Remittance from migrants reinforces forest recovery for China's reforestation policy.

Forests play a key role in the mitigation of global warming and provide many other vital ecosystem goods and services. However, as forest continues to vanish at an alarming rate from the surface of the planet, the world desperately needs knowledge on what contributes to forest preservation and restoration. Migration, a hallmark of globalization, is widely recognized as a main driver of forest recovery and poverty alleviation.

Determinants of Pathogen Contamination of the Environment in the Greater Yangon Area, Myanmar.

Recent results from water, sanitation, and hygiene interventions highlight the need to better understand environmental influences on enteropathogen transmission. We quantified a range of viral, bacterial, and protozoal pathogens and one indicator, in soil and water from urban and rural sites in and around Yangon, Myanmar. We found that environmental characteristics associated with contamination differed by pathogens and substrates.

Systems Science Approaches for Global Environmental Health Research: Enhancing Intervention Design and Implementation for Household Air Pollution (HAP) and Water, Sanitation, and Hygiene (WASH) Programs.

Background: Two of the most important causes of global disease fall in the realm of environmental health: household air pollution (HAP) and poor water, sanitation, and hygiene (WASH) conditions. Interventions, such as clean cookstoves, household water treatment, and improved sanitation facilities, have great potential to yield reductions in disease burden. However, in recent trials and implementation efforts, interventions to improve HAP and WASH conditions have shown few of the desired health gains, raising fundamental questions about current approaches.

Looking for medium-term conservation and development impacts of community management agreements in Uganda's Rwenzori Mountains National Park.

We evaluate the impact of collaborative management agreements (CMAs) designed to protect forests and raise incomes for smallholders living adjacent to Rwenzori Mountains National Park (RMNP), Uganda. We use a quasi-experimental study design to estimate changes in several income measures, as well as land cover using three waves (2003, 2007, and 2012) of household survey and remote sensing data. Overall, we find no significant impact of CMAs on any of our income measures.

Smallholder responses to climate anomalies in rural Uganda.

Recent research suggests that sub-Saharan Africa will be among the regions most affected by the negative social and biophysical ramifications of climate change. Smallholders are anticipated to respond to rising temperatures and precipitation anomalies through on-farm management strategies and diversification into off-farm activities. Few studies have empirically examined the relationship between climate anomalies and rural livelihoods.

Early Adoption of an Improved Household Energy System in Urban Rwanda.

Cooking with solid fuels and inefficient cookstoves has adverse consequences for health, environment, and human well-being. Despite the promise of improved cookstoves to reduce these impacts, adoption rates are relatively low. Using a 2-wave sample of 144 households from the baseline and first midline of an ongoing 4-year randomized controlled trial in Rwanda, we analyze the drivers and associations of early adoption of a household energy intervention marketed by a private sector firm.

A 'burning opportunity' for human rights: using human rights as a catalyst for policies to mitigate the health risk of household air pollution.

With over 3 billion people dependent on traditional cooking and heating technologies, efforts to address the health burden of exposure to household air pollution (HAP), as well as other sociodemographic impacts associated with energy poverty, are central to sustainable development objectives. Yet despite overwhelming scientific consensus on the health burden of HAP exposure, particularly harms to impoverished women and children in developing countries, advocates currently lack a human rights framework to mitigate HAP exposure through improved access to cleaner household energy systems. This article examines the role of human rights in framing state obligations to mitigate HAP exposure, supporting environmental health for the most vulnerable through intersectional obligations across the human right to health, the collective right to development, and women's and children's rights.

Implementation and scale-up of a biomass pellet and improved cookstove enterprise in Rwanda.

This paper reviews the experience of a for-profit firm in Rwanda promoting biomass pellets and a fan micro-gasification improved cookstove as a clean cooking alternative to charcoal. Consumers purchase locally produced biomass pellets and receive the improved cookstove on a lease basis. The cost of the pellets and stove(s) is lower than the cost of cooking with charcoal in the urban setting where our study takes place.

Barriers and facilitators to adoption and use of fuel pellets and improved cookstoves in urban Rwanda.

Background: The environmental and health impacts of reliance on solid fuels and traditional cookstoves in low-income countries have motivated the promotion of household cooking energy systems that use cleaner burning fuels and cookstoves that lead to reduced exposure to harmful pollutants. Little is known about adoption and use of such systems from the users' perspective.

Methods: We explored the facilitators and barriers to adoption and use of a private sector marketed household cooking energy system that uses sustainably produced biomass pellets and the cleanest burning fan micro-gasification stove currently available.

Impacts of China's Grain for Green Program on Migration and Household Income.

In the late 1990s, China's Yangtze and Yellow River Basins suffered devastating natural disasters widely attributed to the degradation of soil and water resources. The Government of China responded with a number of major environmental programs, the most expensive and influential of which, the Grain for Green (GfG) Program, was implemented widely from 1999. Under the GfG Program-also known as the Sloping Land Conversion or Conversion of Cropland to Forest Program-the central government compensates farmers to convert cropland on steep slopes or otherwise ecologically sensitive areas to forest or grassland.

Fuel Efficiency and Air Pollutant Concentrations of Wood-Burning Improved Cookstoves in Malawi: Implications for Scaling-up Cookstove Programs.

National governments and other key stakeholders in developing countries are grappling with how to reduce household air pollution (HAP) resulting from cooking with solid fuels using traditional cooking technologies. Recent studies have shown that improved cookstoves may offer reductions in fuel use and harmful emissions of carbon monoxide (CO) and fine particulate matter (PM), yet there is little quantitative evidence collected in a "real-world" setting showing how improved stoves perform directly compared to traditional cooking technologies. Our simulated kitchen study takes place in a semi-controlled, "real-world" setting in Malawi and was designed to quantify the fuel efficiency improvements and air pollutant concentration reductions capabilities of two improved stoves currently marketed in the country.

Household air pollution (HAP), microenvironment and child health: Strategies for mitigating HAP exposure in urban Rwanda.

Exposure to household air pollution (HAP) from cooking and heating with solid fuels is major risk factor for morbidity and mortality in sub-Saharan Africa. Children under five are particularly at risk for acute lower respiratory infection. We use baseline data from randomized controlled trial evaluating a household energy intervention in Gisenyi, Rwanda to investigate the role of the microenvironment as a determinant of children's HAP-related health symptoms.

Building the evidence base for REDD+: Study design and methods for evaluating the impacts of conservation interventions on local well-being.

Climate change mitigation in developing countries is increasingly expected to generate co-benefits that help meet sustainable development goals. This has been an expectation and a hotly contested issue in REDD+ (reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation) since its inception. While the core purpose of REDD+ is to reduce carbon emissions, its legitimacy and success also depend on its impacts on local well-being.

Social capital, collective action, and communal grazing lands in Uganda.

Recent scholars have found that collective action can be harnessed to sustainably manage common property, contrary to longstanding hypotheses that without effective external regulation community members will exploit communal resources. Researchers have also found that social capital, in addition to biophysical conditions and community attributes, is an important element of successful collective action. However, few studies exploring this topic have specifically examined communal grazing land, which is a critical component of rural livelihoods in many parts of the developing world.

Land use and household energy dynamics in Malawi.

Interventions to mitigate household air pollution (HAP) from cooking with solid fuels often fail to take into account the role of access to freely available woodfuels in determining fuel choice and willingness to adopt clean cooking technologies, key factors in mitigating the burden of HAP. We use national-scale remote sensing data on land use land cover change, and population representative data from two waves of the Malawi Living Standards Measurement Survey to explore the relationship between land use change and the type of fuel households use, time spent collecting fuel, and expenditures on fuel, hypothesizing that land use dynamics influence household-level choice of primary cooking fuel. We find considerable heterogeneity with respect to regeneration and deforestation/degradation dynamics and evidence of spatial clustering.

Biomass Cooking Fuels and Health Outcomes for Women in Malawi.

In sub-Saharan Africa, biomass fuels account for approximately 90% of household energy consumption. Limited evidence exists on the association between different biomass fuels and health outcomes. We report results from a cross-sectional sample of 655 households in Malawi.

Stoves or Sugar? Willingness to Adopt Improved Cookstoves in Malawi.

Malawi has set a target of adoption of two million improved cookstoves (ICS) by 2020. Meeting this objective requires knowledge about determinants of adoption, particularly in rural areas where the cost of traditional cooking technologies and fuels are non-monetary, and where people have limited capacity to purchase an ICS. We conducted a discrete choice experiment with 383 households in rural Malawi asking them if they would chose a locally made ICS or a package of sugar and salt of roughly equal value.

Taxes and Bribes in Uganda.

Using data from 433 firms operating along Uganda's charcoal and timber supply chains we investigate patterns of bribe payment and tax collection between supply chain actors and government officials responsible for collecting taxes and fees. We examine the factors associated with the presence and magnitude of bribe and tax payments using a series of bivariate probit and Tobit regression models. We find empirical support for a number of hypotheses related to payments, highlighting the role of queuing, capital-at-risk, favouritism, networks, and role in the supply chain.

Environmental Income and Rural Livelihoods: A Global-Comparative Analysis.

This paper presents results from a comparative analysis of environmental income from approximately 8000 households in 24 developing countries collected by research partners in CIFOR's Poverty Environment Network (PEN). Environmental income accounts for 28% of total household income, 77% of which comes from natural forests. Environmental income shares are higher for low-income households, but differences across income quintiles are less pronounced than previously thought.

Land Use Change, Fuel Use and Respiratory Health in Uganda.

This paper examines how biomass supply and consumption are affected by land use change in Uganda. We find that between 2007 and 2012 there was a 22% reduction in fuelwood sourced from proximate forests, and an 18% increase in fuelwood sourced from fallows and other areas with lower biomass availability and quality. We estimate a series of panel regression models and find that deforestation has a negative effect on total fuel consumed.