Deforestation and land tenure in Mexico: A response to Bonilla-Moheno et al.

Bonilla-Moheno et al. published an interesting paper on land tenure as a determinant of deforestation in Mexico, in Land Use Policy in 2013. In this review, we focus critically on the methodology used by the authors to reach two key conclusions. Firstly, we suggest that their use of coarse resolution MODIS EVI data to assess deforestation rates may have resulted in an erroneous conclusion, that forest area in Mexico is increasing rather than decreasing. This finding is contrary to official data and to other recent scientific assessments. Secondly, we question their conclusion that territories under the tenure of ‘comunidades indigenas’ are less likely to experience deforestation, and more likely to experience expansion of forest area, than those under ‘ejidal’ tenure. We believe that the sampling method, which involved the selection of municipalities with high concentrations of one particular type of tenure, and which eliminated the 60% of municipalities which contain mixed forms of tenure, biased the sample, particularly for the case of comunidades. The comunidades included in the sample are almost all found in a single region of the country, which may represent a special case. In reality comunidades are much more widespread through the country. Moreover we find that the explanation given by the authors for the relative success of comunidades in conserving their forests is not founded in data from any study of process at the local level.