@article{9a47f16113f241b2b6c7ed21bb71aa6f,
title = "Reducing hunger with payments for environmental services (PES): Experimental evidence from Burkina Faso",
abstract = "Both environmental protection and poverty alleviation are high on the international policy agenda for developing countries. We examine whether conditional environmental cash transfer programs contribute to the social protection of the beneficiaries, using data from a randomized controlled trial on reforestation, implemented in cooperation with the government of Burkina Faso. Randomly selected farmers were invited to undertake maintenance activities to increase the survival rate of trees that were planted on degraded forest lands. Compensation, in the form of monetary payments, varied with the number of trees still alive nine months after the tree planting. The timing of the conditional payments coincided with the lean season, when most farmers needed cash for food consumption and agricultural inputs. Six months after the transfers, the recipient households reported 12% higher food consumption expenditures compared to the control group, as well as a 35 and 60% reduction in, respectively, moderate and severe food insecurity. Our data indicate that the transfers received during the lean season were not only used to address immediate consumption needs but also to invest in crop and livestock production. The investments resulted in subsequent increases in agricultural outputs and income. We thus conclude that conditional environmental cash transfers, when paid in the lean season, can not only support consumption smoothing in the short run but can also improve livelihoods in the longer run.",
keywords = "Burkina Faso, food security, payments for environmental services, REDD+, reforestation",
author = "Adjognon, {Guigonan S.} and {van Soest}, Daan and Jonas Guthoff",
note = "Funding Information: Guigonan Serge Adjognon is an agricultural economist in the Development Impact Evaluation (DIME) Department at the World Bank. Daan van Soest is professor of environmental economics (Department of Economics and CentER) at Tilburg University, and academic director of the Tilburg Sustainability Center. Jonas Guthoff is a research assistant in the Development Impact Evaluation (DIME) Department at the World Bank. This work was made possible by the financial support from the Climate Investment Funds and thanks to the fruitful collaboration with Burkina Faso's Programme d'Investissement Forestier (PIF) in the implementation of this research. We thank colleagues from DIME for helpful feedback on initial drafts of this paper. We also thank the editor Marc Bellemare and three anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments and suggestions. The findings, interpretations, and conclusions expressed in this paper are entirely those of the authors. They do not necessarily represent the views of the World Bank and its affiliated organizations, or those of the executive directors of the World Bank Group or the governments they represent. All remaining errors are our own. Funding Information: The notion that forests represent a cost effective source of carbon sequestration while providing economic, environmental, and socio‐cultural benefits (Canadell and Raupach 2008 ; Busch et al. 2019 ) has received renewed impetus with the 2015 Paris Agreement, as evidenced by the key role the agreement attributed to forest conservation. In this spirit, the government of Burkina Faso has initiated a Forest Investment Program (FIP) with joint technical assistance from the African Development Bank and the World Bank Group, and with financial support from the Climate Investment Fund. One of the main goals of Burkina Faso's FIP is to improve the carbon sequestration capacity of protected forests while contributing to poverty reduction in forest‐dependent communities. Publisher Copyright: {\textcopyright} 2020 Agricultural & Applied Economics Association Copyright: Copyright 2020 Elsevier B.V., All rights reserved.",
year = "2021",
month = may,
doi = "10.1111/ajae.12150",
language = "English",
volume = "103",
pages = "831--857",
journal = "American Journal of Agricultural Economics",
issn = "0002-9092",
publisher = "Oxford University Press",
number = "3",
}