Ethiopia’s flagship public works program increases tree cover in rural areas and sloped terrains

More than one billion people worldwide receive cash or in-kind transfers from social assistance programs. In low-income countries, these transfers are often being conditioned on participation in labor-intensive public works to rehabilitate local infrastructure or natural resources. Despite their popularity, the environmental impacts of public works programs remain largely undocumented, implying that researchers and policymakers may be underestimating their social impacts. We assess the environmental impacts of public works within Ethiopia’s Productive Safety Net Program (PSNP), one of the largest and longest- running public works programs in the world. As many of the PSNP public works are forestry projects, we focus on quantifying the impact of the PSNP on the percentage of tree cover in local communities. Using satellite-based measures of tree cover, we combine difference-in- differences and inverse probability treatment weighting methodologies to identify the causal impacts of the PSNP on tree cover. We find that the PSNP increased tree cover by 3.8% and that these increases in tree cover are larger in less densely populated areas and on steep- sloped terrains that are poorly suited for crop agriculture. As trees sequester carbon and increasing tree cover is considered an important strategy to limit global warming, our results suggest an important win-win potential for social safety net programs with an environmental component.