Social protection as climate-shock insurance for forests: Evidence from Sub-Saharan Africa

Forest-dependent households in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) frequently respond to income and climate shocks by clearing forests, whether through cropland expansion, charcoal production, or distress land use. If public social protection relaxes the liquidity and insurance constraints that drive these coping strategies, it may curb shock-driven deforestation even where it has no effect on average. Using a balanced panel of 48 SSA countries over 2001-2024, this paper combines satellite-based gross tree-cover loss (Hansen/UMD, distributed through Global Forest Watch) with public social spending (World Bank) and a plausibly exogenous climate-shock measure (FAOSTAT country temperature anomalies). Two-way fixed-effects, dynamic system-GMM, and Driscoll-Kraay estimators reveal no unconditional average association between social protection and forest loss. However, a temperature shock significantly raises tree-cover loss where social protection is weak, while the effect is roughly halved and rendered statistically insignificant at higher levels of provision, with the marginal effect crossing zero near 3% of GDP; the interaction between the shock and social effort is negative and significant (coefficient -0.17, p<0.01). The buffering effect is robust to functional form, influential deforesters, country-specific trends, alternative outcomes, and wild-cluster-bootstrap inference, and the level of forest loss falls most with social effort in the climate-vulnerable Sahel. Social protection thus operates as a form of climate-shock insurance for forests, with implications for the design of adaptation finance, REDD+, and social-protection systems in forest-rich, climate-exposed economies.