LULCC

In this geo-spatial impact evaluation, we will assess land use and land cover change impacts of the Sorghum and Millet upscaling project in Mali, implemented by ICRISAT between 2014 and 2015. Over 100,000 sorghum and millet farmers across 227 villages in the Sikasso region in Mali, have adopted improved sorghum and millet technologies, leading to yield increases in the range of 30% to 60%. The impact evaluation will assess the heterogeneous causal effects of yield improvements induced by the technology upscaling on local land use. The impact evaluation will leverage a retrospective panel of remote sensing data spanning between 2008 and 2020 across Sikasso region covering both treated and non-treated villages. The heterogeneous adoption patterns induced by concurrent technology upscaling and market and policy changes, make this a particularly interesting ‘live-lab’ to extend current debates on Borlaug hypothesis versus Jevons’s paradox on land use.

In this project, we collaborate with ICRISAT (John Nzungize), the University of Louvain (Patrick Meyfroidt), and the University of California at Santa Barbara (Robert Heilmayr).

• Leibniz Institute of Agricultural Development in Transition Economies (IAMO), Germany
• Université catholique de Louvain, Belgium
• ICRISAT (International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics), Mali

• CGIAR Standing Panel on Impact Assessment (SPIA)
• Bioversity International