Chapter Two : Stay or Go?
12. Other studies have documented a similar maladaptive reaction to irrigation in specific regions. One well-known study found that access to the Ogallala aquifer in the United States induced a shift to water-intensive crops that increased drought sensitivity over time (Hornbeck and Keskin 2014). 13. Migration in and of itself can also have important though complex and often ignored impacts on forests. In some countries, migration has allowed forests to recover or rebound as people leave rural areas and become less dependent on farming (Oldekop et al. 2018). In others, it has reduced forest cover as remittances allowed further expansion of cultivation (Gray and Bilsborrow 2014). The effects will vary depending on whether migration is one-way or “circular,” how remittances are invested, and how migration interacts with forest management regimes (Hecht et al. 2015). Teasing out the various factors remains an important area of future work. 14. This is equivalent to the 95th percentile of the global forest loss distribution in the data. 15. Although the results in this chapter demonstrate two potential buffering strategies, other policies may also be equally as effective. Policies that reduce the exposure of a person’s income to rainfall variability, such as social protection safety nets, weather-based crop insurance, or incentives to grow more weather-resilient crops, can also change a person’s calculus when deciding how to respond to anomalies.
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