Research

Abstract

Over the past few decades, Nepal's Community Forest initiative--where the government allocates state forest lands to local village groups--has played a significant role in preserving and expanding forest resources. However, during this same period, forest fires have become more frequent and severe, raising concerns about whether current forest management practices effectively mitigate environmental and household vulnerability to these fires. In this paper, we leverage the staggered rollout of Community Forest User Groups alongside a remote-sensed measure of forest fire intensity to show that Community Forests increase forest fire intensity in Nepal by approximately 50% relative to the treated sample average. This finding is robust across multiple sensitivity checks and placebo tests. Additionally, we show that these fires are concentrated in regions with rapid settlement growth and economic activity, where households have alternative livelihood opportunities outside of Community Forests. Finally, a cost-benefit analysis--using the social cost of carbon--shows that these forest fires could reduce the carbon sequestration benefits of Community Forests by nearly 65%, highlighting the need for better monitoring and training to minimze the unintended costs of Community Forests for Nepal.

Cost-effective and scalable soil testing tools can play an instrumental role in guiding agricultural decisions and policies, particularly in Sub-Saharan Africa, where declining soil fertility poses a serious threat to productivity. Laboratory tests of soil samples, which provide the most accurate measures of soil properties, remain costly and challenging to scale in the context of national surveys or programs. To test and validate alternative approaches to soil measurement, the World Bank launched the Uganda CLASS study. This paper evaluates the accuracy and scalability of three soil testing tools (the AgroCares Scanner, the Palintest kit, and the Sonkir pH meter) as well as two publicly available soil maps (iSDA and SoilGrids), against laboratory-based soil measurements conducted by CIFOR-ICRAF. While differences in soil parameter estimates may be expected to vary across testing methods, understanding the nature and magnitude of the divergence in estimates from those measured using established laboratory approaches is critical for practitioners and analysts seeking to leverage soil analyses to inform policy and program design. We find that the soil tools - except for the Sonkir pH meter, which performs poorly - provide only moderately adequate predictions of soil properties, and that both soil maps fail to capture sample variation. These findings highlight key trade-offs in accuracy, cost, and scalability, and offer practical guidance for scaling soil monitoring strategies in Uganda and similar contexts.

Abstract
Seasonal changes in food availability and disease incidence put pressure on children’s health in Sub-Sahara Africa. Using year-round survey data from Senegal, we examine how seasonality in key health inputs (dietary diversity, diarrhea, and fever) helps predict seasonality in children’s health (weight-for-height z-score). We first parameterize seasonal variation in health and health inputs using second-order trigonometric polynomials, then decompose the seasonal curve of children’s health into component parts explained by seasonality in each health input. We find that lagged seasonality in disease incidence predicts seasonality in child health, while seasonality in dietary diversity does not — likely because diets are poor in Senegal even during the most food-plentiful part of the year. We also observe noticeable heterogeneity in the way these health inputs predict children’s health across different wealth levels and regions.

Background: Child wasting is known to exhibit seasonal patterns, but few studies have examined how the seasonality of wasting affects tracking of wasting trends over multiyear periods.

Objectives: We explored the seasonality of wasting in Senegal relative to multiyear changes and examined implications for tracking. We tested whether month-fixed effects reduced bias in estimating longer-term wasting trends given variation in survey timing.

Methods: The average prevalence of child wasting (weight-for-height z-score < −2) and 95% confidence intervals were calculated by month and year from the continuous Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) from 2012–2019. Peak and low wasting season estimates were defined as the 4 highest and the 4 lowest months of average wasting prevalence. Month-adjusted annual wasting estimates were generated using month-fixed effects linear regression, and the effectiveness of this method of bias adjustment was examined in simulated datasets.

Results: Nationally, wasting fluctuated from 2013–2019, with the lowest annual prevalence of 6.0% (95% confidence interval [CI]: 5.1, 7.0%) recorded in 2014 and the highest in 2017 at 9.0% (95% CI: 8.3, 9.8%). Pooled across years, the peak wasting season prevalence was 8.8% (95% CI: 8.3, 9.3%), and low wasting season prevalence was 6.4% (95% CI: 5.7, 7.1%). Month-adjusted wasting estimates did not differ notably from raw wasting prevalence estimates. Simulations demonstrated that adjusting for months reduces bias in wasting when surveys are conducted 1 or 2 mo apart across waves but fails to reliably do so when surveys are conducted in different seasons across waves.

Conclusions: Seasonal fluctuations in the prevalence of wasting can be large enough to bias the interpretation of multiyear trends. Efforts should be made to conduct national surveys at the same time of year. Seasonality adjustment using month-fixed effects works more reliably when the differences in survey periods across waves are minimal.

Forest Gardens are an agroforestry intervention aimed at providing households with an alternate and more resilient source of livelihood throughout the year. Technicians enroll interested households willing to allocate some land for a Forest Garden and provide them with the seeds and support to grow high-value fruits and vegetables, and can also provide timber resources.

We ran focus-group interviews across five villages in the Fatick and Kaffrine regions of Senegal to learn more about the constraints households experienced in managing these Forest Gardens and the lessons we can learn to make sure this intervention is more successful and can be scaled further.

Outputs:

• Project Report [link]

• Story Map [link]

Kathmandu Valley is one of Nepal's fastest growing region. Lands that were once suitable for agriculture, are gradually being converted into roads, houses, and urban spaces. This project attempts to investigate the sustainable use of agricultural resources from the perspective of farmers.

Outputs:

• Documentary: Fate of the Fields [link]

• Documentary: Water Monitoring in Chapakharka [link]

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