Climate change will likely impact the ecosystem services and biodiversity generated from conserved land. Land conservation can also play a significant role in achieving cost-effective mitigation of greenhouse gas emissions. In this special issue we feature seven papers from the 2017 NAREA Workshop, “Climate Change and Land Conservation and Restoration: Advances in Economics Methods and Policies for Adaptation and Mitigation.” The articles include papers furthering the methodological frontier; portfolio optimization, dynamic rangeland stocking, and global timber harvest models, and those highlighting innovative applications; climate smart agricultural practices in Nigeria and Vietnam, welfare impacts on birding, and carbon and albedo pricing.

Environmental economics has made it possible to estimate prices for air pollution externalities. However, these values are rarely observed in emissions trading markets. Moreover, market outcomes show prices persistently remain below expectations and frequently fall over time. Low allowance prices may appear virtuous, but often reflect poor market design that does not anticipate interaction with other policies, and may undermine confidence in market-based approaches to environmental policy. This paper surveys emissions markets and factors influencing prices, and concludes with a discussion of how market design can anticipate and remedy the strong tendency for low prices.

In this paper we develop tools and intuition for portfolio optimization for multiple conservation objectives. We show it is more efficient to optimize a conservation portfolio for multiple goods jointly, allowing planners to exploit information about multiple dimensions of correlations between goods. We identified a new type of correlation that is important for optimal conservation planning of multiple objectives under uncertainty: scenario correlation between objectives in a given part of the landscape. The conservation planner faces a different kind of problem if the objectives at hand respond similarly rather than differently to climate shocks in subregions of the planning area.

We explore the optimal regulation of forest carbon and albedo for climate change mitigation. We develop a partial equilibrium market-level model with socially optimal carbon and albedo pricing and characterize optimal land allocation and harvests. We numerically assess the policy's market-level impacts on land allocation, harvests, and climate forcing, and evaluate how parameter choices (albedo strength, productivity of forest land, and carbon and albedo prices) affect the outcomes. Carbon pricing alone leads to an overprovision of climate benefits at the expense of food and timber production. Complementing the policy with albedo pricing reduces these welfare losses.

We use a random utility model for birding destination choices based on the reports of Oregon and Washington State members of the Cornell University Laboratory of Ornithology eBird citizen science project. We estimate spatially differentiated welfare effects that birders may experience as a consequence of forecasted changes in land cover and climate. We predict per-trip welfare effects (equivalent variations) expected under a business-as-usual scenario using published forecasts for both land cover and species richness. We find significant county-level heterogeneity across eBirders in predicted average per-trip welfare effects. The results suggest discernible distributional consequences across active birders in different areas.

Using a sample survey from Vietnam's M&RRD, this study examines both the factors affecting smallholder households’ perceptions of climate change, and the impact of climatic change on smallholders’ income and land allocation decisions. Results show a significant and negative impact of perception of climate change on income of smallholder households. Smallholders with perceived climate changes reduce land allocated to paddy crop. Farmers make strategic decision to counter the negative effects of climate change by increasing the amount of rented land for paddy crop production, while at the same time decreasing the amount of owned land allocated to paddy crop.

Climate change will increase variability in temperature and precipitation on rangelands, impacting ecosystem services including livestock grazing. Facing uncertainty about future climate, managers must know if current practices will maintain rangeland sustainability. Herein, the future density of an invasive species, broom snakeweed, is estimated using a long-term ecological dataset and climate projections. We find that livestock stocking rates determined using a current method result in lower forage production, allowable stocking rate, and grazing value than an economically efficient stocking rate. Results indicate that using ecology and adaptive methods in management are critical to the sustainability of rangelands.

Influence of land tenure and property rights (LTPRs) on farmers’ willingness to accept (WTA) incentives to embrace climate-smart agriculture (CSA) to combat land degradation was examined with choice experiment data collected from 1,138 farmers drawn across 16 States in Nigeria. Data analysis within random-effect and mixed logit framework revealed the existence of strong linkages between the payment vehicle, LTPRs and farmers’ CSA preferences. While farmers who were dependent on leased and/or communal lands expressed implicit dislike for CSA-related investments, the majority with freehold titles, particularly those with registered titles, expressed positive WTA incentives to embrace CSA and combat land degradation.

Although most global forest economic studies have found that warming is likely to increase forest supply, these studies have examined only the limited warming expected through 2100. This study extends the analysis out to 2250 to test much higher levels of warming to examine very long term effects. Future warming is predicted to steadily increase forest productivity, with global timber supply predicted to increase through 2250, even with warming up to 11 °C warming. However, natural forestland and biomass will shrink. This result suggests far future forests will not be able to hold the same stock of carbon they hold today.