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Agricultural expansion-led deforestation in Uganda is one of the highest of the world. At the same time, internal migration patterns are strongly inter-linked with agricultural dynamics in the country, as migrants are involved in crop production activities and traditionally play important roles in major crop value chains. Migration for agricultural purposes may complicate the already difficult trade-off between agricultural development and forest preservation. This article investigates how internal migration and commercial agriculture shape deforestation patterns across Uganda. Our analysis suggests that the number of cash crop producers and the number of inter-district migrants engaged in agriculture in the recipient parishes are linked to a significant increase in deforestation. We identify cash crop production as a major channel through which migrants affect deforestation. Taken together, these findings call for an improved coordination between policies on forest, agricultural development and land use. In particular, ad-hoc policies of integration are critical to support migrants in recipient areas and avoid additional pressures on natural resources. • The expansion of cash crop activities is significantly associated with deforestation in Uganda. • Internal migrants who produce cash crops also contribute to deforestation significantly more than locals. • Incentives to commercial agriculture and easily accessible lands hint the cash crops, migration and deforestation link. • Improved coordination between measures on forests, agriculture, land use, and migration is crucial to reduce deforestation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• The study assesses the impact of the Ethiopia's Productive Safety Net Programme on food security and vulnerability outcomes. • Programme beneficiaries are less likely to experience food insecurity and harvest losses after droughts. • The benefits of the programme partially extend to the beneficiaries' community peers after droughts. • However, the support does not alleviate the impacts of non-drought-related stresses regardless the group considered. • The findings suggest integrating environmental and climate considerations into social protection interventions. This article uncovers the mechanisms shaping the impact of the public work component of Ethiopia's Productive Safety Net Programme (PSNP) on beneficiaries and communities' food security and vulnerability to various shocks. Using three waves of a national representative household survey, this study provides quantitative evidence on the pathways through which the social protection intervention affects direct beneficiaries and their community peers. The empirical findings show that the PSNP beneficiaries are less likely to be food insecure and to experience harvest losses in the aftermath of droughts. Notably, the beneficial effects of the programme partially spill over to the direct participants' community peers. This is likely to be due the nature of the public works implemented through the programme, such as the integrated community-based watershed development, including soil and water conservation measures and rangeland management in pastoral areas. Additionally, no significant impacts have been found when households self-report stresses unrelated to droughts. Our findings are expected to inform the debate on the effectiveness of the PSNP and other adaptive social protection programmes. From a policy perspective, they suggest the explicit integration of environmental and climate considerations into the design of social protection interventions targeting poor agricultural households highly vulnerable and exposed to weather shocks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• This study develops a spatially explicit approach to measure development resilience through capturing human interactions and the impact of surrounding systems. • The proposed method significantly and robustly improves overall targeting accuracy, especially at aggregated level and for households experiencing drastic well-being shifts. • From a policy perspective, incorporating spatial elements into measuring resilience has the potential to improve resource allocation efficiency for development and humanitarian interventions. • The method chosen for measuring development resilience implies a policy tradeoff between over-coverage and leakage. Building resilience is paramount in the development and humanitarian agenda, yet existing resilience measures "are all, at best, imperfect, and at worst, deeply flawed" (Upton, Constenla-Villoslada and Barrett, 2022). This study contributes to improving the conceptualization and the measurement of resilience. Conceptually, it builds on the notion of systemic resilience. Operationally, it explicitly models the spatial structure underlying human-system interactions and locational effects. To do so, a generalization of the conditional moments of well-being approach (Cissé and Barrett, 2018) is proposed. Our method has relatively low data requirements and is reasonably straightforward to implement. It largely preserves the desirable in-sample features of the parent method while significantly increasing the targeting accuracy. From a policy perspective, incorporating spatial elements into measuring resilience has the potential to improve resource allocation efficiency for development and humanitarian interventions. It also emphasizes the importance of synergizing community-based interventions to complement household-level ones in building resilience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Highlights • Climate-related shocks are key push factors for livelihood diversification. • Effect of livelihood diversification on household income are varied across countries and diversification strategies. • Impact of both crop and income diversification on households' welfare is generally higher for the poorest. • Livelihood diversification interventions should be tailored toward specific socio-economic segments of the rural population. Abstract This article investigates the empirical linkages between crop and livelihood diversification strategies, extreme weather events, and household welfare using a unique dataset that integrates harmonized, national representative household surveys and geo-referenced climatic information collected in Malawi, Niger and Zambia. In doing so, the paper addresses the potential endogeneity arising from the selection bias and the heterogeneity of the effect across the quantiles of the income distribution. Results show that exposure to extreme rainfall events is positively associated with either crop or livelihood diversification in all the countries analyzed, suggesting that climate-related shocks are key push factors for diversification. Moreover, results show that the effect of diversification on household income are varied across countries and diversification strategies. However, most of this heterogeneity disappears when estimating the quantile treatment effects. In particular, the results show that the impact of both crop and income diversification on households' welfare is generally higher for the poorest (people located at the bottom tail of the distribution) while it decreases, and in some cases turns to be negative, moving toward the upper end of the income distribution in all three countries. The findings, therefore, highlight the pro-poor impact of diversification strategies in multiple rural African contexts, as well as the need to tailor diversification interventions toward specific socio-economic segments of the rural population. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]