REDD Metrics

Marshall points us to reddmetrics.com, a neat blog/company that FE readers might appreciate:

Founded in early 2011, REDD Metrics, LLC, applies innovations in large-scale spatial data processing to questions in environmental and resource economics.

 The blog is sparse but has several cool posts. They also seem to working on some interesting long term projects:

Large-scale implementation of change detection algorithms
Employing the power of cloud computing to detect changes in earth systems using satellite imagery over wide geographic areas. 

Economic analysis of natural resource use and management
Identifying economic determinants of resource consumption. For example, how do interest rates or agricultural prices affect the rate of forest clearing in Indonesia? 

Predictive modeling of spatial processes
Using massive spatial datasets and cutting-edge spatial modeling techniques to predict the flow of environmental phenomena over space and time. 

Development of mobile apps to disseminate and collect environmental data
Enhancing on-the-ground natural resource management by syncing local field data with indicators from large-scale spatial datasets.

Global tropical deforestation slowing down

Our colleague Jan Christoph von der Goltz points us to this new working paper by Wheeler, Kraft, and Hammer at the Center for Global Development:

This report summarizes recent trends in large-scale tropical forest clearing identified by FORMA (Forest Monitoring for Action). Our analysis includes 27 countries that accounted for 94 percent of clearing during the period 2000–2005. We highlight countries with relatively large changes since 2005, both declines and increases. FORMA produces indicators that track monthly changes in the number of 1-sq.-km. tropical forest parcels that have experienced clearing with high probability. This report and the accompanying spreadsheet databases provide monthly estimates for 27 countries, 280 primary administrative units, and 2,907 secondary administrative units. Countries’ divergent experiences since 2005 have significantly altered their shares of global clearing in some cases. Brazil’s global share fell by 11.2 percentage points from December 2005 to August 2011, while the combined share of Malaysia, Indonesia, and Myanmar increased by 10.8. The diverse patterns revealed by FORMA’s first global survey caution against facile generalizations about forest clearing in the pantropics. During the past five years, the relative scale and pace of clearing have changed across regions, within regions, and within countries. Although the overall trend seems hopeful, it remains to be seen whether the decline in forest clearing will persist as the global economy recovers.

CGD blog link here. While the overall trend is good news, the point about heterogeneity is well taken. See, for example, this time series map of Borneo's forest cover, and in particular the jump between 2000 and 2010:

Source: UNEP GRID

Increasing income increases deforestation in Mexico

Over a year ago, I pointed readers to this paper after seeing it at WCERE and thinking it was important, so I'm happy to hear that its now forthcoming in ReStat.  It is also is also an excellent example of individuals increasing their resource consumption, when they becoming richer, by increasing their trophic level (described two posts ago).  The paper finds that when households receive cash transfers, they consume more meat, which requires more rangeland, which induces additional deforestation.

The Ecological Footprint of Poverty Alleviation: Evidence from Mexico's Oportunidades Program

Jennifer Alix-Garcia, Craig McIntosh, Jarrod R. Welch, Katharine R. E. Sims 

Abstract: We study the consequences of poverty alleviation programs for environmental degradation. We exploit the community-level eligibility discontinuity for a conditional cash transfer program in Mexico to identify the impacts of income increases on deforestation, and use the program’s initial randomized rollout to explore household responses. We find that additional income raises consumption of land-intensive goods and increases deforestation. The observed production response and deforestation increase are larger in communities with poor road infrastructure. This suggests that better access to markets disperses environmental harm and that the full effects of poverty alleviation can be observed only where poor infrastructure localizes them.