-people conflict resolution, but has seemingly become a spent force. The aim of the present study was to assess the extent to which the GCP is a form...

Near-natural silvicultural regimes for beech (Fagus sylvatica L.), in the form of uneven-aged selective felling, receive increasing interest in Denmark. This is partly due to the ability of this system to preserve the forest climate and maintain important ecological functions such as bio-geochemical cycling and biodiversity conservation. The optima...

A multiple-use forest management method is developed to support decisions on insect control in state forests of a case area in Central Poland, aiming at optimisation in a socio-economic context. The model is closely linked to the specific planning situation, but its structure is adaptable to other cases of optimal decision-making on multiple-use fo...

A thorough analysis of the optimal control of multiple-use forest management at the stand level reveals that the results of earlier studies, which seem to contradict each other, are in fact part of a common solution space. We provide an explanation for this result by showing that it is caused by the growth function and the interaction between the t...

The integration of the Danish roundwood market with the surrounding markets during the period 1911 through 1992 is analyzed. A qualitative evaluation of the market agents’ expressed perceptions is compared to an empirical analysis of roundwood prices. The agents’ explanations of price fluctuations in the Danish roundwood market indicate that they p...

The changing role of forests in society provides new challenges to forest management planners, as conceptualised in 'sustainable forestry'. Using an end-means rationality, there is a need to develop criteria for sustainable development and indicators to measure whether development goes in the desired direction. Recent European efforts of operationa...

Traditional methods in econometric time series theory and practice rely on a set of assumptions concerning the stochastic properties of the time series analysed. One of these assumptions is that the time series are (weakly) stationary, which implies that the two first moments of the series are invariant to displacements in time – at least when some...

Strategic decision-making within integrated forest pest management is often mistakenly based on a short-term treatment cost evaluation. A modelling framework is presented having a long-term perspective focused on the environmental impact associated with two groups of control agents — insect growth regulators and biological insecticides. The analysi...

In 1996 a major six-year research programme, 'Economic Optimisation of Multiple-Use Forestry and Other Natural Resources' was implemented at Department of Economics and Natural Resources, The Royal Veterinary and Agricultural University (KVL), Copenhagen. The research is funded by KVL; The Danish Agricultural and Veterinary Research Council; The Da...

The optimal thinning and rotation age policy for a stand subject to risk of destruction by windthrow is investigated. In particular, risk is not assumed exogenous as in previous research, but is modelled as endogenous to stand management. It is shown that the optimal solution when risk is endogenous differs significantly from the optimal solution t...

Forest management planning comprises selection among treatment alternatives in management units. A traditional linear programming (LP) approach may effectively account for a profit maximization objective combined with sustainability constraints, e.g. on the temporal distribution of harvest volume flows, cash-flow, and net present value development,...

In 1981 a storm caused windthrow of 3 million cubic meters of softwood in Denmark, equal to the normal removals of three years. The object of the present analysis is to determine the way in which the probability of windthrow depends on parameters that can be affected by forest management, viz. rotation age, thinning programme, choice of species, sp...

SUMMARY In the tropical lowlands of Bolivia, indigenous peoples claim formal and official recognition of their rights to 24 million ha, and during the last decade, they have experienced considerable success. Commercial forestry is a potential on 8.3 million ha, and local indigenous communities are increasingly engaged in forest operations. Three sc...