Citation: Ghanbari, S.; Smith-Hall, C.; Jafari, M.; Eastin, I. COVID-19 and Rural Households’ Environmental Incomes in Iran. Forests 2023, 14, 1918. https://doi.org/10.3390/f14091918 Academic Editor: Luis Diaz-Balteiro Received: 30 August 2023 Revised: 18 September 2023 Accepted: 19 September 2023 Published: 20 September 2023 Copyright: © 2023 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ 4.0/). Article COVID-19 and Rural Households’ Environmental Incomes in Iran Sajad Ghanbari 1, * , Carsten Smith-Hall 2 , Mostafa Jafari 3 and Ivan Eastin 4 1 Department of Forestry, Ahar Faculty of Agriculture and Natural Resources, University of Tabriz, Tabriz 53548-54517, Iran 2 Department of Food and Resource Economics, Faculty of Science, University of Copenhagen, Rolighedsvej 23, 1958 Frederiksberg, Denmark; cso@ifro.ku.dk 3 Forest Researches Division, Research Institute of Forests and Rangelands, Agricultural Research, Education and Extension Organization, Tehran 13185-116, Iran; mostafajafari@libero.it 4 School of Environment and Sustainability, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI 48109, USA; ieastin@umich.edu * Correspondence: ghanbarisajad@gmail.com; Tel.: +98-414-423-7717 Abstract: The COVID-19 pandemic negatively impacted rural livelihoods in the Global South. Envi- ronmental products, such as medicinal plants and fodder harvested in forests and rangelands, are a major source of income in many rural communities. In this paper, we investigate environmental product-related income and economic responses to the COVID-19 pandemic using face-to-face in- terviews with randomly selected household heads (n = 384) in 26 villages in northwestern Iran. We found that the main impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic were a decrease in income (reported by 72% of households), an increased health risk (48%), and persistent fear of infection by COVID-19 (45%). Household economies were found to be particularly reliant on animal husbandry (26% of total annual household income) and farming (26%). Environmental products contributed an average of 18% of total household income. Almost half of the households (45%) experienced lower livestock prices, a lack of buyers (49%), and a lockdown of animal markets (38%). Fodder (collected by 45% of households), medicinal plants (42%), and wild fruits (29%) were the most important environmental products harvested during the COVID-19 pandemic. We found a negative but not significant effect of the COVID-19 pandemic on total rural household income and that the COVID-19 pandemic led to a slight non-significant decrease in relative forest income. The negative impact on relative forest income resonates well with existing scholarship on livelihoods and negative shocks. It is noteworthy, however, that there is substantial scope for increasing environmental incomes and, thus, the potential of environmental products as a response option in the face of covariant shocks such as COVID-19. Keywords: diseases; livelihoods; rural communities; forest; West Asia 1. Introduction The COVID-19 pandemic has had global impacts, including about 4.2 million deaths and 90,630 deaths around the world and Iran, respectively [1]. There is a growing concern about the economic impacts of the pandemic on rural households involved in small- scale activities in the Global South [2–4]. The Global South refers to countries previously described as “developing”, “less developed,” or “underdeveloped”. Shackleton and de Vos (2022) found that half of the global non-timber forest product (NTFP) users are located in rural regions of the Global South. Many rural households depend on small-scale industries and micro-subsistence strategies such as animal husbandry, small-scale agriculture, and harvesting of environmental products, including NTFPs, to generate income [4]. These activities were disrupted when the pandemic constrained the ability to harvest, sell, and market products. Forests 2023, 14, 1918. https://doi.org/10.3390/f14091918 https://www.mdpi.com/journal/forests