Conference Agenda
Overview and details of the sessions of this conference. Please select a date or location to show only sessions at that day or location. Please select a single session for detailed view (with abstracts and downloads if available).
Please note that all times are shown in the time zone of the conference. The current conference time is: 24th Aug 2026, 12:47:53am WEST
External resources will be made available 30 min before a session starts. You may have to reload the page to access the resources.
|
Daily Overview |
| Session | |
|
Environment and Development Location: B005 Session Chair: Maxwell Adizor Dzudzor, University of Reading | |
    | |
Agricultural Technology and Deforestation in Pre-Industrial Economies Drexel University, United States of America Global forest cover was in steady decline for millennia prior to modern industrialization. This paper studies how technological progress in agriculture shaped long-run forest cover in pre-industrial societies. I begin by developing an equilibrium bio-economic model to analyze how agricultural productivity influenced land allocation decisions and forest cover in the presence of limited trade and Malthusian population dynamics. I show that while early agricultural innovations may have spared forests, beyond a threshold further advances necessarily expand cultivation and accelerate deforestation. I test these predictions using high-resolution Holocene forest reconstructions from fossil pollen data. Exploiting variation in the timing of the First Agricultural Revolution, I find that early adoption led to a sustained 25% per-millennium decline in forest cover relative to later adopters. In a complementary case study focusing on the introduction of the three-field rotation system in medieval Europe, I show that the system caused an immediate 20% reduction in forest cover followed by a long-run decline of 50%. Together, these results indicate that agricultural innovation was an important driver of global deforestation in the pre-industrial era. | |