Kate Sims, former Visiting Scholar and Pre-Doctoral Fellow with the Harvard Environmental Economics Program, is co-lead of a new study describing how land conservation in New England impacts local economies by increasing employment rates. Kate is currently Chair of the Economics Department at Amherst College. The study, published in Conservation Biology, is the first of its kind, estimating the local net impacts of both private and public land conservation over 25 years (1990-2015) across 1,500 cities and towns that are home to 99.97% of New England’s population.
New England Public Radio (Springfield, Massachusetts) reported on the paper; the audio and a write-up are here. Jonathan Thompson, Senior Ecologist at Harvard Forest, is a co-author; the Harvard Forest reports on the paper here.