Extended Data Fig. 1: Trend lines for cumulative forest loss in Tiger Reserves where the conservation policy exhibited significant effects on deforestation.

Cumulative forest loss for Tiger Reserves that exhibited significant results (unadjusted p-value < 0.05) based on a two-sided Fisher’s exact test to compare the ratios of pre-intervention and post-intervention mean squared prediction errors between treated reserves and placebo units (see Methods section for more details). Significance levels from placebo testing have been reported for each synthetic counterfactual in the displayed plots. Overall, 15 out of the 45 reserves exhibited significant effects after Tiger Reserves with anticipation effects ruled out (See Supplementary Figs. 5, 6 and Supplementary Table 3). Of these 15 Tiger Reserves, 11 demonstrated avoided deforestation. The remaining four reserves demonstrated higher than anticipated forest loss (highlighted in the dashed red box). The dotted pink line represents the cumulative forest loss for the synthetic control model while the dotted grey line represents observed deforestation in hectares. The vertical dashed line represents the year of implementation of the enhanced conservation policy. For each of these reserves, the synthetic control line closely tracks the observed cumulative forest loss values before the intervention.