Estimating the opportunity cost of conservation

Alex Rasoamanana, Rina Rabemorasata and Julia Jones have been piloting the research tools for estimating the opportunity cost of restricting tavy.

Slash and burn agriculture has traditionally been an important agricultural system in the eastern rainforests of Madagascar.

Farmers cut and burn the forest, cultivate crops for a few years before leaving the land fallow to regain fertility.

Tavy (especially tavy in closed canopy forest) is illegal but the practice still continues and is an important cause of deforestation in some areas. International carbon payments (such as REDD+) could be invested in efforts to reduce tavy.

In the p4ges project we are interested in estimating the opportunity cost to local people of restricting tavy. We do this by looking at the returns to labour of farmers with varying access to forest.

The socio-economic team have just returned from piloting their research methods and testing data entry on tablet computers.

There is a brief video on this:here:

Date: 19th May 2014