Deforestation

Curbing deforestation rates will be crucial for meeting our climate targets. Tropical deforestation rates have reached particularly alarming rates, although important progress has been made in recent years. This literature review discusses the body of evidence on the agricultural, industrial, international, and political drivers of deforestation. For policymakers, we offer policy takeaways for protecting our vital forest resources.

For researchers, we highlight new directions for inquiry. There remain opportunities to build on the existing evidence. We can interrogate and seek to lessen the potential trade-off between economic development and environmental protection. We can leverage new data to study firm choices and outcomes at scale. We can develop new policy tools to ensure green trade and international coordination. And we can emphasise and evaluate politically feasible regulation.

We also highlight areas where the evidence in economics is more limited. First, we note a gap in geographic focus. The Congo rainforest is the second-largest tropical rainforest in the world, and yet the vast majority of work in this space focuses on Brazil and Indonesia, where the data landscape is somewhat richer. Second, conservation has important benefits for biodiversity, even as current work typically focuses on carbon emissions. The difficulty lies in quantifying the economic gains from biodiversity, but the first step is to quantify impacts on biodiversity itself. Third, more research is needed on active and passive forest regeneration. Regenerating natural vegetation on degraded land would help to restore ecosystems and protect biodiversity, while also capturing atmospheric carbon. We hope that future work in this growing space will make progress on all fronts. We hope that future work in this growing space will make progress on both fronts.

References

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