The effect of illicit crops on forest cover in Colombia

ABSTRACT Many armed conflicts worldwide occur in biodiversity hotspots and nearly 50% of those conflicts occur in forested regions. In Colombia, the armed conflict has implied the clearing of large forest tracts for the establishment of illicit crops. The aim of this study was to assess the role that illicit crops played in the deforestation dynamics in Colombia between 2001 and 2014. We established a database with the annual deforestation rates and nine predictors for 1120 municipalities and built fixed effects models that take spatial autocorrelation into account. Model selection with AIC suggested that the area cultivated with coca crops was the best predictor of annual rates of deforestation, whereas coca crop removal was associated with increasing forest cover. According to our results, coca crops promoted deforestation in Colombia between 2001 and 2014 through indirect (spilling-over to nearby areas), immediate and temporally-lagged mechanisms.