The purpose of this project is to examine socioeconomic causes of deforestation in Nepal. In particular, the project focuses on the relationship between poverty and deforestation, though more socioeconomic data will be incorporated as time goes on and the project becomes more sophisticated.

Nepal is divided up into 75 districts:

Some of the data available is on a much finer scale than these districts; but some data is only available as averages per district. So, data which was finer had to be generalized to district level. One key piece of data was deforestation:

Learn more about how this data was created and what it means

Positive values represent areas where deforestation occurred, and negative values represent areas where forestation occurred. The red areas indicate very severe deforestation.

The other important data used were poverty levels by district:

These district-level poverty figures were calculated by Mani Nepal of the UNM Economics Department as part of his Ph.D. thesis.

In some districts, more than ¾ of the population lives in poverty.

Other socioeconomic data were also created for future analyses, but were not used in the final regression at this stage.

Now, let’s take a look at the analysis of how deforestation is related to poverty.