The Tropics. Poverty, forests and diseases.

Tropical forests contain two-thirds of the Earth's terrestrial biodiversity and provide significant benefits through the provision of biological goods, maintenance of genetic diversity, and storage of carbon. Yet the future of the tropics has never been more uncertain. At a time when the world is experiencing unprecedented changes in biodiversity at local and global scales, my research intends to highlight the role tropical forests play in the global ecosystem services. My aim is to investigate the link between two important features of the tropics. First, the role of anthropogenic forest loss and fragmentation in the emergence of infectious and zoonotic diseases. Second, the pervasive poverty which is a persistent socio-economic dimension of the region, existing in majority of the rural communities living in the forest frontiers. These communities have a complex and symbiotic relationship with the environment, often benefiting from them whilst contributing to deforestation. My research specifically aims to understand how the emergence of diseases from deforestation contributes in perpetuating the poverty trap commonly experienced by the rural communities in the tropics. To study this, I will focus on building the poverty-deforestation-disease hypothesis which will explicate how poor households in the forest frontiers engage in low-productivity agriculture for subsistence leading to deforestation. This in turn often has cascading ecological effects by increasing the probability of pathogen spillover due to change in inter-species contact patterns and giving rise to infectious and zoonotic diseases. Emergence of such diseases disproportionately affects the already vulnerable rural communities on the forest margins, pushing them further into poverty and forcing them to continue degrading the natural resource. The focus of my investigation will be the Congo Basin, the second-largest tropical forest cover in the world and where majority of the forest loss is driven by subsistence and small-scale commercial farmers. Additionally, this region is a hotspot for emerging diseases, whose burden has been steadily increasing in recent years. The first part of my research introduces a theoretical model encapsulating the hypothesis and integrating ecological, economic and epidemiological features of the region leading to persistent poverty. The second part will be to empirically investigate the implications for each of the six countries within the Congo Basin, with an initial focus on Ebola and Monkeypox outbreaks and future extensions to other regional tropical diseases. Utilizing spatially disaggregated data with econometric tools, my aim is to establish causal mechanisms and quantify the effect of disease in amplifying the feedback between deforestation and poverty. This can help policymakers in the region to introduce the right incentives and interventions for disease management and poverty reduction while simultaneously achieving tropical conservation goals.