Does Certification Change the Trajectory of Tree Cover in Working Forests in The Tropics? An Application of the Synthetic Control Method of Impact Evaluation

Pushpendra Rana,Erin Sills

doi:10.3390/f9030098

Abstract

Certification by the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) remains rare among forest management units (FMUs) in natural tropical forests, presenting a challenge for impact evaluation. We demonstrate application of the synthetic control method (SCM) to evaluate the impact of FSC certification on a single FMU in each of three tropical forest landscapes. Specifically, we estimate causal effects on tree cover change from the year of certification to 2012 using SCM and open-access, pan-tropical datasets. We demonstrate that it is possible to construct synthetic controls, or weighted combinations of non-certified FMUs, that followed the same path of tree cover change as the certified FMUs before certification. By using these synthetic controls to measure counterfactual tree cover change after certification, we find that certification reduced tree cover loss in the most recent year (2012) in all three landscapes. However, placebo tests show that in one case, this effect was not significant, and in another case, it followed several years in which certification had the opposite effect (increasing tree cover loss). We conclude that SCM has promise for identifying temporally varying impacts of small-N interventions on land use and land cover change.

Highlights

Tropical forests have attained new significance in the context of climate change
We studied one Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) certified forest management units (FMUs) in each of three topical forest landscapes: Orsa Florestal S.A
While tree cover change is not the same as deforestation, our results suggest that certification likely did reduce deforestation in our case study FMU in Indonesia, and likely did not in our case study FMU in Gabon

Summary

Introduction

Tropical forests have attained new significance in the context of climate change. High rates of tropical deforestation threaten the ability of these forests to act as carbon sinks and endanger their biodiversity and the livelihoods of millions of forest-dependent people around the world. One reason that the income potential of forests is lower than these alternatives is that the profitability of sustainable management and harvest of timber is undercut by low timber prices due to rampant illegal logging in the tropics [4,5]. Forest certification aims to increase the value of responsibly managed forests by encouraging the market to recognize verified sustainable management of forest management units (FMUs) including compliance with regulatory frameworks, adoption of reduced-impact logging, forest stock enhancement, and respect for the rights of both workers and local people [6,7,8,9]. The costs incurred in the certification process (for adoption of new practices and for audits) are supposed to be defrayed by consumers and translated into benefits for firms through price premiums or improved market access for timber products from certified

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