When agricultural productivity improves, farmers may react by expanding farming and further encroach on forest lands, or they may choose to intensify and produce more output with less land. We specify the conditions under which agricultural productivity can have such ambiguous effects on...

Rural agroforestry landscapes in West and Central Africa face a number of threats. Since decades, the ever escalating bushmeat crisis is pushing populations of threatened wildlife closer to extinction in many parts of West and Central Africa. In addition, population growth and economic needs are...

Every government that controls an exhaustible resource must decide whether to exploit it or to conserve and thereby let the subsequent government decide whether to exploit or conserve. This paper develops a theory of this situation and shows when a small probability that some future government...

Does economic development have an unavoidable ecological cost? We examine the ecological impacts of one of India's signature place-based economic policies involving massive tax benefits for new industrial and infrastructure development following the creation of the new state of Uttarakhand. The...

Free trade often leads to resource depletion, such as deforestation in the tropics. This paper first presents a dynamic model whereby the South (S) depletes to export the extracted units (lumber) or the produce (beef) from land available after depletion. Because of the damages, the North...

The production of charcoal to meet cooking needs of urban households is one of the main causes of deforestation and degradation of Africa’s tropical forests, which offer significant carbon sequestration capacity to the global economy. In collaboration with a reputable local microfinance...

This paper sets out an empirically-driven approach for targeting environmental policies optimally in order to combat deforestation. We focus on the Amazon, the world's most extensive rainforest, where Brazil's federal government issued a ‘Priority List' of municipalities in 2008, to be...

This paper revisits the issue of environment and development raised in the 1992 World Development Report, with new analysis tools and data. The paper discusses inference and interpretation in a machine learning framework. The results suggest that production gradually favors conserving the...

This paper sets out an empirically-driven approach for targeting environmental policies optimally in order to combat deforestation. We focus on the Amazon, the world's most extensive rainforest, where Brazil's federal government issued a 'Priority List' of municipalities in 2008, to be targeted...

The land use sector is an area with high potential to pursue mitigation and adaptation goals alike. However, due to the complexity derived from managing landscapes with multiple objectives and the lack of tools to assess the outcome, this potential is presumably subtilized in practice. In order...

Public health interventions targeting contaminated drinking water and indoor air pollution may help to reduce two of the leading causes of death among children under 5 in Rwanda - diarrhea and pneumonia. These interventions also have the potential to provide economic benefits, including...

In this paper, I study the effectiveness of privately managed FSC certified forests and public sustainability reserves distributed over the entire Brazilian Amazon from 2002-2015. The paper uses high-resolution data on forest cover derived from satellite images and organized in a grid of 1 km2...

Mitigation and adaptation are the main strategies to address climate change. Both of them are interrelated instruments and key elements of an integral approach to tackle the phenomenon. This interrelation is particularly strong in the land use sector, an area in which practically any policy has...

This paper proposes an environmental DSGE model with deforestation of a tropical rain forest. The forest can be used to produce goods, but it also affects the well-being of the representative individual. Environmental policy is implemented with the taxation of the deforestation activity. We...

A growing number of case studies and reports suggest that Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) play an important role in fighting against deforestation, and the penetration of ICT help decrease deforestation in a different part of world's forests. The aim of this study is to test...

This paper documents the effect of primary forest cover loss on increased incidence of malaria. The evidence is consistent with an ecological response and land use change, anti-malarial programs or migration cannot explain the effect of forest cover loss on increased malarial incidence. The...

This paper documents the effect of primary forest cover loss on increased incidence of malaria. The evidence is consistent with an ecological response. I show that land use change, anti-malarial programs or migration cannot explain the effect of primary forest cover loss on increased malarial...

Philippines has a land mass of 30 million ha, 52.7 percent of which was classified as forestlands. The country was identified as a megadiverse area in terms of tropical forests and biodiverse ecosystems. Laws and policies were laid since 1975 in order to inform forest management strategies. The...

To reduce SDG tradeoffs in infrastructure provision, and to inform searches for SDG synergies, the authors show that roads’ impacts on Brazilian Amazon forests varied significantly across frontiers. Impacts varied predictably with prior development – prior roads and prior deforestation –...

The demand for agricultural land is globally increasing due to population growth and dietary diversification. As the availability of agricultural land is limited, much of the cropland expansion is occurring at the expense of tropical forests. During the past few decades, oil palm has become one...

Changes in land use, such as deforestation, expansion of sedentary agriculture and intensification of agricultural systems, significantly altered economic and ecological conditions in many regions of the world. In recent decades, one of the most rapid changes in land use was the expansion of...

There is an emerging consensus that carbon emissions must be limited. An attractive approach to promoting carbon reductions is to encourage reductions in deforestation. But any such strategy must confront a basic problem: agents that might be induced to reduce their actions which would reduce...

This paper presents the first rigorous empirical evidence of the impact of a large hydrocarbon project in both its economic and environmental dimension. Concentrating on Peru’s largest hydrocarbon project, the Camisea Gas Project, which began operating in the dense Amazonian jungle under...