Natural resource management involves balancing benefits and costs that accrue through time. How individuals and local communities weight such tradeoffs can profoundly influence how they use and conserve resources. Our goal was to understand time preferences of future benefits for goods that are relevant for developing effective conservation strategies. We surveyed >500 Fulani in Benin about their time preferences regarding financial, ecological, and agricultural goods, summarizing these in the form of discount rates. In a discrete‐time, constant annual form, our results were much higher (median: 150%) than values often discussed in literature. These discount rates declined through time; people valued the future more than would be assumed based on constant discounting. Discount rates were higher for financial goods than ecological or agricultural goods. We illustrate how our estimates of discount rates change recommendations for optimal management of forest resource harvesting in the tropics. While members of this grazing community discount future benefits at a high rate, they do so in ways that contrast with conventional economic theory and favor long‐term use of nontimber forest products.

中文翻译：

---

牧民在管理自然资源时如何权衡未来的环境利益

自然资源管理涉及平衡随时间累积的收益和成本。个人和当地社区如何权衡这种折衷会深刻影响他们使用和节省资源的方式。我们的目标是了解与制定有效保护策略相关的商品未来收益的时间偏好。我们对贝宁的500多个富拉尼人进行了调查，以了解他们在金融，生态和农产品方面的时间偏好，并以折现率的形式对其进行汇总。在一个离散的，固定的年度形式中，我们的结果比文献中经常讨论的值要高得多（中位数：150％）。这些折扣率随着时间的流逝而下降；人们对未来的重视程度超过了基于持续贴现的假设。金融产品的折现率高于生态或农业产品。我们说明了折现率的估算如何改变对热带地区森林资源采伐的最佳管理的建议。尽管这个放牧社区的成员高估了未来的收益，但这样做的方式与传统的经济理论相反，并赞成长期使用非木材林产品。