Francisco Costa, PhD, Assistant Professor of Economics at the Alfred Lerner College of Business and Economics at the University of Delaware, will present the EEEP Seminar Series, “Efficient Forestation in the Brazilian Amazon” on February 15, 2023.
Abstract: This paper estimates the Brazilian Amazon’s carbon-efficient forestation — i.e. when farmers internalize the social cost of carbon. We propose a dynamic discrete choice land use model and estimate it using a panel of land use and carbon stock of 5.7 billion pixels between 2008 and 2017. Business-as-usual implies an inefficient release of 44 billion tons of CO2 in the long run resulting from the deforestation of an area twice the size of France. We show that targeted mitigation efforts in areas with the largest potential for emission reductions can mitigate up to 13 billion tons of CO2 at a cost under $10/ton. However, the abatement cost curve is convex, making preserving the whole forest an expensive task.
Read full paper: https://osf.io/preprints/socarxiv/8yfr7/
Speaker Bio: Francisco Costa is an environmental and development economist with work on land use, climate change, energy efficiency, and regional development. His main research agenda concentrates on understanding how market incentives and policies can shape land use in tropical forests, with a focus on the Amazon rainforest. He is an Assistant Professor of Economics at the Alfred Lerner College of Business and Economics at the University of Delaware, and an Invited Researcher at J-PAL (LAC & K-CAI). Prior to joining UD, he was an Assistant Professor at FGV EPGE. He received his Ph.D. in Economics from the London School of Economics and his M.A. and B.A. from FGV EPGE.