Back to the fields? Increased agricultural land greenness after a COVID-19 lockdown

Abstract

Abstract In response to the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic, policymakers worldwide adopted unprecedented measures to limit disease spread, with major repercussions on economic activities and the environment. Here we provide empirical evidence of the impact of a lockdown policy on satellite-measured agricultural land greenness in Badung, a highly populated regency of Bali, Indonesia. Using machine learning and satellite data, we estimate what the Enhanced Vegetation Index (EVI) of cropland would have been without a lockdown. Based on on this counterfactual, we estimate a significant increase in the EVI over agricultural land after the beginning of the lockdown period. The finding is robust to a placebo test. Based on evidence from official reports and international press outlets, we suggest that the observed increase in EVI might be caused by labour reallocation to agriculture from the tourism sector, hardly hit by the lockdown measures. Our results show that machine learning and satellite data can be effectively combined to estimate the effects of exogenous events on land productivity.