Agriculture is the largest cause of deforestation. So, it follows that forest expansion efforts would displace agriculture — but new research from Georgia Tech's School of Economics reports that that’s not necessarily the case. And not only that, forest expansion actually increased agricultural output in the study.

These findings can help governments, policymakers, and conservation organizations more accurately assess the costs and benefits of forest expansion projects in the fight against climate change.

“The key policy implication is that there may be co-benefits to using forest expansion as a tool to sequester carbon,” said Matthew E. Oliver, associate professor at the School of Economics and co-author on the paper. Without accounting for them, the net social benefits may be significantly underestimated, the researchers write.

The findings could also suggest alternative paths for aid organizations, Oliver said.

“Development programs don’t have to be in the form of direct aid. This project was about increasing forest areas, but it also supported the local economy in another indirect way.”

Main Findings

The paper, written by Oliver and Dylan Brewer at Georgia Tech and Vikrant K. Kamble at Muskingum University, was published in Land Economics. The project began as Kamble’s Ph.D. dissertation, on which Oliver and Brewer co-advised. They find:

• Following one of the largest forest expansion programs in Rajasthan, India, agricultural production in the area increased by 24% in the seven to 14 years after planting.
• The researchers hypothesize this could be due to increased pollinator activity in the newly forested areas and the 2% increase in rainfall they measured.
• While the 2% increase is statistically insignificant, yields for crops relying on rainfall grew considerably while yields for crops relying on irrigation did not, suggesting a connection between forest expansion, rainfall, and improved agricultural outputs.

This is some of the first evidence of its kind, and the researchers caution that the results may not hold true everywhere.

However, “our task was to rule out a negative impact on agriculture, and the fact that we're not seeing that and that there could be a positive impact is really strong evidence that we don't see a reverse trade-off,” Brewer said. “When you go back and reforest, it's not going to eat into agricultural resources.”

“Is There a Tradeoff between Forest Expansion and Agriculture?” was published in Land Economics in August 2025. Read more at https://doi.org/10.3368/le.101.3.022924-0020R