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In order to ensure the provision of goods and services from forests, many governments have promoted less-traditional conservation initiatives such as programs of payments for ecosystem services called, more broadly, direct payments for conservation. The Socio Bosque Program (SBP) is a governmental program in Ecuador that directly provides economic incentives to rural families and local and indigenous communities who have voluntarily agreed to comply with some conservation activities. An impact evaluation method (matching) was used to assess the impact of the SBP between 2008 and 2014. This study revealed that on average, the SBP reduced deforestation by 1.5% in those forests that received the SBP's direct payment. These forests would have been deforested if the SBP had not been implemented. Assessment of the impact of the SBP on individual and collective contracts, using the matching method, revealed that 3.4% and roughly 1% of the forest would have been deforested in the absence of the program, respectively. In other words, the protected area in the collective SBP was 1,247,500 ha and, if the SBP had not been implemented, an area of 11,227 ha would have been lost between 2008 and 2014. The 165,700 ha protected by the individual SBP, it was estimated that 5,733 ha were not deforested due to the implementation of the conservation program. Conventional estimates of the impact of the SBP tend to overestimate avoided deforestation because they do not control for observable covariates that correlate with or affect both SBP participation and deforestation. The conclusions are robust, even given potential hidden biases. The present study demonstrated that the SBP serves to mitigate the effects of climate change, especially with those contracts that are intended for individual owners., Competing Interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.

The leading policy to conserve forest is protected areas (PAs). Yet, PAs are not a single tool: land users and uses vary by PA type; and public PA strategies vary in the extent of each type and in the determinants of impact for each type, i.e. siting and internal deforestation. Further, across regions and time, strategies respond to pressures (deforestation and political). We estimate deforestation impacts of PA types for a critical frontier, the Brazilian Amazon. We separate regions and time periods that differ in their deforestation and political pressures and document considerable variation in PA strategies across regions, time periods and types. The siting of PAs varies across regions. For example, all else being equal, PAs in the arc of deforestation are relatively far from non-forest, while in other states they are relatively near. Internal deforestation varies across time periods, e.g. it is more similar across the PA types for PAs after 2000. By contrast, after 2000, PA extent is less similar across PA types with little non-indigenous area created inside the arc. PA strategies generate a range of impacts for PA types--always far higher within the arc--but not a consistent ranking of PA types by impact., (© 2015 The Author(s).)

We estimate the effects on deforestation that have resulted from policy interactions between parks and payments and between park buffers and payments in Costa Rica between 2000 and 2005. We show that the characteristics of the areas where protected and unprotected lands are located differ significantly. Additionally, we find that land characteristics of each of the policies and of the places where they interact also differ significantly. To adequately estimate the effects of the policies and their interactions, we use matching methods. Matching is implemented not only to define adequate control groups, as in previous research, but also to define those groups of locations under the influence of policies that are comparable to each other. We find that it is more effective to locate parks and payments away from each other, rather than in the same location or near each other. The high levels of enforcement inside both parks and lands with payments, and the presence of conservation spillovers that reduce deforestation near parks, significantly reduce the potential impact of combining these two policies.