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This paper provides a method for understanding how city actions impact trees and forests outside their boundaries. The Forest Footprint for Cities methodology connects global estimates of tropical and subtropical deforestation linked to agricultural production to commodity-specific international trade and city consumption. The methods ultimately present the city’s Forest Footprint in terms of hectares of embodied deforestation consumed and the associated CO2 emissions.

Better Forests, Better Cities evaluates how forests both inside and outside city boundaries benefit cities and their residents, and what actions cities can take to conserve, restore and sustainably manage those forests. This report is the first of its kind comprehensive resource on the connection between cities and forests, synthesizing hundreds of research papers and reports to show how all forest types can deliver a diverse suite of benefits to cities.

Presentation 23074

While the scientific community has focused on documenting environmental degradation and developing scenarios that help identify the operational margins for system Earth, less attention has been given to the mental models of decision-makers that underpin environmental policies. We suggest that global efforts to stop deforestation and biodiversity loss are failing in part due to a critical blind spot in the analysis—human agency. To address this weakness, we propose to formulate mental models and translate them into strategy games. This will increase the representation of agency in scenario development and create spaces for deliberation between different worldviews. We claim that personal transformation can be achieved through transparent democratic dialogues that identify, challenge, and respond to the human and social limitations inherent to decision-making and we present empirical examples that validate that claim. Their transformation through gaming gives decision-makers access to the experience of consciousness: “what is it like being a stakeholder?”. Such experience will help to break free of established norms in science and political processes.

Presentation 21020

Presentation 21024

Consumers’ shifting tastes have made sustainable growth for firms in the food industry increasingly difficult. Scholars and industry practitioners constantly try to develop business strategies to deal with disruptions in modern food markets. This case uses Brazilian company Mantiqueira as an example of how a company can adopt demand-driven innovation and embrace disruption to aid its sustainable growth over the years. We follow the success of Mantiqueira in the market of eggs, from its humble beginnings until its dominance in the Brazilian market. With the use of data, the case (1) shows the current challenges faced by Mantiqueira and (2) asks readers to participate in the next round of decisions that Mantiqueira will have to make in order to hold its market share. This case is intended for use with graduate students and professionals in the agribusiness and food industries. It can be used to develop competencies associated with decision making for agribusiness firms, particularly for those faced with changes in the demand side that require new marketing strategies and capital investments.

This dissertation expands on the economics of labeling products with credence quality attributes. Specifically, it aims at incorporating recent discussions in the food markets regarding 1) consumers' difficulty of perceiving the exact quality that labels try to communicate and 2) imperfect competition on quality and price between firms providing these labeled products. These items are important because consumers and firms have to navigate a market environment in which there exist many quality labels competing for consumers' preferences (e.g., nonGMO, USDA organic, Bioengineered label, local) with many of these labels offering different grades of quality (e.g., 100\% organic, organic, made with organic ingredients). While more quality label may match consumers' heterogeneous preferences, they may cause confusion and misperception among buyers, ultimately impacting efficiency and distribution of surplus in the market. More quality labels also may impact firms' decisions as firms can select themselves into different poles of the quality spectrum and avoid price competition by doing so. Finally, governmental policies that aim at educating consumers or provide them with more options (e.g., informational-based policies, graded USDA organic certification program) can have unintended consequences under an environment in which there exist market failures related to information or competition.My goal is to evaluate this complex environment in three interconnected studies. The first study is an applied theory paper in which I show how curbing consumers' misperception about quality in a market of labeled credence attributes may decrease welfare if firms imperfectly compete in quality and prices. I show that this is true if consumers' misperception offers incentives for firms to either expand the size of the market or increase the average quality of products offered. The second essay empirically tests these insights in controlled laboratory experiments in which subjects act as sellers that compete along quality and price dimensions. I show that the insights of the theory paper hold particularly when consumers overvalue a high-quality product that holds a large market share. Finally, in the last study of this dissertation, I show that the rank-order of the USDA organic certification program may not hold in all markets, as consumers may not have a high willingness to pay for 100\% organic products. In the study, I show that consumers in the market of organic ground coffee market could be better off if USDA ditched the quality grade \textbf{100\% organic} of its program. Doing so would also benefit the most profitable firms in the market and increase welfare.This dissertation shows that label programs and food policies that tackle quality in credence attributes must be designed with two main market characteristics in sight. The first is how well consumers understand the information in labels. The second is what is the degree of competition in the market and how firms can use the certification program to extract further rents from consumers.

Leclère et al.1 have outlined the possibility of a biodiversity transition for the 21st century, a line of thinking equivalent to the Forest Transition theory and what it says about forest cover globally2. The authors use a suite of global models to explore the impacts on global biodiversity of interventions on land-use, consumption and production patterns. They outline six strategies that have the potential to stop the downfall of global terrestrial biodiversity by 2050 and redress it to a pre-1970 level by 2100. Although robust, sophisticated and well-illustrated, the conclusions of this paper cannot alone be used to frame a post-2020 biodiversity strategy.

Presentation18136

Although significant resources are being spent researching and fostering the relationship between forests and livelihoods to promote mutually beneficial outcomes, critical gaps in understanding persist. A core reason for such gaps is that researchers, practitioners, and policy makers lack the structured space to interact and collaborate, which is essential for effective, interdisciplinary research, practice, and evaluation. Thus, scientific findings, policy recommendations, and measured outcomes have not always been synthesized into deep, systemic understanding; learning from practice and implementation does not easily find its way into scientific analyses, and science often fails to influence policy. Communities of practice (CofPs) are dynamic sociocultural systems that bring people together to share and create knowledge around a common topic of interest. They offer participants a space and structure within which to develop new, systemic approaches to multidimensional problems on a common theme. Uniquely informed by a systems-thinking perspective and drawing from the scientific and gray literatures and in-depth interviews with representatives of established CofPs in the natural resource management and development domain, we argue that a well-designed and adequately funded CofP can facilitate interdisciplinary and cross-sectoral relationships and knowledge exchange. Well-designed CofPs integrate a set of core features and processes to enhance individual, collective, and domain outcomes; they set out an initial but evolving purpose, encourage diverse leadership, and promote collective-identity development. Funding facilitates effective communication strategies (e.g., in person meetings). We urge our colleagues across sectors and disciplines to take advantage of CofPs to advance the domain of forests and livelihoods.

Although significant resources are being spent researching and fostering the relationship between forests and livelihoods to promote mutually beneficial outcomes, critical gaps in understanding persist. A core reason for such gaps is that researchers, practitioners, and policy makers lack the structured space to interact and collaborate, which is essential for effective, interdisciplinary research, practice, and evaluation. Thus, scientific findings, policy recommendations, and measured outcomes have not always been synthesized into deep, systemic understanding; learning from practice and implementation does not easily find its way into scientific analyses, and science often fails to influence policy. Communities of practice (CofPs) are dynamic sociocultural systems that bring people together to share and create knowledge around a common topic of interest. They offer participants a space and structure within which to develop new, systemic approaches to multidimensional problems on a common theme. Uniquely informed by a systems-thinking perspective and drawing from the scientific and gray literatures and in-depth interviews with representatives of established CofPs in the natural resource management and development domain, we argue that a well-designed and adequately funded CofP can facilitate interdisciplinary and cross-sectoral relationships and knowledge exchange. Well-designed CofPs integrate a set of core features and processes to enhance individual, collective, and domain outcomes; they set out an initial but evolving purpose, encourage diverse leadership, and promote collective-identity development. Funding facilitates effective communication strategies (e.g., in person meetings). We urge our colleagues across sectors and disciplines to take advantage of CofPs to advance the domain of forests and livelihoods.

Buildings have always played a role in negotiating the boundary between individual expression and social context. Through the lens of architectural history, this article explores the relationships between “community,” “culture,” “craft,” and “specification”—concepts fundamental to the way people express themselves and develop group behaviors and collective meaning. The article focuses on the tension between “craft,” as an implicit community practice based on “skill” and “knowledge,” and “specification,” which presumes an explicit and abstract means of communicating “information.” At the center is the elusive concept of “design.” But what is design? How does it affect culture at an incremental and substantial level? How do new values, both individual and collective, weigh in to the question of cultural change through design? Coming full circle, the article reflects on how the design of built space is integrated into communicative praxis itself, framing and cultivating particular forms of dialogue while displacing or resisting others.

This study examines the relationship between trade and potential determinants: GDP, FDI, unemployment rate in Spanish provinces while incorporting spatial dependence. This methodological paper contributes to the literature because it evaluates trade at a more disaggregated level and includes FDI to explain the trade pattern. The research concludes that: (1) Only considering GDP and unemployment rate; increase in economic growth or a decrease in unemployment rate could motivate trade in the province; likewise trade of the neighbors will increase the competition, which could decrease the province sales. (2) If FDI is included, FDI received by the neighbor provinces could decrease the exports of the province because it makes its rivals more productive and competitive.