Richard B. Howarth

Expanding tree cover outside forests is central to India’s climate and restoration goals, yet the effectiveness of public programs driving these efforts remains uncertain. We examine eight major government schemes aimed at promoting trees on farmlands and other non-forest lands, linking program funding (2013–2019) with observed tree cover change (2017–2023) across three complementary datasets: the Forest Survey of India (FSI), MODIS Vegetation Continuous Fields, and the Brandt et al (2024) high-resolution individual tree maps. Results reveal that while the Sub-Mission on Agroforestry (SMAF) is consistently associated with gains in tree cover on agricultural lands, several other large programs—including those for afforestation, agricultural development, and compensatory planting—show weak or negative relationships with tree cover outside forests. These patterns suggest that program design and targeting, rather than funding volume alone, determine success. Our findings underscore policy priorities such as better alignment of agricultural and forestry incentives to support on-farm trees, improved transparency in program implementation and monitoring, and greater public access to fine-scale expenditure data to enable evaluation of outcomes. As India and other countries expand tree-planting investments under climate and biodiversity commitments, evidence from this study highlights the need to move from funding inputs to verifying outcomes, ensuring that tree-based interventions contribute effectively to both ecological restoration and rural livelihoods.

This paper analyses how Hans Jonas’ Imperative of Responsibility may provide useful insights into the analysis of sustainability issues. The challenges of environmental and social sustainability in terms of inter-generational fairness are analysed and involve a moral duty that is applicable to economic governance. To what extent responsibility is an alternative to utilitarianism and as a principle facilitating the coordination of the agents involved? Exploring this question may be a first step towards the long-term and sustainable conservation of Nature.

Borsuk, M. E., G. Mavrommati, N. R. Samal, S. Zuidema, W. Wollheim, S. H. Rogers, A. M. Thorn, D. Lutz, M. Mineau, C. Grimm, C. P. Wake, R. Howarth, and K. Gardner. 2019. Deliberative multiattribute valuation of ecosystem services across a range of regional land-use, socioeconomic, and climate scenarios for the upper Merrimack River watershed, New Hampshire, USA. Ecology and Society 24(2):11. https://doi.org/10.5751/ES-10806-240211

Environmentalism has evolved since the 1960's from a concern with the preservation of wilderness in the American experience to a concern over pollution of human habitat throughout the industrialized world. Reasoning from a partial-equilibrium framework, economists have argued that environmental valuation and the incorporation of such values in decision-making is a way of caring for future generations. The principle of sustainable development—that needs are to be met as fully as possible while ensuring that the life opportunities of future generations are undiminished relative to the present—is widely accepted. The environmental-valuation literature addressed the interests of future generations through its early association with questions of wilderness preservation. The relationships between social goals and valuation identified by the general-equilibrium framework, however, indicate serious conceptual inadequacies in the analyses to date of global issues such as climate change.

Mavrommati, G., M. Borsuk, and R. B. Howarth. 2016. A novel deliberative multicriteria evaluation approach to ecosystem service valuation. Ecology and Society 22(2):39. https://doi.org/10.5751/ES-09105-220239

Murphy, M., G. Mavrommati, V. R. Mallampalli, R. B. Howarth, and M. E. Borsuk. 2017. Comparing group deliberation to other forms of preference aggregation in valuing ecosystem services. Ecology and Society 22(4):17. https://doi.org/10.5751/ES-09519-220417

In the Anthropocene, coupled human and natural systems dominate and only a few natural systems remain relatively unaffected by human influence. On the one hand, conservation criteria based on areas of minimal human impact are not relevant to much of the biosphere. On the other hand, conservation criteria based on economic factors are problematic with respect to their ability to arrive at operational indicators of well‐being that can be applied in practice over multiple generations. Coupled human and natural systems are subject to economic development which, under current management structures, tends to affect natural systems and cross planetary boundaries. Hence, designing and applying conservation criteria applicable in real‐world systems where human and natural systems need to interact and sustainably coexist is essential. By recognizing the criticality of satisfying basic needs as well as the great uncertainty over the needs and preferences of future generations, we sought to incorporate conservation criteria based on minimal human impact into economic evaluation. These criteria require the conservation of environmental conditions such that the opportunity for intergenerational welfare optimization is maintained. Toward this end, we propose the integration of ecological–biological thresholds into decision making and use as an example the planetary‐boundaries approach. Both conservation scientists and economists must be involved in defining operational ecological–biological thresholds that can be incorporated into economic thinking and reflect the objectives of conservation, sustainability, and intergenerational welfare optimization.