Future Work

This analysis was undertaken at the district level. Even individual districts in Nepal can be quite varied. The deforestation data available is much more detailed than this, but the socioeconomic data available did not allow a more refined analysis. The geographical analysis done considered each district to be a point located in its centroid, which of course is not true.

The key to a more refined analysis is to obtain socioeconomic data at the Village District Community (VDC) level, which is the next administrative division down from district. Nepal has about 4000 VDCs. If poverty and other data were available at this level, analysis could be done using rasters of deforestation along with rasters of this data.

Obtaining this data is possible. There are people in the UNM Department of Economics who have extrapolated poverty levels and other data to VDC levels. The next step is to use this data to do a better and more detailed econometric analysis. Such a level of detail might also make the road data more useful.