Abstract:
Rural households in agricultural economies are
vulnerable to several environmental risks such as fires,
floods, and droughts that may affect their productivity in
whole or in part. These hazards are especially relevant in
developing countries where farmers have few or no access
to traditional risk-transfer techniques, such as insurance and
finance, and where low governmental investments in rural
infrastructure, risk assessment techniques, or early warning
systems makes the aftermath of such hazards more
expensive and results in slower recovery for those who are
affected. In this paper, we use historical satellite data (Terra)
of burned areas in South America to fit a semiparametric
spatial model, based on kernel smoothing and on a nonlinear
relationship between average time between events and damage,
to assess the environmental hazard affecting the land’s
productivity. The results were twofold: first, we were able
to develop a spatial assessment of fire hazard, and second,
we were able to evaluate how much a farmer may lose in
terms of productivity per hectare due to the environmental hazard. The methodology may be easily adapted to other
world regions; to different environmental hazards such as
floods, windbreak, windthrow, or related land-use changes;
or to integrate various environmental hazards simultaneously,
as long as they can be monitored via remote sensing
(e.g., satellite imagery, aerial photographs, etc).
