Antoine Leblois

Forest management plans are central to regulations governing logging concessions in the Congo Basin, yet their long-term effectiveness remains uncertain. Here, we combine annual satellite-derived forest change data with administrative concession records and exploit variation in the timing of plan validation across five countries to assess how validation influences forest-cover dynamics from 2000 to 2020 using counterfactual impact-evaluation methods. We find that concessions with validated plans experience a gradual, sustained decline in forest loss, averaging 100 ± 44 hectares per year, equivalent to a 47% reduction relative to concessions operating without validated plans. Effects persist for up to 19 years and occur in concessions with and without independent third-party certification. These results indicate that accelerating the validation and implementation of forest management plans can substantially reduce forest disturbance in the Congo Basin.

Collaborative management partnerships (CMPs) between state wildlife authorities and nonprofit conservation organizations to manage protected areas (PAs) have been used increasingly across Sub-Saharan Africa since the 2000s. They aim to attract funding, build capacity, and increase the environmental effectiveness of PAs. Our study documents the rise of CMPs, examines their current extent, and measures their effectiveness in protecting habitats. We combine statistical matching and Before-After-Control-Intervention regressions to quantify the impact of CMPs, using tree cover loss as a proxy. We identify 127 CMPs located in 16 countries. CMPs are more often located in remote PAs, with habitats that are least threatened by human activity. Our results indicate that, on average, each year in a CMP results in an annual decrease in tree cover loss of about 55% compared to PAs without CMPs. Where initial anthropogenic pressure was low, we measure no effect. Where it was high, we see a 66% decrease in tree cover loss. This highly heterogeneous effect illustrates the importance of moving beyond average effect size when assessing conservation interventions, as well as the need for policy makers to invest public funds to protect the areas the most at risk.

Marine Protected Areas (MPAs) are a cornerstone of marine conservation efforts, with the potential to protect biodiversity and provide socioeconomic benefits. We quantified the effect of MPAs on fishing outcomes, economic activities, and material living standards in 24 coastal villages of Tanzania over two decades. We accessed original data from a study conducted in 2003 that found no effect of MPAs 3–8 years after their creation. Eighteen years later, we replicated the survey and used a Before‐After Control‐Intervention design to quantify the effect of MPAs. We found that villages near MPAs experienced a 50% higher improvement in living standards compared to those further from MPAs. This benefit is not related to higher fishing outcomes but to a diversification of economic sectors. Our findings highlight a decoupling between fish catches and economic benefits, revealing that socio‐economic outcomes can be observed for MPAs whose ecosystems’ productivity has declined.

Extreme weather events, particularly droughts, have strong impacts on the livelihoods of populations in rural areas. In a context of low access to insurance and credit markets, households respond to such shocks by implementing different risk-management strategies, which in turn are likely to have an impact on the environment, in particular through land-use changes and deforestation. This paper contributes to the emerging literature on the links between droughts and deforestation: (1) distinguishing responses to previously experienced droughts versus current droughts, and (2) disentangling the time of the agricultural season at which droughts occur. We show that deforestation declines whenever a drought occurs during the growing season, while it increases whenever a drought occurs during the harvesting season. These impacts are mitigated within protected areas and are exacerbated in more accessible locations, i.e., areas within 4 hours of travel time of main/major cities. By contrast, deforestation outcomes following droughts that occur during the planting season depend on whether the crop considered is maize or cassava.

Shocks related to weather variations have strong effects on developing countries’ economies. Climate change is expected to increase the occurrence and magnitude of extreme weather events such as droughts, floods or hurricanes that strongly affect agriculture and other activities. This special issue gathers literature reviews and case studies that aim to better understand heterogeneous impacts and their transmission channels, as well as to evaluate the impact of such weather shocks on developing economies, including Sub-Saharan African countries, India and Brazil.

Global food demand is rising, pushed by growing world population and dietary changes in developing countries. This encourages farmers to increase crop production which, in turn, increases worldwide demand for agricultural land and the pressure on tropical forests. With a possible doubling of world food demand by 2050, this pressure is not likely to decrease in the next decades. While the impact of food demand on deforestation has been pushed forward in the medias, rigorous evidence using large-N data estimating the causal impact of crop price variations on deforestation remains scarce. Here, we quantify this impact over the twenty first century using high resolution annual forest loss data across the tropics, combined with information about crop-specific agricultural suitability and annual international commodity prices. We find a sizeable impact of price variations on deforestation: crop price variations are estimated to have contributed to 35% of the total predicted deforestation in the tropics over the period 2001-2018. We also highlight that the degree of openness to international trade and level of economic development are first-order local characteristics to explain the magnitude of the impact of crop prices on deforestation.