Two factors have elevated recent academic and policy interest in tropical deforestation: first, the realization that it is a major contributor to climate change; and second, a revolution in satellite-based measurement that has revealed that it is proceeding at a rapid rate. We begin by reviewing...

Forests accompany the cities we build. There are an estimated 5.5 billion urban trees in the United States. Globally, about 25 percent of urban land is covered by tree canopy. This study examines urban forests as a policy tool for air pollution mitigation. We study an afforestation program in...

The world has pledged to protect 30 percent of its land and waters by 2030 to halt the rapid deterioration of critical ecosystems. We summarize the state of knowledge about the impacts of protected area policies, with a focus on deforestation and vegetation cover. We discuss critical issues...

Quantifying factors giving rise to temporal variation in forest fires is important for advancing scientific understanding and improving fire prevention. We demonstrate that eighty percent of the large year-to-year variation in forest area burned in California can be accounted for by variation in...

The European Union designates 26% of its landmass as a protected area, limiting economic development to favor biodiversity. This paper uses the staggered introduction of protected-area policies between 1985 and 2020 to study the selection of land for protection and the causal effect of...

Payments for Ecosystem Services (PES) are a widely used approach for forest conservation through which people are paid to avoid deforesting land they enroll in the program. We present findings from a randomized trial in Mexico that tested whether a PES contract that requires enrollees to enroll...

An enduring puzzle regarding technology adoption in developing countries is that new technologies often diffuse slowly through the social network. Two of the key predictions of the canonical epidemiological model of technology diffusion are that forums to share information and higher returns to...

Tile drainage was first demonstrated in the United States in 1835 as a method to adapt agriculture to excessive water in soils. Subsequently, innovations in coordinated drainage enterprises, engineering, and tile manufacture led to drainage over large portions of the U.S. Midwest and Southeast....

Irrigation in the Eastern US receives little attention compared to the West, but farmers in humid states of the US, traditionally reliant on rainfall, have more than tripled irrigation since 1978. We examine this trend in Illinois where there has been a nearly threefold increase in center pivot...

We study a fundamental institution in many societies: the structure of property rights over land. Across societies, communal land rights have been more common than private land rights. We test the hypothesis that longer fallow requirements - the time needed to leave land uncultivated to restore...