Join us as we welcome Sayantan (Sunny) Mitra, a candidate for the Nelson Institute’s RISE-EARTH hiring initiative.
Mitra is a PhD candidate at the University of California, Berkeley in the Department of Agricultural & Resource Economics. Using natural and field experiments, his research spans the economics of natural resources, agriculture and rural development in contexts across the globe while empirically testing the potential of specific policy initiatives for ensuring social and environmental justice.
Mitra will present “Impact of Land Use Change on Equity, Environment and the Local Economy: The Case of Clearing Forests for Infrastructure.”
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Abstract
Globally, land use changes result in significant transformations of the environment, populations and the economy in the surrounding area. Identifying the winners and losers from these changes is essential in the design of incentives and policies related to sustainable development. While these changes related to forests and agriculture are widespread, this research focuses on forest clearing for infrastructure which accounts for 80% of deforestation in India and 10% globally.
Utilizing a large household level panel dataset and the staggered timing of government approvals, this research estimates the local causal effects of clearing forests for projects such as roads, railways and electricity in India.
First, I find that traditionally forest-dependent Indigenous households shift away from engaging in retail trade to subsistence agriculture as the forest loss represents a negative production and consumption shock for this local population. Second, while there is no change in average household income and consumption, incomes and consumption rise only for poorer households and their household size increases with migrants returning. This is consistent with the infrastructure-induced increase in regional trade between the local area and the skill-abundant external economy, which reduces employment of educated households in skill-intensive services.
Finally, weighing the economic benefits for the poorer local households against the environmental costs, clearing forests for infrastructure seems to be justified only for smaller projects (less than 95 hectares in area) located in densely populated areas (more than 25 households per square kilometers).