Investing in land to change your risk exposure? Land transactions in a landslide prone region

The poor and vulnerable tend to be increasingly exposed to natural hazards like landslides. This paper investigates the consequences of land transactions for the (un)equal distribution of exposure to landslide risk and of total land holdings in a rural area in Western Uganda. We propose and empirically test a mechanism through which land holdings and exposure to landslide risk evolves over a farmer s lifetime. A structured household survey and detailed information on land transaction as well as georeferenced information on plots was used to construct a panel dataset of land transactions. Regressions with household fixed effects were run to identify how landholdings and exposure to landslide susceptibility evolves over a farmer s lifetime. We find that farmers that are initially more exposed to landslides manage to reduce their average exposure to some extent by acquiring plots outside landslide prone areas. This goes at a cost, as farmers that are initially highly exposed acquire land more slowly than farmers that have a lower exposure on their first plot. Over a lifetime, in our case study, land transactions therefore have a somewhat levelling effect on inequality in exposure to landslide susceptibility, but increase the inequality in land ownership. Acknowledgement : This study would not have been possible without the dedicated effort of all enumerators involved in the data collection, the local chair persons and the farmers that provided us with abovementioned information. We would also like to thank the logistical support provided by the Mountains of the Moon University (MMU). The financial support was received from the AfReSlide project, BR/121/A2/AfReSlide, titled Landslides in Equatorial Africa: Identifying culturally, technically and economically feasible resilience strategies , funded by the Belgian Science Policy (BELSPO). We would also like to thank the VLIR UOS South Initiative, ZEIN2013Z145.