Continuing to challenge the narrative that land conservation is bad for business growth, Katharine Sims, associate professor of economics and environmental studies and chair of the economics department, is now getting attention for a pair of recent studies on the impact of protection efforts in New England and Nepal.
Sims recently spoke with WGBY’s Connecting Point about her recent paper in Conservation Biology, which looked at the impacts of public land protection in New England from 1990 to 2015.
The study, funded by the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) Long-Term Ecological Research (LTER) Program, “revealed that when land conservation increased, employment also increased over the five-year period that followed,” Farm and Dairy reported. “If a town with 50,000 employed citizens increased its land protection by 50 percent, it saw, on average, 750 additional people employed in the next five years.”
[UPDATE July 2019: Sims has published a column for The Conversation summarising the findings of the New England study.]
Scienmag and Science Daily reported on a University of Manchester study published in Nature Sustainability, for which Sims joined the a UK team looking at conservation in Nepal. The study found that areas with community forest management were 51% more likely to witness simultaneous reductions in deforestation and poverty.
“We sought to learn from Nepal’s experience implementing an innovative conservation policy,” Sims told Scienmag. We hope our methods will be useful for future study of community forestry in different contexts and compared to alternate governance structures.”