Analysis of costs and people's willingness to enroll in forest rehabilitation in Gorno Badakhshan, Tajikistan

Abstract

Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, an energy crisis in Tajikistan led to extensive deforestation. Initial financial investment is necessary for the reforestation of the severely degraded areas. In such areas, the State Forest Agency, with the support of the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ) GmbH on behalf of the Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ), began to test the Saving Book Approach (SBA) in Gorno Badakhshan region. SBA is a specific scheme of Payments for Ecosystem Services reforestation scheme. Local people participating in SBA receive compensation for six years, if the workload is fulfilled. This research has been carried out in order to analyze people's willingness to enroll in SBA and the suitability of certain forest plots for SBA implementation. The empirical results show that out of the factors tested — ‘benefit expectations’, ‘social pressure’, ‘age’, ‘income’ and ‘ability’, ‘ability’ was the only influential factor for willingness to enroll. ‘Ability’ is defined as the labor force availability, physical ability and amount of available time of the labor force in the household. The suitability of the forest plot depends on the needed investments for reforestation activities. Indeed, the willingness to enroll in SBA of local people does not necessarily match with plot suitability. These findings contribute to the improvement of the determination and understanding of factors that influence local peoples' decision to enroll and thus, provide the international development community with useful information for the design of future payment schemes.