When crops fail, forests follow: Agricultural shocks and deforestation in Zambia (2025) with Hadunka, P., Rossi, G., and Baylis, K. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 122(40).
Land cover change effects from community forest management in Michoacán, Mexico (2023) with Baylis, K., Ramirez, I. Environmental Research Letters, 18(6).
Evidence for the impacts of agroforestry on ecosystem services and human well-being in high-income countries: a systematic map (2022) with Castle, S., Miller, D. C., Merten, N., Baylis, K. Environmental Evidence, 11.
The impacts of agroforestry interventions on agricultural productivity, ecosystem services, and human well-being in low- and middle-income countries: A systematic review (2021) with Castle, S., Miller, D. C., Baylis, K., Hughes, C. Campbell Systematic Reviews, 17(1).
The impacts of agroforestry on agricultural productivity, ecosystem services, and human well‐being in low‐and middle‐income countries: An evidence and gap map (2020) with Miller, D. C., Brown, S. E., Forrest, S., Nava, N. J., Hughes, K., Baylis. Campbell Systematic Reviews, 16(1).
Evidence for the impacts of agroforestry on agricultural productivity, ecosystem services, and human well-being in high-income countries: a systematic map protocol (2018) with Brown, S.E., Miller, D.C., Baylis, K. (2018). Environmental Evidence, 7.
Protocol for an evidence and gap map The impacts of agroforestry on agricultural productivity, ecosystem services, and human well-being in low-and middle-income countries: An evidence and gap map (2017) with Miller, D.C.; Baylis, K.; Hughes, K.; Rana, P. Campbell Systematic Reviews, 13(1).
Payment for Ecosystem Services in Costa Rica: Evaluation of a Country-wide Program (Latest draft)
Our study evaluates the effect on deforestation and land cover of Costa Rica’s payment-for-ecosystem-services (PES) program, one of the oldest country-wide PES programs in the world. Using property level data from over 2,600 landowners who applied to participate in the program between 2016 and 2019, we employ an event study design using modern methods that account for rollout under treatment heterogeneity and find a statistically significant decrease in the deforestation rate. The estimated effect represents an 87% decrease with respect to the pre-2016 average deforestation rate and is equivalent to 0.09 hectares of avoided deforestation per property (a small total effect given the low baseline deforestation). We find no significant effect on forest cover, but we find suggestive evi-dence that there is a shift from annual to perennial crops. Given that the lack of addition-ality is one of the main critiques of PES programs, we explore whether the program could increase its additionality by targeting properties with higher ex-ante deforestation risk. For this, we train a machine learning model to predict which properties have a higher risk of deforestation and find that the program is currently not enrolling disproportionately more high-risk properties. Limiting our focus to these properties, we find that the reduction in the deforestation rate is 27-73% larger than what we find for the whole sample of participants. Risk-based targeting could reduce the cost of avoided CO2 emis-sions by 42%, from $71 for the current program to $41 per ton, well under current esti-mates of the social cost of carbon.
Power plants, Air Pollution and Health in Colombia (version Feb. 2021)
In this paper I estimate how electricity generation from fossil fuel power plants affects air pollution in Colombia, and how that air pollution affects the mental, respiratory and cardiovascular health of the population around them. I use the river flows that feed hydroelectric power plants as instruments for electricity generation from fossil-fuel plants, to estimate increases on particulate matter (PM10) and associated health effects. I find that the electricity necessary to meet the monthly demand for 1 million people (116 GWh), is responsible for 2.75 ug/m3 of PM10, leading to an increase in mental health patients of 6%, and of 9% for respiratory health patients. I show that this has significant economic effects, highlighting that the inclusion of mental health effects increases the total costs by 13%. The total health costs for the 24 million people in my sample, amount to 22 million USD per year, for 1 ug/m3 of PM10. A cost-benefit analysis of the re-placement of coal power plants around Bogota by solar generation, shows that the health benefits outweigh the cost of the tax incentives, with a benefit-cost ratio of 6:1.