Does Green Infrastructure Work?: Precipitation, Protected Areas, Floods and Landslides

Juan Robalino (), Katrina Mullan, Matías Piaggio and Marisol Guzmán

No 13166, IDB Publications (Working Papers) from Inter-American Development Bank

Abstract: We evaluate whether floods and landslides are more likely when rain falls inside versus outside protected areas (PAs). We use monthly municipality data for the period 2000-2015 in Guatemala and monthly district data for the period 1992-2019 in Costa Rica. We define relevant catchment areas using water flows to population centers of administrative units. Then, we calculate the precipitation inside and outside PAs within the relevant catchment areas, and test how the frequency of floods and landslides is affected by whether rain falls inside or outside PAs. We use a two-way fixed effect panel data model. For Guatemala, we find no robust statistically significant effects on these types of disasters. However, in Costa Rica, we find that shifts in precipitation towards PAs reduce floods significantly. These results were highly robust. We also find effects on landslides in densely populated districts, as well as reductions in flood-related deaths.

Keywords: Disasters; floods; Landslides; Protected areas; Precipitation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: Q24 Q28 Q54 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023-10
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-env and nep-ure
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://publications.iadb.org/publications/english ... s-and-Landslides.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Does Green Infrastructure Work? Precipitation, Protected Areas, Floods and Landslides (2023)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:idb:brikps:13166

DOI: 10.18235/0005219

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in IDB Publications (Working Papers) from Inter-American Development Bank Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Felipe Herrera Library ().