Wealth, inequality and deforestation: a scale-dependent relationship

Elodie Adam, Leland Werden and Melissa Chapman
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Melissa Chapman: National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis

No bfvyk_v1, SocArXiv from Center for Open Science

Abstract: Understanding how wealth and economic inequality shape global land-use change is both a long-standing and urgent challenge. While existing empirical evidence largely relies on either national-scale metrics of wealth and inequality or small-scale case studies, few analyses combine global scope with local-scale data. Here we do so, linking local wealth and local inequality to satellite-derived deforestation and its proximate drivers for 27,657 household survey clusters across 52 countries. We find that local wealth, rather than inequality, is the stronger predictor of forest loss, but the direction of this effect is not uniform: depending on the country, a one-standard-deviation increase in local wealth is associated with anywhere from a 19% decrease to a 36% increase in the expected deforestation rate, with no discernible effect in most countries. The share of tree cover loss due to permanent agriculture tends to be higher in wealthier clusters, while the share due to shifting cultivation tends to be higher in areas with lower wealth. We further identify clusters with high wealth, low inequality, and low deforestation, to understand the environmental and socioeconomic drivers of these "triple-win" clusters. Triple-win areas tend to cluster spatially, suggesting that district-level analysis is key to identifying policy levers and institutional structures that can reconcile human development with environmental protection.

Date: 2026-10-14
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:osf:socarx:bfvyk_v1

DOI: 10.31235/osf.io/bfvyk_v1

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