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Conference on the costs and social impacts of forest conservation in Madagascar

The three speakers

Some of the people who attended the mini-conference

Poster advertising the event
 
 
 
 
 
 


Conference on the costs and social impacts of forest conservation in Madagascar

On Wednesday, December 9, 2015 the p4ges project organised a small conference on impacts and local costs of forest conservation at ESSA-Forêts. The event was well attended and about 40 students, academics, and partners from NGOs joined for the presentations and discussion.

After three presentations from researchers associated with the p4ges project, which is financed by ESPA (see below for details of presentations), the chairman Patrick Ranjatson (researcher at ESSA-Forêts in charge of the institutional analysis p4ges component of the project) led a debate on environmental justice. Before the conference we distributed three questions to the participants. These questions focused on distribution options and types of compensation.

Question 1: Who should receive the most benefits from conservation projects locally?

Question 2: What should be the compensation?

Question 3: What is the best approach to forest conservation in Madagascar?

The responses helped structure and stimulate debate on these issues. At the end of the discussion the same questionnaire was distributed. It was interesting to see that many of the responses had altered: evidence that participants changed their views during the discussions on these complex issues.

Figure 1: Changes in responses before and after the conference debate on
"who should receive the most benefit? "

Presentations

Social safeguards for REDD + have they reached their target? here - Rina Mandimbiniaina (Essa-Forêts researcher working on the socio-economic component of p4ges)

Estimating the local costs of forest conservation using choice experiments here - Sarobidy Rakotonarivo (doctoral student at Bangor University and University of Copenhagen)

The bitter and the sweet. Social impacts of ecological compensation and biodiversity offset here - Cécile Bidaud (Associate researcher at the University of Bangor and p4ges project and ESPA Fellow)

Date: 6 January 2016

Cécile Bidaud

Link to news item about the conference here