IFPRI’s Applied Microeconomics & Development Seminar Series provides a forum for researchers to present top-quality applied microeconomics and development work. Seminars are held on the first and third Thursdays of each month at IFPRI’s Washington DC office. Please contact Julie Lang (j.lang@cgiar.org) if you have any questions.
Note: All seminars will be held virtually and in-person seminars are only opened to IFPRI staffs during this time.
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July 6
Speaker: Colette Salemi, Assistant Professor at University of Victoria
11:00-12:15pm EST
Conference Room 9A
Rohingya refugee camps and land cover change in Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh
How do refugee camps impact the natural environment when the refugee population is large? We examine the case study of Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh, a district that hosts nearly 1 million Rohingya refugees in camps. We evaluate recent changes using spatially explicit data on land cover, nighttime lights, and proximity to a camp boundary. Our identification relies on a difference-in-difference two-way fixed effects specification that compares areas 0-5 km from a camp boundary (treatment) to areas 10-15 km away (control). We use the HonestDID approach to evaluate confidence bounds over the treatment effect while relaxing the parallel trends assumption. Our main findings suggest that the rate of forest loss intensified near camps, but settlement expansion and nighttime lights also increased. Alarmingly, a great deal of camp-associated forest losses and settlement expansion are occurring in protected areas. Given the mobility constraints imposed on camp residents, our results suggest that camp-stimulated Bangladeshi activity may be driving forest losses near camps. The negative impact on forests, however, is not robust to an alternative specification using the 16-20 km buffer as the comparison area. Overall, our findings cast doubts on the prior that refugee harvesting of firewood and shelter materials is directly fueling deforestation in the area.
AMD Seminar Series 