Crossing spatial analyses and livestock economics to understand deforestation processes in the Brazilian Amazon: the case of São Félix do Xingú in South Pará

The Amazon is the largest tropical forest area on Earth, and has been undergoing rapid deforestation for the last four decades. In the Brazilian Amazon, large‐scale pasture for cattle ranching and soybean production are the main land uses, leading to a yearly deforestation rate of 0.5%. These conversions are mostly located in frontier areas distributed along the so‐called “arc of deforestation”. Within this large zone, various land use change processes are interacting through several modes of land valuation and organisation. From several case studies in the State of Pará (Brazil), the current project aims at analysing how landscape dynamics are related to infrastructure development, ecological conditions, zoning policies and to the evolution and the organisation of the production, consumption and marketing chains of livestock products. This paper presents the results for one test site, the region of São Félix do Xingú, South of Pará This region is the focus of land speculation, cattle expansion, and deforestation. Road construction, investments in electrical energy, financial credit for cattle, and the land reform policies have all fuelled this process. All these factors make this region one of the most dynamic agricultural frontiers in the Brazilian Amazon. The main objective of the paper is to improve our understanding of deforestation processes by crossing spatial analyses and 1ivestock economics.studies, and to characterise the role and impact of various natural and anthropic factors in the location and development of the main types of farmers, and their policy implications.     

Discouraging Rainforest Transformation: An Ex-ante Policy Impact Analysis

Despite extensive efforts made by national and international certification agencies, Indonesian smallholder farmers’ participation in palm oil certification schemes adoption remains low. A fundamental obstacle is the smallholder practice of rainforest transformation into oil palm plantation which is forbidden by the agencies. In this context, we investigate three policies that could lead to a reduction in rainforest deforestation by smallholders: price premium on certified palm oil; the provision of environmental information; contributor recognition. In order to evaluate the influence of the policies ex-ante, we conduct a social dilemma experiment involving rubber and oil palm smallholders in Jambi Province, Sumatra, Indonesia. The findings indicate that the price premium and provision of context-specific environmental information could reduce rainforest transformation. However, a statistically significant effect of contributor recognition was not found.     

Forest transition in South Korea: Reality, path and drivers

While forest transition (FT) in South Korea began in 1955, when forest cover was only 35% of national land area, significant increases in both forest cover and growing stock really occurred in the early 1970s. Using reconstructed historical records, we empirically demonstrate that (1) FT in South Korea was mainly accomplished by the recovery of degraded, non-stocked forest; and (2) one-dimensional FT analysis using forest area alone has severe limitations in diagnosing meaningful changes in forest sustainability. The key driver of FT in South Korea was the government-led reforestation policy. The comprehensive reforestation plans, started in 1973, not only provided economic incentives to the general public by establishing clear quantifiable goals, they also promoted inter-agency cooperation and coordination, especially between the energy and forest sectors, to replace firewood with fossil fuels. These government-led efforts, accompanied by rural-urban migration, brought an increase in stocked forest area and a complementary rising average growing stock level. The case of South Korea shows that FTs can be cultivated in a relatively short period of time by a central authority, even with imperfect governance and low economic development.     

Shifting cultivation and forest pressure in Cameroon

Shifting cultivation is often blamed as a principal cause of deforestation in tropical Africa. It is claimed that the practice is unsustainable because shortened fallow lengths result in soils too degraded to support forest vegetation. The decline in fallow lengths is often attributed to increases in population density and greater market participation. The conventional wisdom makes several claims that are as yet unsubstantiated. This article investigates whether there is evidence to support two of these claims in southern Cameroon. First, using both cross‐sectional and panel data, I find that there is indeed a robust negative association between fallow lengths and population density in the study area and weaker evidence for a negative relationship between fallow lengths and market participation. Second, a stochastic frontier production function approach is used to investigate the marginal contribution of fallow to output. Results indicate that fallow lengths are not low enough to be affecting yields and therefore do not appear to be resulting in declines in soil fertility. Thus overall, while some of the assumptions of the conventional wisdom appear to be true, there is little evidence to support its dramatic conclusion that shifting cultivators are causing deforestation in the forested region of Cameroon.     

Local institutions: Regulation and valuation of forest use—Evidence from Central Sulawesi,Indonesia

Forest management poses particular challenges as the pressure on forests is huge due to deforestation. In this context, the establishment of protected areas is a common conservation measure where institutions are put in place and sanctions regarding forest use are enforced. This paper focuses on the practice of sustainable forest management and the associated perspectives of local institutions at the rainforest margins of Lore Lindu National Park (LLNP) in Central Sulawesi, Indonesia.     

Shifting patterns of oil palm driven deforestation in Indonesia and implications for zero-deforestation commitments

Oil palm plantations in Indonesia have been linked to substantial deforestation in the 1990s and 2000s, though recent studies suggest that new plantations are increasingly developed on non-forest land. Without nationwide data to establish recent baseline trends, the impact of commitments to eliminate deforestation from palm oil supply chains could therefore be overestimated. We examine the area and proportion of plantations replacing forests across Sumatra, Kalimantan, and Papua up to 2015, and map biophysically suitable areas for future deforestation-free expansion. We created new maps of oil palm plantations for the years 1995, 2000, 2005, 2010 and 2015, and examined land cover replaced in each period. Nationwide, oil palm plantation expansion occurred at an average rate of 450,000 ha yr⁻¹, and resulted in an average of 117,000 ha yr⁻¹ of deforestation, during 1995–2015. Our analysis of the most recent five-year period (2010–2015) shows that the rate of deforestation due to new plantations has remained relatively stable since 2005, despite large increases in the extent of plantations. As a result, the proportion of plantations replacing forests decreased from 54% during 1995–2000, to 18% during 2010–2015. In addition, we estimate there are 30.2 million hectares of non-forest land nationwide which meet biophysical suitability criteria for oil palm cultivation. Our findings suggest that recent zero-deforestation commitments may not have a large impact on deforestation in Sumatra, where plantations have increasingly expanded onto non-forest land over the past twenty years, and which hosts large potentially suitable areas for future deforestation-free expansion. On the other hand, these pledges could have more influence in Kalimantan, where oil palm driven deforestation increased over our study period, and in Papua, a new frontier of expansion with substantial remaining forest cover.     

The relation between forest clearance and household income among native Amazonians: Results from the Tsimane' Amazonian panel study, Bolivia

The Amazon rain forest harbors some of the world's richest biological diversity. During the twentieth century, two types of actors cleared that forest: native Amazonians and outside encroachers. Of the two actors, we know more about what drives outside encroachers to clear forest than about what drives native Amazonians to clear forest. The past research focus has served well because during the twentieth century outside encroachers cleared most of the Amazonian forest. But the past research focus needs to be expanded because native Amazonians are claiming de jure stewardship of the forests they inhabit, and with tighter jurisdiction over those forests will likely come changes in the amount of forest native Amazonians clear. Prior research in rural areas of low-income nations suggests that household income affects household forest clearance. To estimate the effects of household real income on the total forest area (old-growth + fallow) cleared by households we use a panel composed of five annual household surveys (2002-2006, inclusive) from 324 households of a native Amazonian society in Bolivia (Tsimane'). We control for household and village fixed effects and use an instrumental variable for household income. We find positive and significant household real income elasticities of forest clearance of 0.35 and 0.47 and an increase in forest clearance of 5.3%/year. The main finding stood up well to sensitivity analysis. These estimates suggest that in the near future, the forest in the Tsimane' territory will likely face increasing pressure from the Tsimane' themselves, not just from outside encroachers.     

Socio-environmental drivers of forest change in rural Uganda

Tropical deforestation and forest degradation are among the top global threats to biodiversity, carbon storage and rural livelihoods, but the social processes underlying these changes remain difficult to observe across large spatial scales and in data-poor contexts such as tropical Africa. We link longitudinal survey data from agricultural households in rural Uganda to high-resolution satellite data on forest cover change, and use this linked dataset to investigate processes at two scales: tree planting and harvesting at the parcel scale, and deforestation and reforestation at the community scale. This multi-scale analysis reveals that tree planting is more common on parcels with secure tenure, by educated heads and in isolated communities. Deforestation is highest in land-rich, agrarian communities with low population density and high baseline forest cover. These results provide explicit evidence that the social drivers of forest change in Uganda vary across scales, indicating a need for additional multi-scale studies.     

Modelling Deforestation and Land‐Use Change: Sparse Data Environments

Land‐use change in developing countries is of great interest to policy‐makers and researchers with diverse interests. Concerns about consequences of deforestation for global climate change and biodiversity have received the most publicity, but loss of wetlands, declining land productivity and watershed management are also problems facing developing countries. Analyses of these problems are especially constrained by lack of data. This article reviews modelling approaches for data‐constrained environments that involve discrete choice methods including neural nets and dynamic programming, and research results that link individual household survey data with satellite images using geographic positioning systems.     

The institutional drivers of sustainable landscapes: a case study of the ‘Mayan Zone’ in Quintana Roo, Mexico

Research on the dynamics of tropical forest land use and cover change (LUCC) has focused on the three scenarios: (1) deforestation/degradation; (2) settled, degraded areas in recovery, and (3) sparsely settled, expansive, intact forest. Through examination of a central Quintana Roo, Mexico case study we propose a fourth scenario of a ‘sustainable landscape’: an inhabited, productively used, forested landscape that nonetheless shows little change or net gains in forest cover over the last 25 years. We use Landsat images to demonstrate a low incidence of net deforestation, 0.01% for the 1984–2000 period, the lowest recorded deforestation rate for southeastern Mexico. Institutional innovations such as an agrarian reform process that established large common property forests for non-timber forest product extraction, and later innovations such as sustainable forest management institutions have driven the outcome of low net deforestation, added to multiple organizational processes that promote sustainable land use.