Land cover change effects from community forest management in Michoacan, Mexico

More than half of Mexico's forests and about a third of the forests of the world are communally owned. Despite this, community forest management (CFM) is the least studied forest management policy, and existing studies have focused on the effects of CFM on deforestation. In this paper, we evaluate the effect of CFM on land cover more broadly, to understand how CFM affects a community's land use decisions. Mexico's forestry administration mandates that to legally sell timber, communities must adopt forest management plans designed by a certified forester. In this study, we use differential access to foresters to identify the effect of community management on land cover and deforestation. We find that over time communities that adopt management plans see relatively more primary forest, a limited expansion of the agricultural frontier, and a decrease in deforestation. The decrease in deforestation is economically significant since the economic benefits from the avoided CO2 emissions alone could far outweigh the costs of adopting the management plans.