Long and short run effects of climate change on forest rents in Zambia: A time series analysis
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Extant literature often focuses on the impact of deforestation on climate change; often with conclusions that deforestation must be discouraged. However, forests are a key contributor to socio-economic wellbeing of the people at household level as well as to economic growth of nations through the natural resources extracted from them. Forests are a great reservoir of biodiversity. In most developing countries, forests are also the most reliable drug stores, they supply medicinal remedies. Instead of preventing people from utilizing these resources, a good approach is to embrace sustainable forest resource utilization. Hence, understanding how climate change affects forest rents would be useful in formulating policy that builds a resilient ecosystem. This study uses climate change and forest rents data from 1970 to 2019 to model long and short run relationship between climate change and forest rents in Zambia. Rainfall, temperature and agricultural land were used as climate change variables. This data was obtained from the World Bank climate change portal and World Development Index. A long run positive relationship was found between agricultural land and forest rents. The speed of adjustment was 56.85%. Carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions were significant predictors in the short run.
Rainfall was generally not a significant predictor of forest rents. The findings further indicate that increased rainfall granger causes increase in agricultural land clearance. Also a bi-directional causal relationship between CO2 and agricultural land was found. These findings offer interesting tips that could be considered when formulating energy, natural resource and climate change policies.
Keywords: Forest rents, Climate change, Time series, Cointegration, Zambia
ID 3624205