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’.
'Mangrove restoration, changing fish markets and food security' (2025-)
(with Jeffrey Pagel and Lorenzo Sileci)
In recent decades, mangrove restoration efforts have expanded significantly in scale and scope across the globe. This paper examines how local fisheries respond to mangrove restoration and how this response affects the wellbeing of fishing and non-fishing households in the Philippines. We begin with a bioeconomic fisheries model, which suggests that restoration could increase 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 is found to increase fishing activity, reflected in more vessels, greater capital investment, and expanded fishing effort, but had no impact on catch or catch per unit effort. Furthermore, poorer households are more likely to enter the fishing sector, while wealthier households are more likely to increase their capital investment and fishing incomes. Next, we show that mangrove restoration drives a substitution away from the consumption of fish toward meat and eggs, particularly among poor households. This pattern extends to non-fishing households, indicating spillover effects within treated
villages. These shifts in consumption correspond to greater protein diversity, most notably among poorer households, regardless of whether they participate in fishing. Together, these findings highlight the potential for ecological restoration to stimulate economic activity and improve dietary quality 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.
'Does securing the commons conserve resources and improve well-being?' (2022-)
(with Philippe Delacote and Jessica Meyer)
In recent decades, policies have been implemented 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 common-pool resources and improve well-being when investments in resource production and the community’s capacity to regulate labour to extraction are effective. An impactful policy is likely when the community’s ex ante capacity to regulate labour to extraction is weak and where members are highly resource dependent. A differences-in-differences framework is applied to a household panel dataset to evaluate the well-being and forest impacts of Malawi’s Improved Forest Management for Sustainable Livelihoods Programme. Our results show that the Programme had a short-term negative effect on household well-being but no impact on rates of forest loss. Supplementary empirical analysis provides suggestive evidence that 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.
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‘More than just carbon: the socioeconomic co-benefits of large-scale tree planting’ (2023-)
(with Jeffrey Pagel and Lorenzo Sileci)
Large-scale tree planting is a nature-based solution with the potential to jointly address environmental and poverty concerns. We examine the poverty effects of the National Greening Program (NGP), a major tree planting initiative in the Philippines, which directly and indirectly generated hundreds of thousands of jobs. Utilizing a dynamic difference-in-differences approach that leverages the staggered implementation of the NGP, we find significant and sizable reductions in poverty, measured via traditional and remotely-sensed indicators. Poverty reduction is channeled via shifts in local labor markets, decreasing agricultural employment while boosting unskilled labor and service sector jobs, and increasing incomes, consumption, and assets. The design of the NGP sustains poverty reduction over time, with
payments and forest assets playing complementary roles. Payments to incentivize the establishment and maintenance of plantations produce temporary effects on poverty that gradually dissipate, but when combined with income-generating natural assets the NGP generates larger and more sustained reductions in poverty.
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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.
'The global impact of agri-environmental policies on grasslands: trade-offs between bird species richness and protein production' (2023-)
(with Kirara Homma, Jinfeng Chang, Hadi and David Wuepper)
The world’s agricultural grasslands lose biodiversity at a rapid pace. Countries aim to make grassland use more sustainable through policies, e.g., land use regulations that oblige farmers to shift practices, and payment schemes that incentivize farmers to do so. Yet, we know comparably little about these policies’ performance: to what extent management shifts improve biodiversity, and, on the cost side, the magnitude of potential trade-offs with grassland production at the intensive margin and land expansion to offset productivity losses at the extensive margin. We created a globally comprehensive dataset comprising information on grassland bird species, farmers’ grassland management practices, and relevant agri-environmental policies, collected annually from 2001 to 2018. To identify causal effects, we combine difference-in-differences and difference-in-discontinuities designs. We find that land-use regulations addressing both land management and tenure significantly improved biodiversity, whereas agri-environmental payment schemes and general biodiversity conservation policies are not effective. Specifically, land-use regulations increased general bird species richness by 9% and richness of red-listed birds by 7%. However, this mainly occurred by reducing management intensity, thereby reducing animal feed production by about 2% (approximately USD 1,300 loss per km²). For currently intensively managed countries, the land expansion needed to mitigate this loss is expected to range from 6,080 km2 (if newly expanded lands are managed at the same intensity) to 74,000 km2 (under a more realistic middle-intensity scenario). Moving beyond global averages, heterogeneity analyses by countries’ contexts show that biodiversity benefits become larger in countries with higher institutional capacity, human development, and secure property rights.
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'Biodiversity-food trade-offs when agricultural land is spared from production' (2014-2024)
[Early View American Journal of Agricultural Economics]
(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.