Environmental Protection after Civil War: Mining and Deforestation in the DRC

• In Event: Remote Sensing—Methods and Applications

Abstract

Despite the fact that more than eighty percent of civil wars have been fought within biodiversity hotspots, we still do not fully understand the roles of post-conflict institutions in environmental protection. While post-conflict societies have numerous challenges, including acute economic needs and weak state capacities, war and resultant collapse of the extant regime also provide opportunities for modernizing the environmental institutions and implementing them with aid of the international community. In this paper, we adjudicate these competing claims by exploiting a unique analytical opportunity in Congo. After the so-called “Great War of Africa,” the Congolese government introduced an innovative mining code in order to minimize the effect of mining on deforestation. The mining regulations, however, were applied only to the mining permits, which have arbitrary rectangular shapes. This allows us to compare the deforestation just inside and outside of the mining permits, and hence to validly infer the causal effect. By combining the geographical regression discontinuity design with the satellite-based big data that are available at every 30 meters for over a trillion cells, we show that the mining regulation reduced deforestation.

Authors

• Kyosuke Kikuta, Japan External Trade Organization

• Yuta Kamahara, Yokohama National University