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Contributed Talk

Session: : Conservation Planning and Policy 2

COS 101-2 - Do working forest easements work for conservation?

Tuesday, August 8, 2023
1:45 PM – 2:00 PM PDT
Location: C120-121
Abstract: Conservation easements are voluntary legal agreements designed to achieve conservation goals on private land. Many “working forest” conservation easements (WFCE) have been established on financialized timberlands, ostensibly to protect conservation values while maintaining commercial timber production. We use variation in the timing of easement adoptions and covariate pre-matching to estimate the impact of WFCEs in Maine from a novel 33-year time-series of remotely sensed forest-loss and forest-harvesting data. We find little evidence that the WFCEs have changed land-use outcomes: we estimate that the WFCEs protected < 1.5 ha yr-1 from conversion and increased the rate of harvest by >1500 ha yr-1. Restrictions on forestry practices within the WFCEs increased during the study period, yet there is no evidence that this affected harvest rates. Our results indicate that WFCEs achieved their goals of continuing harvests, they did not appear to provide broader conservation benefits during this time span. Our methods demonstrate a generally applicable approach to evaluate similar easements in other locations to inform prioritization of scarce conservation investment.