Research
Current and recent projects
The Economics of Biodiversity Additionality (2022-)
(1) ‘Accounting for additionality in the presence of deforestation and regrowth’
(with Lykke Andersen, Fabiana Argandona, Ben Balmford, Sabrina Eisenbarth, Ben Groom, Ville Inkinen, Sarah Meier, Zdenek Plesek, Lorenzo Sileci, and Diana Weinhold)
Additionality is a fundamental requirement for forest conservation and reforestation interventions to deliver climate benefits, and there is an urgent need for methodologies that identify where additional gains can be realised. This study develops a framework integrating high-resolution remote sensing data with machine learning methods to predict the potential additionality of forest conservation interventions in South America. We predict annual deforestation and regrowth probabilities and convert them into expected carbon stock pathways and their corresponding present values. Our approach quantifies additionality by comparing the predicted business-as-usual scenarios against those enhanced by conservation interventions. This measure informs the relative values of different intervention types and where they should be targeted to maximise their additional benefits. Our method supports governments, NGOs, and private stakeholders to optimize their forest conservation strategies, ensuring that limited resources are directed where they can achieve the greatest environmental benefits.
(2) ‘The paradox of conservation policy layering’
(with Ben Groom and Lorenzo Sileci)
Funded by the Natural Environment Research Council, funding call: ‘Economics of Biodiversity’.
'The ecological-economic response of the fishery to ecosystem restoration' (2025-)
(with Jeffrey Pagel and Lorenzo Sileci)
Ecosystem restoration is increasingly promoted as a nature-based solution to support both ecosystems and livelihoods. This paper evaluates the ecological-economic response of the fishery to mangrove restoration and its implications for household well-being in the Philippines. We begin with a bioeconomic fisheries model, which suggests that restoration has ambiguous effects on fishing effort, catch and income. A difference-
in-differences strategy is applied to village- and household-level data, exploiting variation from a nationwide tree-planting initiative implemented between 2011 and 2018, restoring mangroves in a staggered manner across villages. Mangrove restoration increases fishing activity: more vessels, greater capital investment, and expanded fishing effort. There is no impact on total catch or incomes. Increased fishing effort is likely to be driven more by fish being harder to catch, as a consequence of growing mangrove habitats, than by a rise in fishery productivity. This rise in fishing effort translates into higher costs, reflected in higher market prices despite stable catch volumes. As
a result, households reduce fish consumption and expenditures, substituting towards meat and eggs, an effect that is concentrated among poorer households. These dietary shifts extend to non-fishing households, reflecting greater protein diversity. Our study shows how ecological restoration can reshape livelihoods, markets, and consumption patterns in resource-dependent communities.​
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Funded by the UK Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC), NERC/UKRI BIOADD Grant NE/X002292/1 and the LSE’s Global School of Sustainability.
(with Philippe Delacote and Jessica Meyer)
Recent decades have witnessed efforts to secure property rights over hundreds of millions of hectares of land claimed as common property. We first show theoretically that securing the commons can conserve resources and improve community members’ well-being when investments
in resource production and the community’s capacity to regulate labour to extract resources are effective. An impactful policy is more likely when the community’s ex ante capacity to regulate labour to extraction is weak and where members are highly resource dependent. Our theory is
tested with an application of a differences-in-differences framework to a household panel dataset that evaluates the well-being and forest impacts of Malawi’s Improved Forest Management for Sustainable Livelihoods Programme. The Programme is shown to have a short-term negative effect on household well-being but no impact on rates of forest loss. Supplementary empirical analysis suggests that, consistent with theory, baseline institutional capacity and households’ labour portfolios condition outcomes. First, well-being declined among households who lived in communities lacking a pre-existing communal forest claim. Second, food security declined among resource-dependent households, while non-food expenditures fell among those less resource dependent.
(with Jeffrey Pagel and Lorenzo Sileci)
We evaluate the poverty impacts of the Philippines’ National Greening Program, a large-scale tree planting initiative that generated hundreds of thousands of jobs. Exploiting the program’s staggered roll-out, a dynamic difference-in-differences strategy reveals significant gains in tree cover and reductions in poverty between 2011 and 2018. Poverty reduction is channeled through labor market shifts reducing agricultural work while increasing unskilled and service jobs, in turn generating gains in income, consumption, and assets. While payments have short-term effects, combining them with income-generating forest assets yields longer-lasting effects, highlighting how nature-based, multifaceted interventions can support rural economies.
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Funded by the UK Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC), NERC/UKRI BIOADD Grant NE/X002292/1 and the LSE’s Global School of Sustainability.
'Bending the curve of bird loss on grasslands: A global policy impact evaluation' (2023- under review)
(with Kirara Homma, Jinfeng Chang, Hadi and David Wuepper)
The world’s grasslands lose their birds at a rapid pace. Countries aim to make grassland use more sustainable through various policies, e.g., regulations, tenure reforms, payment schemes, and habitat protections. Yet, we know little about the comparative performance of these policies. Here, we assess the effectiveness of different grassland policies in protecting grassland bird diversity, at the global scale. We created a globally comprehensive dataset comprising information on grassland bird species, farmers’ grassland management intensity, and relevant grassland conservation policies, collected annually from 2001 to 2018. Empirically, we rely on difference-in-differences and difference-in-discontinuities designs. We find that policies promoting management extensification via changes in both management practices and tenure (land-use regulations) significantly improve bird species richness, whereas agri-environmental payment schemes and general biodiversity conservation policies are not indicated to be impactful on average. Land-use regulations increased general bird species richness by 9% and richness of red-listed birds by 7%. However, this mainly occurs by reducing management intensity, thereby reducing animal feed production by about 2% (approximately USD 1,300 loss per km²). Under current management systems, the land expansion needed to compensate for this loss ranges from 74,000 km² for middle-productivity to 6,080 km² for high-productivity grasslands. Moreover, the identified policy effects on birds are mostly concentrated in high-income countries with stronger institutional capacity and secure property rights.
'Biodiversity-food trade-offs when agricultural land is spared from production' (2014-2024)
[American Journal of Agricultural Economics, 108 (1), 254-284, 2026.]
(with Ben Groom, Lorenzo Sileci and Steve Langton)
Biodiversity conservation in agricultural landscapes, the world’s predominant land use, could involve sparing, or setting aside, agricultural land from production, implying biodiversity-food trade-offs. Employing bird species and agricultural data in two panel datasets, we evaluate the extent of set-aside’s trade-offs in England between 1992 and 2007. Mixed biodiversity outcomes are reflected in a marginal effect, of a 100ha increase in set-aside, associated with a 1-2% increase in species abundance and richness, no impact on Shannon-Wiener diversity and a 0.03 standard deviation fall in phylogenetic diversity. Lower phylogenetic diversity indicates that populations of less genetically distinct bird species appear when set-aside increases. These effects are discontinuous for abundance and richness, and larger in the long-run than in
the short-run for richness and phylogenetic diversity. Set-aside led, on average, to a 7-9% fall in cereal land. In turn, this led to an up to 2% decline in cereal output. A yield increase of 5-10% is likely due to the setting aside of mostly marginal land. Biodiversity-food trade-offs in agricultural landscapes could be minimised with a carefully-targeted set-aside policy, based on clearly defined biodiversity goals, and in
settings where there is still scope for intensification.