Refugee Camps and Deforestation in Sub-Saharan Africa
Publisher: Journal of Development Economics
Author(s): Colette Salemi
Date: 2021
Topics: Monitoring and Evaluation, Programming, Renewable Resources
Countries: Africa
To date, there have been few quasi-experimental efforts to evaluate the impact of refugee camps on host landscapes. Yet many stakeholders believe refugee camps lead to deforestation in nearby areas. I use data on camp locations and years of operation as well as secondary geospatial data to produce a high-resolution panel dataset of 0.01° tiles. My difference-in-difference specification with tile fixed effects exploits variation in camp openings and tile proximity to camps. F-tests on event study pre-trends provide support for the satisfaction of parallel trends prior to camp exposure. I find that within the rainforest biome, camps are associated with a small reduction in extensive margin forest loss (i.e., land clearing) and a small increase in intensive margin forest loss (i.e., gradual reductions in canopy cover). In the grasslands biome, camps lead to small increases in forest loss at the intensive margin but have no impact on the extensive margin.