Transitory Sustainability Effects of Behavioral Changes : Short-Term Benefits of COVID-19 Lockdowns Reversed Over Time, Resulting in More Wildfires in the Amazon

To control the COVID-19 pandemic, governments worldwide deployed unprecedented policies. Mandatory lockdowns, mobility restrictions, and calls for social distancing and voluntary individual constraints were among the key interventions to reduce exposure risks. The resulting global reductions in human mobility constitute a massive natural experiment on whether and how changes in human activities affect natural ecosystems and sustainability. This analysis focuses on the relationship between human activities and wildfires. Human activities contribute to wildfires, both directly and indirectly, threatening ecological, environmental, and climatic stability, as well as human health. Prior research of the effects of lockdowns on natural systems report beneficial outcomes due to the lack on human activities. In our analysis we relied on the rapid change of human mobility rate to model its relationship with wildfires in Amazon basin countries during the initial COVID-19 lockdown in March 2020. Our analysis reveals that constraining human mobility significantly reduced fires in the Amazon regions of Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, and Brazil during a brief initial period, but the effects dissipated after 30 days. After controlling for environmental conditions, at 60 days the number of fires was higher than previous years’ average. The unintended sustainability effects of behavioral changes after COVID-19 were short-lived and we document a compensatory effect that resulted in higher wildfire incidence. By highlighting how rapidly societies returned to business-as-usual practices and overcompensated for opportunity loss, our analysis points towards the need for durable institutional and policy changes for effective shifts in human behaviors towards longer-term sustainability outcomes