Conference Agenda

Rural electrification is widely promoted as a pathway to improve well-being, yet its

environmental consequences remain less well understood—especially in forest frontiers where infrastructure can shift land-use incentives. We estimate the impacts of gridbased electrification on household livelihoods and deforestation in a rural settlement region in the Brazilian Amazon. Combining longitudinal household survey data with property boundaries and satellite-based land-cover, we implement a heterogeneity robust difference-in-differences estimator for staggered treatment timing. We find that electrification increased cattle-related income and appliance ownership by economically meaningful amounts, with impacts emerging over the medium term rather than immediately after connection. In contrast, we find no detectable effect of electrification on annual deforestation at the property level and can rule out large increases relative to pre-treatment clearing rates. The results suggest that electrification can support rural development without exacerbating land-use change in frontier contexts where production opportunities include intensification.

This paper examines the temporal dynamics of farmer decision-making regarding cover crops with a focus on continuous adoption behavior and the factors associated with adoption duration. Using newly developed satellite-based data, I track field-level cover crop adoption for a stratified random sample of corn producers in Iowa, Illinois, and Indiana from 2011 to 2021. Based on annual adoption patterns, farmers or field parcels are categorized as always adopters, intermittent adopters, or never adopters. Focusing on adopters or parcels planted with cover crops, I define an

“adoption spell” as a sequence of consecutive years during which cover crops are continuously adopted by a farmer or on a field parcel. The duration analysis reveals that time-varying factors, including planted acreage, the share of owner-operated land, pre-planting mean temperature, and conservation payments, are significantly associated with the length of adoption spells. In addition, farmer characteristics such as education and age, and field characteristics such as soil clay content, are also significant factors associated with adoption duration. These findings shed light on the

adoption dynamics and the determinants of adoption duration, which are relevant for designing agri-environmental policies that promote sustained adoption and for modeling the long-term environmental and economic benefits of cover cropping.

Agriculture, forestry and other land use contribute about a fifth of total anthropogenic greenhouse gases (GHG) emissions. Mitigation efforts have emphasized “decoupling” that sustains production while lowering emissions per unit of output. However, the underlying decoupling mechanisms have not been fully characterized. We rely on a mathematical identity to decompose agricultural GHG emissions growth (\Delta E) into 3 parts: output (\Delta Y), emissions per unit of input (\Delta E/X) and output per unit of input (\Delta Y/X) or Total Factor Productivity (TFP). We then rely on official country-level data to quantify the historical contribution of these components. Over 1961-2021, we find that TFP growth —which captures the sector’s ability to produce more output per unit of measured input— has consistently remained one of the main sources of GHG emissions reduction within farms. Further decomposition reveals a key role for rising land productivity in reducing emission intensity.

This paper analyzes long-term income and wealth trajectories among smallholder households in agrarian reform settlements in Rondônia, Brazil (1996–2019). Although agrarian reform settlements representing less than 10% of the Amazon biome, they account for more than 25% of deforestation, illustrating a frontier dynamic in which natural capital is converted into cropland, livestock pasture, and other forms of produced and financial capital. We explore whether this loss of natural capital has resulted in gains in household welfare, adopting a weak sustainability perspective, and further assess how those gains are distributed. Using a balanced household panel, we combine convergence and catch-up regressions, inequality measures, and multinomial logit models to evaluate absolute and relative mobility in income and wealth. We relate these measures of mobility to von Thünen–type measures of access, Ricardian-type endowments, demographic factors, and livelihood portfolios. Results show that income and wealth increased over time, but gains were unequally distributed. Income showed proportional convergence—poorer households grew faster relative to their baseline—yet absolute gaps widened. Wealth accumulation was steadier but more stratified, with persistent advantage at the top. Although initial endowments were associated with the opportunity space households faced, time-varying strategies—particularly land accumulation and livelihood diversification—were more predictive of upward or downward mobility. Yet the link between income gains and long-term asset building was relatively weak, suggesting structural constraints such as limited access to credit, savings mechanisms, and technical assistance. Overall, settlers achieved economic gains but not lasting equality, underscoring how agrarian reform settlements—designed to promote equal access to land and economic opportunities—have come to mirror broader Amazonian patterns of unequal growth coupled with decline in natural capital. Policies that tailor interventions to households at different points in the income and wealth distributions—combining income stabilization, asset building, and recovery mechanisms for vulnerable groups with incentives for sustainable intensification and productive reinvestment—are central for aligning land distribution and rural development with long-term socio-environmental sustainability.

Agri-environment schemes (AES) are a key instrument of EU biodiversity policy, yet their effectiveness remains contested due to selection bias and limited outcome measurement. This study provides the first nationwide, field-level evaluation of AES in the Czech Republic using a complete administrative census (2015–2022; almost 1.3 million field-year observations) linked to a robust, species-distribution-model-based biodiversity potential index. We estimate AES impacts at both the extensive margin (enrollment) and intensive margin (payment intensity, measure stacking) using farmer and year fixed effects and instrumental-variable strategies. Results show negligible average effects of enrollment once selection is addressed, modest positive elasticities for subsidy intensity (0.4–0.6 %), and gains from stacking measures without evidence of diminishing returns. Policy allocation is heavily skewed toward permanent grassland, where baseline biodiversity potential is already high, while high-contrast measures on arable land remain rare and underfunded. These findings highlight that ecological additionality depends less on binary participation and more on targeting, measure type, and landscape context. We conclude that reallocating resources toward high-contrast arable prescriptions and piloting results-based payments could improve biodiversity outcomes per unit of public spending.

Biofuels are promoted worldwide as a strategy to replace fossil fuels and cut greenhouse gas emissions. However, their climate benefits are uncertain because biofuel production can induce deforestation and other land use change that causes carbon emissions. Here we show that global demand for biomass-based diesel fuel between 2002 and 2018 drove the conversion of approximately 1.7 million hectares of forest to oil palm in Indonesia and Malaysia, which is about one-fifth of the total forest-to-palm expansion during this period. Using econometric models and high-resolution satellite data, we demonstrate that biomass-based diesel demand raised palm oil prices, which in turn accelerated deforestation, primarily in natural forests. The associated land-use change released more than one gigaton of CO2, giving biomass based diesel higher carbon emissions per megajoule than that of fossil diesel. These findings indicate that biofuels derived from vegetable oils have likely increased, rather than reduced, global emissions, and highlight the urgent need to shift renewable fuel policies away from crop-based feedstocks.