*Abstract*
Tropical deforestation remains a major global sustainability challenge despite decades of public, private and NGO-led conservation efforts. Rates of forest loss vary widely across countries and through time, suggesting that national policy choices may strongly influence outcomes. Despite this, robust causal impact evaluations of public policy at this scale remain scarce, partly due to difficulties in constructing credible counterfactuals and isolating policy effects amid confounding global drivers and numerous, overlapping policy interventions. Here, a comparative structural break detection framework is applied to remote sensing derived national deforestation trajectories to identify potential policy signals once external drivers are accounted for. The approach accommodates diverse policy response dynamics by allowing multiple forms of structural change to be detected, without prior assumptions about treatment timing or assignment. Preliminary results highlight both the promise and limitations of existing data and causal inference methods for detecting policy-induced changes in deforestation at the national scale. Through subsequent attribution of structural breaks to individual policies or policy mixes, this research seeks to clarify the role of public policy in shaping tropical forest dynamics, while advancing methods for evaluating conservation impacts at national scales.
*Bio*
Jakob Poffley is a PhD student in the Conservation and Development Lab at the University of Cambridge’s Department of Geography and Conservation Research Institute. His work is supervised by Prof. Rachael Garrett and Prof. Srinivasan Keshav, and funded by the Centre for Doctoral Training in Artificial Intelligence for Environmental Risk (AI4ER CDT).Jakob’s PhD research uses causal impact evaluation and land system science to examine how governance arrangements, including public policy, jurisdictional approaches, and the EU Deforestation Regulation, affect deforestation and related socio-environmental outcomes across the tropics. In doing so, he investigates whether coherent policy mixes can overcome the limits of individual instruments and enable forest conservation at scale. Beyond his PhD, Jakob has worked on illegal wildlife trade, biodiversity offsetting, wildlife monitoring, climate change, and forest ecology. He holds an MRes in Environmental Data Science and BA in Natural Sciences, both from the University of Cambridge.
