Abstract
The recent adoption of the Global Compact on Refugees formally recognizes not only the importance of supporting the nearly 26 million people who have sought asylum from conflict and persecution but also of easing the pressures on receiving areas and host countries. However, few countries may enforce the Compact out of concern over the economic or environmental repercussions of hosting refugees. We examine whether narratives of refugee-driven landscape change are empirically generalizable to continental Africa, which fosters 34% of all refugees. Estimates of the causal effects of the number of refugees—located in 493 camps distributed across 49 African countries—on vegetation from 2000 to 2016 are provided. Using a quasi-experimental design, we find refugees bear a small increase in vegetation condition while contributing to increased deforestation. Such a combination is mainly explained not by land clearance and massive biomass extraction but by agricultural expansion in refugee-hosting areas. A one percent increase in the number of refugees amplifies the transition from dominant forested areas to cropland by 1.4 percentage points. These findings suggest that changes in vegetation condition may ensue with the elevation of population-based constraints on food security.
Highlights
Data and Methodology pt pte ce Definition of Key Variables
Our preferred model suggests that precipitation positively and temperature negatively influence the Enhanced Vegetation Index (EVI), confirming established linkages between inter-annual weather anomalies and vegetation [49,50,51,52]
While conflict events negatively affect vegetation, the magnitude of the effect is quite small after considering refugee presence
Summary
Data and Methodology pt pte ce Definition of Key Variables. Our main unit of analysis is a 1° grid-cell, which has a length and width of roughly 111 kilometers at the equator. We use the grid-cell unit over subnational administrative boundaries, such as a province, as the size of the latter differs from country to country. By using a grid, each geographic unit is comparable in size across countries. Our main dataset uses 2,767 grid-cells, covering 49 African countries, save the island states. The details of the following data sources used to create our main dataset are summarized in
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