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Introduction
Luca Tacconi currently works at the Crawford School of Public Policy , Australian National University. Luca does research in Ecological Economics and policy of ecosystem management.
Additional affiliations
July 1992 - December 2005
April 2001 - March 2005
March 1990 - June 1992
Publications
Publications (136)
Corruption significantly affects the large majority of countries, and it has negative social and economic impacts. Its impacts on environmental and resource management (ERM) sectors are less well understood. We review corruption in the extractive industries, irrigation, agriculture, forestry, fisheries, and conservation activities with a focus on t...
The goals of the Paris Agreement on Climate Change cannot be achieved without a significant reduction in emissions from forests. Reductions of emissions from land use, particularly forests, account for a quarter of the reductions pledged in the Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) submitted by Parties to the UNFCCC. The papers included in thi...
The Government of Indonesia has developed the institutional architecture to deliver the emission reductions commitments stated in its Nationally Determined Contribution (NDC) submitted to the UNFCCC. It has also indicated a range of policies and activities that will be implemented to deliver those commitments. This paper outlines the architecture a...
The Government of Indonesia has committed to reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation. However, the country suffers from one of the most significant illegal logging and illegal land clearing conditions in the world. Brazil was in a similar condition to Indonesia when it implemented an aggressive and strategic forest law enforcem...
Wildfires, including on carbon-rich peatlands, continue to haunt Indonesia every dry season. They have disastrous health, economic, environmental, and climate consequences. As a key measure to manage wildfires, laws strictly prohibit the burning of land and forests, targeting corporate and individual fire users. The literature suggests that weak la...
Fire activity is declining globally due to intensifying land management, but trends remain uncertain for the humid tropics, particularly Equatorial Asia. Here, we report that rates of fire events deemed severe (≥75th severity percentile of 2002-2019) and very severe (≥90th percentile) for Indonesia declined 19-27% and 23-34% over 2002-2019, respect...
Reducing tropical deforestation caused by the expansion of agricultural and other commodities requires effective and equitable interventions for engaging small-scale producers. Interventions should reduce deforestation and environmental degradation while improving the welfare of rural households. Voluntary, sustainability certification schemes prov...
Indonesian fire events generate significant impacts on ecosystems, society, and climate regionally and globally. Following severe burning in 2015, Indonesia prioritized targeted fire prevention to reduce crop destruction, haze, forest degradation, and carbon emissions. We show that such efforts resulted in a qualified success. Fire activity during...
Incentive-based conservation has gained ample notoriety over recent decades, particularly across Latin America where targeted incentives feature prominently in environmental services initiatives, such as for carbon storage or watershed regulation. Here we first develop an analytical framework for assessing the Peruvian initiatives of conservation i...
Extreme wildfires are a major environmental and socioeconomic threat across many regions worldwide. The limits of fire suppression-centred strategies have become evident even in technologically well-equipped countries, due to high-cost and a legacy of landscape transformations, yet with ultimately low-efficient solutions vis-à-vis extreme fires. Ma...
Ecological fiscal transfers (EFT) transfer public revenue between governments within a country based on ecological indicators. EFT can compensate subnational governments for the costs of conserving ecosystems and in principle can incentivize greater ecological conservation. We review established EFT in Brazil, Portugal, France, China and India, and...
Jurisdictional approaches to REDD+ have received less attention than project-based REDD+ activities, yet they are needed for the successful implementation of REDD+ at the national level. Three subnational levels can be considered for the implementation of jurisdictional REDD+ in Indonesia: Provincial, District and Village. REDD+ implementation shou...
For Indonesia to achieve its greenhouse gas emission reduction commitments, it will have to reduce emissions
from deforestation, forest degradation and peatland degradation. The National Action Plan for Greenhouse Gas
Emissions Reductions was Indonesia's first comprehensive plan. It reflected Indonesia's emission reduction
commitments to 2020, and...
Periodic peat and forest fires in Sumatra and Kalimantan result in haze that blankets Indonesia and neighboring countries, with effects on human health, the environment and the economy. Although the prevailing approach for preventing and reducing the incidence of fire in Indonesia is regulatory, village-level incentive schemes have been trialed by...
One of the main components of Indonesia's Just Economy policy is extensive and rapid land reform, which targets about 12% of the country's land area for redistribution to farmers and communities by 2019. Much of the reform is occurring on forest land. At the same time, the country has pledged a significant reduction of its greenhouse gas emissions...
We assess whether the implementation of the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) certification scheme in the Congo basin has had positive additional impacts-as compared to existing regulatory frameworks applied in noncertified Forest Management Units (FMU)-on (1) the working and living conditions of logging companies' employees and their families, (2)...
This paper discusses work carried out in Indonesia to strengthen research capacity and support policy development for the implementation of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change’s mechanism for Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD+). It addresses the questions: in an apparently receptive policy envi...
Tropical deforestation has been one of the most significant global environmental changes of recent decades and has spurred a substantial academic literature. Despite this, the empirical literature provides inconsistent evidence on the role of basic economic determinants of deforestation such as income and population. The authors suggest that one ex...
The first International Peat Congress (IPC) held in the tropics - in Kuching (Malaysia) - brought together over 1000 international peatland scientists and industrial partners from across the world (“International Peat Congress with over 1000 participants!,” 2016). The congress covered all aspects of peatland ecosystems and their management, with a...
Corruption has often been blamed for causing deforestation, however, the evidence is mixed. The paper develops a framework to assess the impacts of corruption on forests and prioritize policy responses. Rather than relying just on a theoretical description of corruption, the framework is developed by analyzing how corruption manifests itself on the...
The first International Peat Congress (IPC) held in the tropics - in Kuching (Malaysia) - brought together over 1000 international peatland scientists and industrial partners from across the world ("International Peat Congress with over 1000 participants!," 2016). The congress covered all aspects of peatland ecosystems and their management, with a...
The implementation of “reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation” (REDD+) will inevitably be affected by local social and political dynamics, with the potential for success depending significantly on cooperation from a range of stakeholders at the subnational level. Building on recent critical research on REDD+, we look at how gl...
http://www.e-elgar.com/shop/intergovernmental-fiscal-transfers-forest-conservation-and-climate-change
Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and forest Degradation (REDD+) is an expanding global initiative oriented at slowing or reversing carbon emissions from forests in the Global South. The programme is based on the principle of payment for environmental services, where the carbon sequestration services of forests are seen to have a financial valu...
Deforestation is a leading cause of biodiversity loss and an important source of global carbon emissions. This means that there are important synergies between climate policy and conservation policy. The highest rates of deforestation occur in tropical countries, where much of the land at the forest frontier is managed informally by smallholders an...
Eucalypt (Eucalyptus spp.) tree farming is a source of income for many smallholders in developing and emerging countries and critical to the resource supply of many pulp and paper companies. These companies rely on smallholders adopting tree farming, sometimes by offering a contract. This paper reports a study from four regions of Thailand, where s...
International discussions on reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation (REDD+) foresee payment for environmental services (PES) schemes as an important mechanism to provide local incentives for the conservation and enhancement of carbon stocks. There are concerns, however, about the potential impacts of REDD+ and PES on local liv...
This article may be used for research, teaching, and private study purposes. Any substantial or systematic reproduction, redistribution, reselling, loan, sub-licensing, systematic supply, or distribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden. The publisher does not give any warranty express or implied or make any representation that the cont...
The opportunity costs of Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD +) accruing to different stakeholders in Indonesia, including companies and the national, provincial and district level governments, are estimated, with particular emphasis on the influence of alternative discount rates. A cost–benefit analysis of the opport...
Tropical deforestation has been one of the most significant global environmental changes of recent decades and has spurned a substantial academic literature. Despite this, the most basic theoretical predictions — such as the role of income and population growth in driving forest changes — fail to be consistently confirmed in the empirical literatur...
SUMMARY Eucalypt plantations and contract farming for eucalypts have expanded and are now occurring on a large scale despite concerns about their social and environmental impacts. Our analysis shows that Thai policies and land tenure context have been the principal drivers of the adoption of eucalypt tree growing by Thai smallholders. Thai policies...
The Environmental Economics and the Ecological Economics perspectives on payments for environmental services (PES) propose rather different views on how to define PES, its key elements, and on the role of PES in ecosystem conservation and rural development. This paper compares these two perspectives and ad-dresses the following questions: what is a...
Environmental problems are often complex and it is widely recognized that they cannot be satisfactorily addressed by single disciplines. The review of forest cover change studies points to the need to carry out research integrating economic, political, social and environmental aspects. Existing interdisciplinary study areas, namely ecological econo...
1 news & views T ogether, deforestation and forest degradation are the second largest global source of anthropogenic carbon dioxide emissions 1 . Reducing emissions from these sources is potentially faster and cheaper than reducing emissions from fossil fuel combustion because it does not involve large-scale changes to existing infrastructure 2 . W...
The concept of Sustainable Forest Management (SFM) has a pivotal role for both the Cameroonian legal framework and market-based instruments such as forest certification. We assess the different impacts on timber harvesting of the forest legal framework as compared to the adoption of forest certification, on the ten Forest Management Unit (FMUs) tha...
There is renewed interest in identifying the causes of deforestation because it contributes about 17% of the annual emissions of greenhouse gases. Despite considerable efforts, universal causes of tropical deforestation remain elusive. The existing models of tropical deforestation are assessed, and the problems involved in approaching the issue thr...
Eucalypt (Eucalyptus spp.) tree farming is a source of income for many smallholders in developing and emerging countries and critical to the resource supply of many pulp and paper companies. These companies rely on smallholders adopting tree farming, sometimes by offering a contract. This paper reports a study from four regions of Thailand, where s...
As of mid-2008, 63 of the 101 available forest management units (FMUs) in Cameroon were managed according to approved management plans, and seven FMUs had received a FSC certification. This paper provides a preliminary assessment of the volumetric and financial variations incurred by logging companies and by the government when adopting both the ma...
The Cameroonian regulatory framework on forest, wildlife and fisheries requires logging companies to pay an Area Fee (AF), half of which must be redistributed to rural councils (40) and villages (10) neighbouring the logging concessions. The AF had the main objectives to provide a consistent
contribution to the State budget and to improve rural liv...
In many respects, Cameroon has for some time set the benchmark for central African nations when it comes to sustainably managing the forests of the Congo basin, home to the world’s second largest area of tropical forest. A key element of the law was its requirement that logging companies granted concessions to harvest government owned forests must...
'Everybody talks about payments for environmental services nowadays, yet we still chronically lack good case studies systematically analyzing the experiences out there. This book fills an important gap by bringing together in-depth analyses of carbon-focused PES and PES-like schemes from three tropical continents. Using a sustainable livelihoods ap...
The ultimate goal of many international and transnational attempts to address global problems is to influence domestic policymaking processes rather than simply to constrain or modify the external behaviour of states. This chapter reviews existing scholarship on the impacts that global forest governance arrangements have had on domestic policymakin...
The implementation of a mechanism for Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD - plus) will be affected by governance conditions within host countries. The top eight countries, which are responsible for 70 percent of the world's total annual deforestation, have implemented certain forms of decentralization in public admini...
In recent years, several proposals for the design of a mechanism to reduce emissions from deforestation and forest degradation (REDD) within the United Nations Convention on Climate Change have been advanced. The essence of these proposals is to provide financial benefits to developing countries proportionally to the amount of avoided emissions the...
This article was submitted without an abstract, please refer to the full-text PDF file.
One of the main objectives of the 1994 Cameroonian forestry law is to improve the management of production forests by including minimum safeguards for sustainability into compulsory forest management plans. As of 2007, about 3.5 million hectares (60%) of the productive forests are harvested following the prescriptions of 49 approved management plan...
This article describes the framework adopted for the socio-economic assessment of protected areas intended to safeguard biodiversity. This framework, which can be described as a three-tiered approach to conservation, is applied to the process of assessment and establishment of a protected area (PA) in Vanuatu. The potential benefits that the landow...
be used for research, teaching and private study purposes. Any substantial or systematic reproduction, re-distribution, re-selling, loan or sub-licensing, systematic supply or distribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden. The publisher does not give any warranty express or implied or make any representation that the contents will be co...
This paper discusses the theory of decentralized forest management, the associated narrative and the underlying hypotheses. That discussion informs the assessment of whether decentralization can lead to forest conservation. The paper argues that the ideal model of democratic decentralization described in the literature is unlikely to be implemented...
The costs of providing giant clam seed in Australia are examined for alternative annual volumes of production. Considerable economies of scale in production are available, both in relation to labor costs and non-labor costs (mostly capital costs). The fall in per-unit cost of producing giant clam seed is considerable when annual production is expan...
Lack of action on cross-border environmental problems in developing countries is often ascribed to gaps in local capacity and resources, failure of regional cooperation, and lack of financial support from rich countries. Using the case of the Southeast Asian Haze pollution from forest and peat fires in Indonesia, we explore the challenges posed by...
Fires have attracted interest and generated alarm since the early 1980s. This concern has been particularly evident in tropical forests of Southeast Asia and the Amazon, but disastrous fires in recent summers in Australia, Europe, and the United States have drawn worldwide attention.
Concern about forest fires, and related air pollution and biodive...
Indonesian legislation calls for a zero-burning policy. This approach to fire management is largely in response to significant negative impacts on the economy and the environment, not only in Indonesia but also the neighbouring region, that result annually from peat fires in Kalimantan and Sumatra. In this context, the present paper investigates th...
A paper published in Ecological Economics [Varma, A. 2003. The economics of slash and burn: a case study of the 1997–1998 Indonesian forest fires. Ecological Economics 46,159–171] claims to show that slash and burn agriculture is socially inefficient and should be banned. However, its conclusions and recommendations are flawed. It defines slash and...