Combatting forest fires in the drylands of Sub‐Saharan Africa: Quasi‐experimental evidence from Burkina Faso

Forest fires are among the main drivers of deforestation and forest degradation in the drylands of Sub‐Saharan Africa. We use remote sensing data on forest fires and remaining tree cover to estimate the effectiveness of a project targeted at reducing fire incidences in 12 protected forests in arid Burkina Faso. The project consisted of two components that were implemented in the villages surrounding the target forests: a campaign aimed at raising community awareness about the detrimental effects of forest fires, and a program to support establishing and maintaining forest fire prevention infrastructures. Using the synthetic control method, we find that the project resulted in an overall reduction of 35% in the number of days on which an average forest grid cell was detected to be on fire in the month of the year when fires tend to be most prevalent—November, at the very end of the agricultural season. This impact is, however, short lived (as the reduction only occurred in the November months in the first 4 years of the program), and the overall reduction in forest fire occurrences was not sufficiently large to result in a detectable increase in vegetation cover. We then try to uncover the underlying mechanisms to shed light on which of the project's components were effective to also learn how the program can be improved.