People & Poverty

In agricultural settings around the world, farmers experience annual “hungry seasons” when their harvest income from the previous year has been depleted. This affects their labor supply, migration decisions, and agricultural output. We explore innovative approaches to combating seasonal poverty.

Conditional cash transfers for environmental performance – including payments for ecosystem services – compensate households and communities for behaviors that generate environmental benefits and would otherwise be costly to implement. We investigate when, why, and how these programs work. 

Revolutionary advancements in data collection, remote sensing, and satellite imagery now enable us to track and evaluate things like land conversion, movements of vessels at sea, and the path of airborne pollutants at an extraordinarily fine scale. We leverage these tools to draw connections between human activity and environmental outcomes with the ultimate goal of improving human welfare.

Low income households around the world struggle to access clean and modern energy services, but expanding access also has the potential to increase carbon emissions. emLab researchers examine how to balance access with efficient and sustainable use through research that covers a number of energy sources and countries, testing the effectiveness of policy interventions for achieving these dual goals.

From identifying forced labor at sea to determining the equity implication of carbon markets, the People & Poverty program examines how the management of different environmental levers can enhance or impair environmental justice in disenfranchised communities around the world.