P.s. In the paper, we further unpack how price signals influence deforestation and provide original statistics on palm oil mills. Check it out and do not hesitate to get in touch!
We are thankful to everyone who advised us on this research, and especially to the reviewers and editors at AJAE for their thoughtful engagement with our work.
This warns that market forces may eclipse existing conservation policies. But they also mean that a uniform refundable tax can curb unregulated deforestation—we estimate CO₂-related revenue in the hundreds of millions of dollars—and that compensating smallholders would further boost effectiveness.
For smallholders, however, the positive elasticity is driven by the influence of the mills they depend on. Controlling for mills’ influence, smallholders actually deforest less as they receive higher prices.
We find that deforestation responds to crude palm oil price signals upstream in the Indonesian supply chain—notably, deforestation for smallholder and for illegal industrial plantations.
To identify the causal price elasticity of deforestation, we construct the first map of mill-gate prices and exploit its granularity. This lets us isolate exogenous price shifts stemming from mills’ idiosyncratic deal schedules and pricing rules imposed by their buyers.
To answer this, we draw on manufacturing census data on palm oil mills and remote-sensing data over Sumatra and Kalimantan—the main palm oil regions—from 1998 to 2014.
But do price signals actually reach the upstream end of the supply chain and incentivize these unregulated plantations?
🔔 New study: palm oil prices & unregulated deforestation 🔔
doi.org/10.1002/ajae...
🪚🔥🌴
Tropical forest loss for oil palm has slowed in Indonesia. Yet, because conservation schemes barely address smallholder and illegal industrial expansion, rising market forces may revive deforestation.
In addition to all who helped me with this work, I am thankful to the 2 reviewers and the editor at Environmental and Resource Economics, journal of @eaere.bsky.social
Do not hesitate to reach out, especially if you need the accepted version of the manuscript.
To apply these tests, I detect crop-specific expansion responses across the tropics to pre-determined – therefore exogenous – increments in maize demand in the US.
I first map the theoretical ILUC mechanisms to a variety of crops. 🌾
Within this framework, observing specific crops provides empirical tests of specific mechanisms.
– Reduced-form paper on indirect land use change and biofuels –
Biofuels can cut fossil use—but if feedstock demand drives tropical deforestation, climate gains vanish.
In this new paper, I test the theoretical mechanisms behind this.
🔗 link.springer.com/article/10.1...
Depuis quelques jours, la Méditerranée est en surchauffe, avec une canicule marine et des écarts de +5°C. L'équivalent d'incendies sous-marin, avec une faune qui "faune et flore qui meurent comme si elles étaient brûlées" : bonpote.com/canicules-ma...
Using Trase's supply chain model for Côte d'Ivoire cocoa, I found that #traceability differs across departments of origin, trading companies and countries of destination, and I reflected on the implications at each level regarding the EU deforestation regulation.
bit.ly/4cy8zKN
Last week, Trase released modelled data on the subnational Ivorian cocoa supply chain and embedded deforestation, from department to importing country, by trader, annually (2019-22). All useful links here: trase.earth/insights/cot... + to new open data on cooperatives: doi.org/10.14428/DVN...
Furthermore, the disclosed supply chains are concentrated in space, leaving vast areas where virtually all companies deny to hold themselves accountable, including in districts with lots of cocoa adjacent to remaining forest.
The companies disclosing their supply chains as part of their efforts to build accountability for sustainable sourcing handle 80% of cocoa exports from Ghana. Yet, the content of these disclosures allow to recover the district of production for only 9% of exports.
🍫As part of the research we - the Land Systems for Sustainability Lab - do in the Trase partnership, I collect supply chain disclosures made by cocoa traders. In Ghana, we find that these disclosures are of poor quality, raising doubts about sustainable sourcing claims.
