Showing papers by "Alan Grainger published in 2015"
TL;DR: The Global Forest Resources Assessment 2015 (FRA 2015) of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations FRA 2015 was based on responses to surveys by individual countries using a common reporting framework, agreed definitions and reporting standards as discussed by the authors.
1,109 citations
TL;DR: In this paper, the feasibility of a land degradation neutral (LDN) scheme as an activity of the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD) was evaluated, and the authors concluded that national and international implementation would involve political, organizational and technological challenges.
79 citations
TL;DR: In this article, the authors investigated the value and distribution of wetland ecosystem service benefits and costs across the three main stakeholder sectors (local community, government and corporate) and found that the net monetary value of the wetlands is $11,000 per delta household of which $9000 was generated as cash income supporting household activities such as education and healthcare.
Abstract: The Niger Delta wetlands are of international importance for their biodiversity, and support a large human population. The value and distribution of wetland ecosystem service benefits and costs across the three main stakeholder sectors (local community, government and corporate) were investigated. Results show that the net monetary value of the wetlands is $11,000 per delta household of which $9000 was generated as cash income supporting household activities such as education and healthcare. The total annual value of provisioning services to local people is approximately $25 billion, about three times the value of oil production in the region. However, local communities also bear about 75% of the environmental costs of oil extraction, equivalent to about 19% of the oil industry profit. Local people, who experience considerable economic hardship and lack alternative income sources, receive little compensation from the oil sector. These results highlight the importance of understanding not only the benefits provided by Niger Delta wetlands, but also the distribution of the environmental costs associated with their use. We conclude that ecosystem service valuation studies should give greater attention to the social distribution of identified values. Such distributional analyses, rarely available, provide insight into how sustainable natural resource management policy and practice could be better aligned to social justice concerns.
58 citations