When crops fail, forests follow: Agricultural shocks and deforestation in Zambia

Significance This article estimates how farmers respond to a negative agricultural production shock from an invasive pest. While one might think that decreasing the productivity of agricultural land would lead to lower demand for agricultural land and thus lower rates of land conversion, we find that those farmers facing the largest pest outbreak deforest more through expanding agricultural land and increasing charcoal production. This effect was particularly pronounced for farmers who have greater access to markets, but lower for wealthier households. Along with related work, our results suggest that households with more available mitigation options are less likely to turn to charcoal as a coping strategy.

• Publication year

  2025

• Venue

  Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America

• Publication date

  2025-10-03

• Fields of study

  Agricultural and Food Sciences, Medicine, Economics, Environmental Science

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.1073/pnas.2427156122PMID 41042844PMCID 12519083
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar, PubMed

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

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