Advancement to Candidacy Presentation: “Comparing Protection Types in the Peruvian Amazon: Multiple-Use Protected Areas Did No Worse for Forests”, Jimena Rico Straffon

Jimena Rico Straffon will be presenting her Advancement to Candidacy paper, “Comparing Protection Types in the
Peruvian Amazon: Multiple-Use Protected Areas Did No Worse for Forests”. To access the Advancement paper, you
must have an active UCSB NetID and password.

Jimena is an Economics PhD student at UCSB, interested in the intersection between Environment and Development Economics. She previously worked at the Economic Research Division of Mexico's Central Bank conducting research on Labor, Inequality, and Monetary Policy. Jimena has a Master of Public Policy from Duke University where she conducted research on the forest loss impacts of logging certification and protected areas in Peru and Cameroon. She also worked for the Mexican Ministry of Environment and a private consulting firm. Jimena also holds a B.A. in Economics from Instituto Tecnológico Autónomo de México (ITAM).

Protected areas (PAs), which restrict economic activities, are the leading land and marine policy for ecosystem
conservation. Most contexts feature different types of protection that vary in their stringency of management.
Using spatially detailed panel data for 1986-2018, we estimate PAs’ impacts upon forests in the Peruvian Amazon.
Which type of protection has greater impacts on the forest is ambiguous, theoretically, given potential for
significant differences by type in siting and enforcement. We find that the less strict multiple-use PAs, that allow
local livelihoods, do no worse for forests than strict PAs: each PA type holds off small loss spikes seen in
unprotected forests; and multiple-use, if anything, do a bit better. This adds to evidence on the coexistence of
private activities with conservation objectives.