Agriculture, Climate, and Environment

^{A bird's eye view of the stark contrast between the forest and agricultural landscapes near Rio Branco, Acre, Brazil. Photo by Kate Evans for Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR), licensed under (CC BY-NC 2.0).}

The Global Environment Facility (GEF) needed to answer a critical question: where were their efforts to fight land degradation succeeding—and why? AidData collaborated with the GEF's Independent Evaluation Office to conduct a rigorous study of their projects to slow, halt, and reverse land degradation. We quantified where and how the health of forests in areas with GEF projects had increased dramatically. By training algorithms to analyze high-resolution satellite data, we found that GEF projects increased both the number of trees in forests and the number of leaves on those trees. We also found that the average GEF project, which costs $4.2 million, sequesters around $7.5 million worth of carbon—a real return on investment for the environment. This study, a first of its kind, was published for the 51st GEF Council Meeting and helped inform the GEF’s future work.

Blog: Using machine learning to combat environmental degradation on a global scale  

^{Map of forest loss in Southeast Asia compared to Chinese infrastructure projects.}

The scale and scope of China's overseas infrastructure activities now rival or exceed that the largest traditional donors and lenders. From 2000 to 2014, China provided over $350 billion in official finance for development, with much of that going towards infrastructure, according to AidData's research. Teaming up with the MacArthur Foundation, AidData used a novel dataset to measure the impacts of these Chinese-funded infrastructure projects on forest health in three of the world’s most ecologically sensitive regions: the Tropical Andes, the Great Lakes region of Africa, and the Mekong Delta. The resulting study highlights the crucial role that domestic environmental governance plays in protecting forests: forest loss actually slowed in areas with strong protection regimes in place. But these effects reversed, and forest loss increased, in countries where forests were not adequately protected by host governments.

Blog: Chinese-funded infrastructure in endangered forests: What is the data telling us?