Is Global Deforestation under Lockdown?

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic and the associated responses by governments have halted economic activity abruptly across the world. The environment has benefited with reductions in pollution in urban areas, but what has happened in rural areas to deforestation has not been studied yet. A priori the effect is unclear: deforestation might decrease with the restrictions on economic activity. But it might have increased given the reductions in monitoring. I combine biweekly data from 70 countries covering the entire world's tropical forest with the dates each country started lockdown restrictions. Using difference-indifferences I find that, although deforestation is higher in 2020 compared to 2019, it is not driven by the lockdowns but rather by higher deforestation that precedes them. There is heterogeneity by the level of government effectiveness of the country: countries with effective governance experience a reduction in deforestation, probably because they can enforce the lockdown restrictions.

Has global deforestation accelerated due to the COVID-19 pandemic?

“…Conversely, as shown in the time series, deforestation in Brazil annually peaks in or after the middle of the year, corresponding to the dry and burning season beginning in late June (Moutinho al. 2020), which could explain the differential increase found by Saavedra (2020). While our results confirm a stark increase in Brazilian deforestation alerts from 2019 to 2020, as reported by others (Daly 2020;Fair 2020;Weisse and Goldman 2021;Wunder et al 2021), we found that this increase aligned with our projection.…”

“…Our results suggest that the increasing deforestation trend observed in the Americas was expected for the year and that at the regional level the pandemic did not decisively change the trajectory of forest cover loss. These results are supported by Saavedra (2020) who found that increases in deforestation alerts in primary forests across the tropics were attributed to already increasing deforestation trends that preceded the pandemic and not to the lockdown measures implemented in the different countries. He reports an increase of 150,000 bi-weekly deforestation alerts from 2019 to 2020, but generally no statistically significant difference in deforestation alerts before and after each country imposed lockdown measures.…”

“…Initially in the year, deforestation in Colombia exhibited an upward trend, following a similar cycle as the years before. This initial spike in the year, which is commonly observed throughout the time series, likely explains the significant differential decrease in deforestation found by Saavedra (2020). While deforestation in Colombia was lower than expected according to our projection, the country still registered an increase from 2019 to 2020 after experiencing a decline in deforestation from 2018 to 2019 (IDEAM 2021; Weisse and Goldman 2021).…”

“…Other media sources relying mostly on site-specific reports, interviews, anecdotal accounts or limited satellite data also posited a direct relationship between increasing deforestation rates and the development of the pandemic (DW News 2020; Fair 2020; Taylor 2020; Unearthed 2020). However, several sources argue that deforestation in many areas was already on the rise at the start of 2020 before lockdown measures went into place (Fair 2020;López-Feldman et al 2020;Saavedra 2020;Wunder et al 2021).…”

Intra-Annual Identification of Local Deforestation Hotspots in the Philippines Using Earth Observation Products

“…The deforestation in 2020 hints that previously deforested areas in recent years have been expanding as evident in the high number of consecutive hotspots. A recent study used GLAD alerts to conduct an inter-country comparison of deforestation in 2020 and it was concluded that the continuation of deforestation from 2019 to 2020 is a more reasonable root cause of the 2020 deforestation statistics than the pandemic lockdown effect [39].…”