Nat. Sustain. 1, 128–135 (2018)

To reconcile the tension in low-income countries between financial gains for clearing local forests and climate regulation benefits of preserving trees, programmes that compensate individuals for lost income if they do not cut down trees have been proposed. However, monetary incentives may undermine pre-existing motivations to conserve forests, and thus render conservation efforts dependent on the intervention in the long term.

Krister Andersson from the University of Colorado, Boulder, and colleagues conducted an experiment in which forest users from rural villages near tropical forests in Bolivia, Indonesia, Peru, Tanzania and Uganda played a common-pool resource game framed in terms of local forest conservation. Introducing bonus payments for conservation reduced hypothetical tree harvesting levels in the game relative to the pre-treatment rounds. Importantly, players continued to conserve more than in the pre-treatment rounds when payments were subsequently removed. Conservation during and following the payment intervention was even higher when participants were also able to communicate with other group members. These results suggest that monetary incentives encouraged forest users to cooperate in the service of conservation, even after payments were discontinued.