When local residents are allowed to make rules about managing nearby forests, the forests are more likely to provide greater economic benefits to households and contain more biodiversity, two University of Michigan researchers and a colleague conclude from an analysis of forest practices in tropical developing countries of East Africa and South Asia. Lauren Persha and Arun Agrawal of the University of Michigan and Ashwini Chhatre of the University of Illinois used evidence from more than 80 forest sites in six tropical countries to test how local participation affects social and ecological benefits from forests.
Jackie Turner, a U-M undergraduate with a double major in the Program in the Environment (PitE) and Screen Arts and Cultures, found that her interests in environment, sustainability, developing nations and documentary filmmaking converged when she traveled to Mpala, a 48,000-acre wildlife conservancy and biodiversity research center in Kenya, as part of a class taught by SNRE professors Rebecca Hardin and Johannes Foufopoulos.
A postdoctoral research fellow at SNRE's International Forestry Resources and Institutions (IFRI) research initiative, Lauren Persha, along with co-investigator and SNRE Professor Arun Agrawal, have received a nearly $400,000 grant from the International Initiative for Impact Evaluation (3ie) to investigate the outcomes of Tanzania's ongoing forest management systems.
Her theories on economic governance and common property earned Elinor Ostrom a share of this year's Nobel Prize for Economic Sciences. But since 2006, a major initiative she founded to grow and share applications of her research has been housed at the School of Natural Resources and Environment Professor Ostrom, who received an honorary degree from U-M in 2006, started the International Forestry Resources and Institutions (IFRI) research network in the early 1990s. Its focus then, as now, was on collecting and analyzing data at local levels related to forest governance.
Agrawal, colleague link land management, ownership and climate change in forests of developing world
Studying 80 forest "commons" in more than a dozen developing nations, a University of Michigan researcher and his University of Illinois colleague have found links between local ownership and control of those forests and the fight against climate change. They found that greater local ownership and input into forest management appear to keep these areas, also called forest commons, from being overharvested or otherwise misused, thereby increasing their ability to capture carbon and mitigate or slow the effects of climate change. Their findings, based on data collected on three continents, appear in a paper published online Oct. 5 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The authors are Arun Agrawal, a professor and associate dean of the U-M School of Natural Resources and Environment, and Ashwini Chhatre of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Don Zak, a professor in the School of Natural Resources and Environment, will deliver the Francis Clark Distinguished Lectureship at the 2009 Soil Science Society of America meeting. The lectureship is the highest award given by the society for pioneering work in soil biology and biochemistry. His lecture will be delivered Nov. 3 at the International Annual Meetings of the Soil Science Society of America (SSSA). That event is Nov. 1-5 at the David L. Lawrence Convention Center in Pittsburgh, Pa. It brings together more than 3,500 people from 50-plus countries representing academia, government and private industry, including a large contingent of undergraduate and graduate students.
Jan L. McAlpine, a leading U.S. government advisor, policy maker, negotiator and facilitator on international issues, has assumed a new role at the University of Michigan to contribute to and learn about collaborative research and education on environmental sustainability. The 17-year government-service veteran, currently on a one-year sabbatical from the U.S. Department of State, is serving as a senior research fellow with Natural Resources and Environment and the first visiting scholar at the Graham Environmental Sustainability Institute.