February 12, 2013, 12:00-1:00pm, Room 1024 Dana Building

Over the past twenty years, dozens of developing countries have decentralized forest governance, often by granting indigenous groups and other local communities formal title to land. During the same period however, forests in developing countries have continued to deteriorate. Given these two concurrent trends, it is important to understand the effect of community titling on forest cover change. Using plot-level panel data derived from high-resolution satellite images to estimate the effect on both forest clearing and disturbance between 2000 and 2005, this presentation will analyze the titling of native communities in the Peruvian Amazon, an ecologically rich but increasingly degraded forest.

Allen Blackman’s work has been published in the American Journal of Agricultural Economics, the Journal of Environmental Economics and Management Land Economics, Conservation Biology, and World Development. He is a founding member of the Scientific Committee of the Latin American Environmental Economics Program, a non-profit organization that provides grants in Latin America. He serves on two NASA science advisory committees, and is a research fellow  at the Environment for Development Center for Central America housed at Tropical Agriculture Research and Training Center (CATIE) in Turrialba, Costa Rica.