The COVID-19 pandemic, stemming from a natural disease, represents an unprecedented global crisis, amplifying discussions on sustainability and planetary health. Land-use changes and forest loss exacerbate biodiversity loss, pollution, greenhouse gas emissions, and soil degradation, with far-reaching health implications. The increasing human-nature interaction at forest margins heightens the risk of new pandemics. Protecting the world’s remaining natural forests thus becomes increasingly valuable as a strategy to safeguard human well-being and health. To inform conservation strategies, PlanetHealth investigated the links between health, global shocks, and forest loss. Amid the pandemic, measures to curb the virus have mixed effects on agriculture, altering incentives for deforestation through illness-related productivity shocks (epidemiological channel), economic uncertainties driving forest expansion, and global demand shocks for agricultural products (economic channel). Additionally, the crisis may encourage anti-environmental policies and illegal logging (government-induced channel).
PlanetHealth’s primary goal was to quantify and spatialize the impacts of the global COVID-19 pandemic on forest losses from a global to a local scale. This project encompassed six interconnected research objectives aligned with corresponding Work Packages (WPs) and their associated deliverables. It sought to establish a comprehensive methodology for evaluating various socio-economic and political channels affected by the COVID-19 crisis, employing advanced econometric shift-share designs. These objectives aligned with the following WPs: Depict the global forest dynamics (WP1), develop spatially disaggregated ex-ante susceptibility maps (WP2), create COVID-19-related exposure matrices (WP3), estimate the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on forest dynamics (WP4), spatialize the COVID-19 impacts across forest landscapes (WP5), analyze the labor-market channels of the COVID-19 effects on deforestation (WP6).
Overall, the project presented strong evidence that the Covid-19 pandemic increased tropical deforestation rates. These effects are primarily driven by labor-market shifts from industry to agriculture. Furthermore, the project showed how economic and political shocks caused deforestation and forest fragmentation depending on the underlying local agricultural incentives. Strategies to mitigate the Global shocks can include public-private partnerships to reduce farmers' vulnerability, but should be accompanied by credible enforcement mechanisms.
