Publication

This paper examines evidence from 117 econometric studies of deforestation from 1996 to 2013 to examine what drives deforestation and what prevents it. From their analysis, the authors find that forests are more likely to be cleared where economic returns to agriculture and pasture are higher, either due to more favorable climatological and topographic conditions, or due to lower costs of clearing forest and transporting products to market. They suggest that promising approaches to preventing forest clearing include reducing road network intrusion into remote forested areas; tying rural income support to the maintenance of forest resources; and protecting forest frontier areas from the price effects of agricultural commodity demand.