Social and environmental impacts of forest management certification in Indonesia

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In response to unsustainable timber production in tropical forest concessions, voluntary forest management certification programs such as the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) have been introduced to improve environmental, social, and economic performance over existing management practices. However, despite the proliferation of forest certification over the past two decades, few studies have evaluated its effectiveness. Using temporally and spatially explicit village-level data on environmental and socio-economic indicators in Kalimantan (Indonesia), we evaluate the performance of the FSC-certified timber concessions compared to non-certified logging concessions. Employing triple difference matching estimators, we find that between 2000 and 2008 FSC reduced aggregate deforestation by 5 percentage points and the incidence of air pollution by 31%. It had no statistically significant impacts on fire incidence or core areas, but increased forest perforation by 4 km2 on average. In addition, we find that FSC reduced firewood dependence (by 33%), respiratory infections (by 32%) and malnutrition (by 1 person) on average. By conducting a rigorous statistical evaluation of FSC certification in a biodiversity hotspot such as Indonesia, we provide a reference point and offer methodological and data lessons that could aid the design of ongoing and future evaluations of a potentially critical conservation policy. © 2015 Miteva et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. View source
Year

2015

Secondary Title

PLoS ONE

Publisher

Public Library of Science

Volume

10

Number

7

DOI

http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0129675

Language

Keyword(s)

air pollution, Article, biodiversity, certification, controlled study, deforestation, environmental impact, environmental planning, environmental protection, forest management, human, Indonesia, logging, malnutrition, respiratory tract infection, social aspect, forest, forestry, Forests

Classification
Form: Journal Article
Geographical Area: Indonesia

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