A Top-Down Approach to Estimating Spatially Heterogeneous Impacts of Development Aid on Vegetative Carbon Sequestration

Daniel Runfola, Ariel BenYishay, Jeffery Tanner, Graeme Buchanan, Jyoteshwar Nagol, Matthias Leu, Seth Goodman, Rachel Trichler and Robert Marty
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Daniel Runfola: Institute for the Theory and Practice of International Relations, The College of William and Mary, Williamsburg, VA 23188, USA
Jeffery Tanner: Independent Evaluation Group, The World Bank, Washington, DC 20433, USA
Graeme Buchanan: Center for Conservation Science, Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, Lydney, South-west GL154JA, UK
Jyoteshwar Nagol: Global Land Cover Facility, University of Maryland, College Park, MD 20742, USA
Matthias Leu: Department of Biology, The College of William and Mary, Williamsburg, VA 23185, USA
Seth Goodman: Institute for the Theory and Practice of International Relations, The College of William and Mary, Williamsburg, VA 23188, USA
Rachel Trichler: Institute for the Theory and Practice of International Relations, The College of William and Mary, Williamsburg, VA 23188, USA

Sustainability, 2017, vol. 9, issue 3, 1-9

Abstract: Since 1945, over $4.9 trillion dollars of international aid has been allocated to developing countries. To date, there have been no estimates of the regional impact of this aid on the carbon cycle. We apply a geographically explicit matching method to estimate the relative impact of large-scale World Bank projects implemented between 2000 and 2010 on sequestered carbon, using a novel and publicly available data set of 61,243 World Bank project locations. Considering only carbon sequestered due to fluctuations in vegetative biomass caused by World Bank projects, we illustrate the relative impact of World Bank projects on carbon sequestration. We use this information to illustrate the geographic variation in the apparent effectiveness of environmental safeguards implemented by the World Bank. We argue that sub-national data can help to identify geographically heterogeneous impact effects, and highlight many remaining methodological challenges.

Keywords: carbon sequestration; causal identification; heterogeneous effects; human-environment interactions; international aid (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O13 Q Q0 Q2 Q3 Q5 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

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