Abstract

We organized one evaluation of the paper: “Does Conservation Work in General Equilibrium” under our “interim evaluation” policy.1 To read this evaluation, please see the link below.

Evaluations

1. Evaluator 1

Overall ratings

We asked evaluators to provide overall assessments as well as ratings for a range of specific criteria.

I. Overall assessment: We asked them to rank this paper “heuristically” as a percentile “relative to all serious research in the same area that you have encountered in the last three years.” We requested they “consider all aspects of quality, credibility, importance to knowledge production, and importance to practice.”

II. Journal rank tier, normative rating (0-5):2 On a ‘scale of journals’, what ‘quality of journal’ should this be published in? (See ranking tiers discussed here.) Note: 0= lowest/none, 5= highest/best.

See “Metrics” below for a more detailed breakdown of the evaluators’ ratings across several categories. To see these ratings in the context of all Unjournal ratings, with some analysis, see our data presentation here.3

See here for the current full evaluator guidelines, including further explanation of the requested ratings.4

Evaluation summaries

Anonymous evaluator 15

This paper investigates the impacts of conservation policies on deforestation, […] explicitly [taking] into account indirect general equilibrium effects. Intuitively, protecting land in certain locations affects local land prices, wages, and agricultural output prices that may lead to deforestation elsewhere, given that regional markets are interconnected – this is known in the literature as ‘leakage.’ Though widely acknowledged as conceptually important, the existing empirical works have not yet explicitly dealt with this issue, except via ‘reduced form’ spillovers, focusing on regions that are adjacent to protected areas (PA). This ‘traditional’ approach, though informative, is not fully satisfying as spillovers may affect non-adjacent regions as well. As I see it, this is a crucial gap in the literature that this paper aims to fill. That is an important contribution.

To do so, the authors develop a quantitative spatial equilibrium model of the Brazilian economy. They find that targeting protection in the regions with highest deforestation levels can be effective, despite the fact that leakage increases significantly in a longer time-horizon. Specifically, after one year, 2-3% of the deforestation reductions are outdone by leakage, which is pretty small. Although this number increases to 10% after 10 years, it is still sufficiently small in my estimation to justify protecting the land.

Metrics

Ratings

See here for details on the categories below, and the guidance given to evaluators.

Journal ranking tiers

See here for more details on these tiers.

Unjournal process notes

We are evaluating this under our interim evaluation” policy. David Reinstein is serving as the evaluation manager.

This is an evaluation of an interim version of “Does Conservation Work in General Equilibrium?” by Veronica Salazar Restrepo and Gabriel Leite Mariante. This version was shared with us in ~April 2024. This evaluates a version of this paper the authors updated in March 2024 and privately shared with us. However, the authors wanted to make it clear that this is not their final version, and they are planning further updates, including in response to the evaluation below. We may ask for further evaluations/followups on a future revised version.

Why we chose this paper

Ben Balmford suggested that we consider this paper. He noted (excerpting this):

This paper explores whether conservation interventions have a net positive effect on the environment, once you account for potential leakage. Leakage - probably “negative spillovers” to most economists - is the idea that if we intervene with some conservation measure, we are in effect going to reduce production (typically this is agriculture, in situ, with reductions at the extensive margin; but I guess could be any other good and could be at the intensive margin). The point is that this is likely to raise the price of these goods (and substitutes) and increase production (again, either extensive or intensive margin) somewhere else.

This is IMO a key issue in a whole range of environmental issues, and has been poorly dealt with to date [with a few exceptions]…

The ‘assessor’ gave a second opinion (excerpted):

Clearly an important issue for climate change policies, and for other forms of intervention in other areas of interest (perhaps animal welfare, other GCRs, other forms of pollution) … if you make ‘doing the (bad) thing’ harder in one area, you may reduce production drive up prices and lead to ‘more of the bad thing’ in other areas. Important to measure and quantify this for considering the impact of policies and interventions, and perhaps even charity-driven subsidies to ‘not do something’. …

Author engagement

The authors granted permission for us to evaluate this under the aforementioned ‘interim’ policy, and to share this evaluation publicly, They said they appreciated the suggestions and are working to address these in their next draft. They have not yet provided an ‘authors response’, but indicated some willingness to respond in the future.

COI considerations

The ‘assessor’ of this paper, David Reinstein, also served as the evaluation manager for this paper. However, four other members of our team (in addition to the suggester and the assessor) voted in favor of prioritizing the paper.

Other comments and considerations from The Unjournal management

Ben Balmford, who suggested this paper, noted

This is IMO a key issue in a whole range of environmental issues, and has been poorly dealt with to date (exceptions I would say are the recent AER: I paper on battery recycling, and Sabrina Eisenbarth’s slightly older paper in JEEM on fisheries). Leakage is obviously a problem for identification, owing to breaking the SUTVA assumption, but perhaps more importantly is also a problem when we come to think about intervention effectiveness. Perhaps particularly relevant at the moment owing to the “additionality crisis” which has gripped the voluntary carbon market and Verra in particular. Additionality and leakage are linked in the sense that additionality = would this local effect have been observed absent intervention, and if the answer is yes, that presumably means that some production has been lost, opening up the potential for leakage. (NB: this idea is called the additionality-leakage duality in a paper by Ben Filewood, at the LSE - that itself is a decent paper aimed more at the science side).

At the minute, additionality has been addressed, but the question of leakage not really, and yet the net effect of both is crucial to understanding effectiveness. As such, I think this paper is addressing a really crucial question. It does so in the context of policies looking to limit deforestation in Brazil, which is obviously a really important area for conservation in and of itself. The findings are more optimist[ic] than I’d have predicted,  with only [about a] 10% leakage rate (driven by intensification and reallocation of both workers and land).