More than one billion people worldwide receive cash or in-kind transfers from social protection programs. In low-income countries, these transfers are often conditioned on participation in labor-intensive public works to rehabilitate local infrastructure or natural resources. Despite their popularity, the environmental impacts of public works programs remain largely undocumented. We quantify the impact on tree cover of Ethiopia’s Productive Safety Net Program (PSNP), one of the world’s largest and longest-running public works programs, using satellite-based data of tree cover combined with difference-in-differences and inverse probability treatment weighting methodologies. We find that the PSNP increased tree cover by 3.8% between 2005 and 2019, with larger increases in less densely populated areas and on steep-sloped terrain. As increasing tree cover is considered an important strategy to mitigate global warming, our results suggest a win–win potential for social safety net programs with an environmental component.

全世界有超过 10 亿人从社会保护计划中获得现金或实物转移。在低收入国家，这些转移通常以参与劳动密集型公共工程为条件，以恢复当地基础设施或自然资源。尽管它们很受欢迎，但公共工程项目的环境影响在很大程度上仍然没有记录。我们使用基于卫星的树木覆盖数据以及差异差异和逆概率处理加权，量化了埃塞俄比亚生产安全网计划 (PSNP) 对树木覆盖的影响，该计划是世界上最大和运行时间最长的公共工程计划之一方法论。我们发现，PSNP 在 2005 年至 2019 年间将树木覆盖率增加了 3.8%，在人口密度较低的地区和陡坡地形上增加幅度更大。