Dr. Allen Blackman, Senior Fellow at Washington D.C.-based Resources for the Future, recently visited IFRI as a guest of the Central Africa Forests and Institutions (CAFI) project. Dr. Blackman is an economist who works at the cutting edge of integrating remotely-sensed measures of forest cover change and sophisticated econometric models to understand environmental outcomes resulting from policy implementations worldwide. His 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.

During his visit, Dr. Blackman presented a stimulating lecture about his recent efforts to understand forest changes that resulted from land titling of indigenous communities in the Peruvian Amazon. 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, Dr. Blackman focused on a study area in the Peruvian Amazon 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, Dr. Blackman and his research team are finding that titling of native communities in the Peruvian Amazon results has complex impacts on this ecologically rich but increasingly degraded forest.

Following his talk, Dr. Blackman met with the CAFI team to discussing respective experiences in Central Africa, Mexico, and the Peruvian Amazon, and to share cutting-edge approaches that political scientists, economists, and remote-sensing scientists are using to rigorously measure impacts of policy implementations on forest ecosystems.

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