ISJ Theoretical & Applied Science 04(156) 2026

Philadelphia, USA

Chituma, N.Ch.

Household timber production, afforestation, and forest cover change in Zambia: panel evidence from north-western and eastern provinces.

Full Article: PDF

Scientific Object Identifier: http://s-o-i.org/1.1/TAS-04-156-3

DOI: https://dx.doi.org/10.15863/TAS.2026.04.156.3

Language: English

Citation: Chituma, N.Ch. (2026). Household timber production, afforestation, and forest cover change in Zambia: panel evidence from north-western and eastern provinces. ISJ Theoretical & Applied Science, 04 (156), 12-20. Soi: https://s-o-i.org/1.1/TAS-04-156-3 Doi: https://dx.doi.org/10.15863/TAS.2026.04.156.3

Pages: 12-20

Published: 30.04.2026

Abstract: Zambia has forests that cover about 60 percent of the entire land in the country but the role of afforestation as a moderating process is empirically under-explored at the district level. The paper considers the role of household involvement in timber production in the change in forest cover among 30 districts in North-Western and Eastern Zambia between the year 2019 and 2024 based on a balance panel of 180 observations and a two-way fixed-effects (FE) regression model. An interaction term is included to determine whether conservation programs are able to mitigate the adverse ecological impact of extraction through a moderating variable - afforestation intensity. Findings indicate that household timber participation has statistically significant negative impact on forest cover (= -0.041, p = 0.01), which is resistant to proxy substitution (charcoal production, = -0.052, p = 0.05) and one year lagged specification (= -0.044, p = 0.1). Importantly, the timber ? afforestation interaction coefficient is (critically) positive and significant (0.001, p < 0.01), which confirms the buffering effect: the decreases in forest cover to one unit of timber activity are significantly less in the districts characterized by the high intensity of afforestation. The model accounts about 95 percent change in forest cover (R 2 = 0.947). These results allow concluding that active afforestation policy can separate household economic extraction with extensive ecological degradation, assuming that the rates of planting and extraction increase in the same proportion.

Key words: forest cover change; timber harvesting; afforestation; fixed- effects panel model; Zambia; forest conservation; rural livelihoods.