Does Deforestation Increase Malaria Prevalence? Evidence from Satellite Data and Health Surveys

2018

Deforestation has been found to increase malaria risk in some settings, while a growing number of studies have found that deforestation increases malaria prevalence in humans, suggesting that in some cases forest conservation might belong in a portfolio of anti-malarial interventions. However, previous studies of deforestation and malaria prevalence were based on a small number of countries and observations, commonly using cross-sectional analyses of less-than-ideal forest data at the aggregate jurisdictional level. In this paper we combine fourteen years of high-resolution satellite data on forest loss with individual-level data from Demographic and Health Surveys on malaria in more than 6…