Deforestation-Forestation Research Paper

1. Past And Present Deforestation

1.1 Rates And Definitions

About one half (47 percent) of Earth’s forest cover of 8,000 years past is gone (World Resources Institute 1998), largely the impress of human activity. Yet forests continue to occupy about one quarter of the land surface, or 3.5 million hectares (ha). Fifty-five percent are located in developing countries, primarily in the tropical world. From 1980 to 1995, developing countries lost some 200 million ha (10 percent) of their forest, while developed countries gained about 20 million ha (FAO 1999).

Deforestation is defined as the permanent transition from forest to all other land categories. Forests in developing countries, according to the FAO, are ecosystems with a minimum of 10 percent crown cover of trees and/or bamboos covering a minimum of 0.5 ha. Estimates of global deforestation, however, are normally based on national forest inventories which use self-defined measures and data of varying quality and commonly differ from estimates derived from satellite data. Many countries use simple extrapolations or model-based estimates. The uncertainty of deforestation estimates, therefore, must be emphasized.

Deforestation is distinguished from forest degradation or a reduction in tree density and/or increased disturbance resulting in loss of forest products and forest-derived ecological services. Selective logging— practiced properly—does not qualify as deforestation, but might lead to forest degradation. In addition, roads constructed for this purpose make forests accessible and may attract migrants, precipitating deforestation.

1.2 The Forest Transition

Deforestation in developing countries and reforestation in developed ones form part of a global pattern in land use that some envision as a long-term, temporal sequence. The forest transition captures this sequence, referring to a pattern of forest use initially leading to deforestation during extractive and agrarian episodes and subsequently to reforestation as economic activity shifts to industry and services (Grainger 1995, Mather and Needle 1998, Rudel 1998). Most developed regions of the world incurred rapid deforestation in the past, closely linked to the growth in their populations. With industrialization and urbanization, however, forest land subsequently increased beginning in the nineteenth century in Europe and the twentieth century in the United States.

This decoupling of population growth and deforestation is more complex than changing sectoral composition of the economy. Improved transport networks stimulated commercial agriculture, permit-ting specialized production based on local conditions. Improved agricultural technologies shifted major production to areas suitable for mechanized cultivation and adjusted agriculture to land capability, permitting the abandonment of marginal lands. Industrialization pulled people off the land and shifted energy supplies from wood to coal and later to other fossil fuels. In the latter half of the twentieth century, forest plantations have contributed to the forest transition, although they contribute only 3 percent to the world’s forests at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Finally, political and cultural changes played a role, primarily through state environmental management and policy. The role of forests in stabilizing water supply and runoff was recognized; forests became more than timber.

2. Impacts Of Deforestation

2.1 Appropriate vs. Inappropriate Deforestation

Not all conversion of forests to agriculture or other uses is inappropriate. Kaimowitz et al. (1998) use three criteria to define inappropriate deforestation: eco-logical (high adverse local or downstream effects, high biodiversity and biomass), economic (high forest value to local people and low agricultural potential), and political (none or few stakeholders gain). Appropriate deforestation, therefore, involves relatively benign consequences environmentally and on current forest uses but significant gains to a significant portion of the stakeholders.

Underlying such terms as ‘(in)appropriate’ or ‘excessive’ deforestation is the concept of ‘optimal levels of deforestation’—balancing all relevant costs and benefits of alternative land uses. Besides the practical data and measurement problem such an analysis entails, the concept raises critical methodological and philosophical issues. How are future costs balanced against the current ones (discounting)? How is the enormous uncertainty related to the (costs of ) climate change and biodiversity loss taken into account? How are costs and benefits occurring to different groups balanced? Nevertheless, there is convincing evidence for the current pace of deforestation being too high: land managers usually fail to incorporate the down-stream or long-term environmental effects of forest conversion; government policies frequently stimulate forest clearing in the service of powerful interest groups, and business may ignore or attempt to circumvent indigenous forest land rights.

2.2 Climate Change

Global concern for tropical deforestation has been strongly linked to the issue of climate change and loss in biotic diversity, although increasingly ecosystem services have been invoked as well. Forests are reservoirs (storage in biomass and soils), sinks (increasing area and/or growth), and sources (release through burning, biomass decay, and soil disturbance) of carbon (FAO 1999). The Inter-governmental Panel of Climate Change (IPCC) estimates that net CO emissions from land-use changes, mainly tropical deforestation, contributed about 20 percent of the global anthropogenic CO emissions during the 1990s (IPCC 2000). Deforestation emits two other greenhouse gases, methane (CH ) and nitrous oxide (N O), but no reliable global emission estimates exist. The main emissions of these other gases related to deforestation are not from forest clearing and burning per se, but rather from sub-sequent uses of the deforested land (Houghton 1993).

Reduced deforestation, improved land management, and more agroforestry and forest plantations can reduce the net emissions from tropical forests. The IPCC estimates that over the first half of the twenty-first century such measures could—under a reasonable scenario—amount to 12–15 percent of fossil fuel carbon emissions.

2.3 Biodiversity Loss

Tropical rain forests are the biologically richest terrestrial biome on the planet, hosting 50–90 percent of all plant species. Tropical deforestation is, therefore, the single largest threat to maintaining the planet’s flora and fauna diversity. Estimates of species loss— whether 10 or 150 species/day—are at best educated guesses, but many scientists believe that the rate of extinction at the end of the twentieth century constitutes a mass extinction on the order of those driven by nature in the geological past.

High biological diversity is worth preserving for several reasons (e.g., Botkin and Talbot 1992). On utilitarian grounds, forest products provide direct benefits to humans. A large proportion of agricultural plants originates in forests, and new plants with potentially high commercial value may yet be dis-covered. High genetic diversity also enhances plant breeding and productivity.

In the 1990s, attention has shifted to the functioning and value of ecosystems, and the value of high biodiversity within these systems (Kremen et al. 2000). Change in ecosystem sensitivity to perturbations and loss of resilience (the ability of an ecosystem to absorb disturbances) follows from changes in diversity and function and can have serious consequences for local communities (Perrings et al. 1995).

Forests and the biodiversity they contain also have an aesthetic value, and the threat of extinction of ‘charismatic fauna’ has raised public concerns over deforestation. Finally, as stated in the UN General Assembly World Charter for Nature of 1982, species have a moral right to exist.

2.4 Forest Products

Forestry contributes about 2 percent of gross domestic product globally, and 3 percent of international merchandize trade (FAO 1997). Wood production from natural forests is shrinking due to the ‘mining’ of precious timber (e.g., tropical hardwoods) and de-forestation, but also because of conservation (i.e., parks, biospheres, reserves). Production is shifting to intensively managed forests (i.e., plantations) and other tree media outside forests (FAO 1999).

The supply of fuelwood and charcoal, the sole or dominant source of domestic energy for more than two billion people, is threatened by the loss of forest. The most alarming reports of the 1970s and the early 1980s on the extent of fuelwood crises have passed. Yet FAO (1997) estimates about one billion people face fuelwood shortages.

Non-wood forest products (NWFPs) have drawn great attention due to their role in both rural house-holds and national economies, and due to their potential to combine income generation and forest conservation objectives. At least 150 NWFPs are significant in international trade. Among these, plants used in pharmaceuticals, nuts, ginseng roots, cork, and oils each have an annual trade value of more than US$300 million (FAO 1997).

2.5 Local Communities

Indigenous people living close to or within the forest use a wide range of forest products. Forests provide food, fiber, fuel, medicinal products, and wood for shelter and tools. Close to 50 million of the world’s 300 million indigenous people live within or depend on tropical forests for these necessities. Indian tribes in the Amazon and Dayak groups in Borneo, for example, have been put at risk by large government development projects and colonization schemes that remove natural forests. Tropical deforestation there-fore threatens cultural diversity.

3. Driving Forces

The process of deforestation involves at least three levels of causes: agents, immediate causes, and under-lying causes (Angelsen and Kaimowitz 1999, Contreras-Hermosilla 2000). The various agents of deforestation and their actions are the proximate sources of deforestation. Their land-use decisions are based on their individual characteristics and factors external to them, such as prices, access to technology, information, services, and infrastructure. These fac-tors determine the choice set and the incentives for different land uses, and form the immediate (direct) causes of deforestation. In turn, they are determined by broader forces—the underlying causes: for ex-ample, markets and institutions which are strongly influenced by political decisions.

3.1 Agents Of Deforestation

The agents of deforestation are those that cut the trees, including smallholders, large commercial landowners, plantation companies, and infrastructure construction agencies. The key actors vary significantly by world region. Most deforestation in Latin America links to medium and large-holder actors, especially cattle ranchers. Deforestation in Africa is largely related to smallholders converting forest and woodlands to short fallow cropland. Asia, in contrast, represents a mix between small-and large-holder operations, in which agro-industrial companies play a significant role, for example, in converting large tracts of forest to oil palm plantations in Indonesia.

Shifting cultivators have been held responsible for more than half of tropical deforestation, but their share remains controversial. Part of the controversy stems from ambiguous use of the terms ‘shifting cultivation’ (some include any type of smallholder farming) and ‘deforestation’ (temporary vs. permanent clearing). Moreover, agents often interact (e.g., logging companies provide farmers with chainsaws or access roads) or different activities can take place sequentially (e.g., small farmers occupying abandoned timber concessions). Often ‘there are no clear guilty or innocent parties’ (Kaimowitz et al. 1998, p. 303).

3.2 Immediate Causes

The farmers or companies deforest because it is the most profitable alternative and they have the necessary means to do so. Thus, the immediate causes are those that make deforestation more profitable and possible. Higher output prices and technologies that increase yield or reduce input costs make expansion more attractive. Better access to credit and lower interest rates pull in the same direction. Higher wages, reflect-ing the costs of hiring labor or the best alternative use of family labor, work in the opposite direction. Reduced access costs (new or better roads) also provide a great stimulus for deforestation.

These linkages are empirically founded. A survey of more than 140 economic models of deforestation finds a broad consensus on three immediate causes of deforestation: higher agricultural prices, more better roads, and low wages and shortage of off-farm employment (Angelsen and Kaimowitz 1999). But the effect of factors such as technology, property rights, and poverty is ambiguous.

Easy and cheap access to improved technologies has contradictory effects on deforestation (Angelsen and Kaimowitz 2001). Farmers might shift to more intensive systems and reduce their total demand for land. Yield-increasing technologies will also boost supply and put downward pressure on prices, depending on the scale of adoption and the size of markets. But agricultural land expansion might also become more profitable. The history of tropical deforestation, for example, includes a long litany of situations where new crops led to massive deforestation: bananas, cocoa, coffee, oil palm, and sugar cane in various parts of the world (Barraclough and Ghimire 1995).

Insecure property rights, in principle, reduce the incentives for long-term investments. This can make farmers opt for extensive production systems and avoid investments in forest management. But forest clearing itself is an investment as it commonly gives or strengthens farmers’ rights to land. In this context, more secure land rights can actually stimulate ‘land races’ and deforestation.

Finally, poverty is claimed to exacerbate deforestation because poor households have short time horizons and few alternatives, making the forest frontier the employer of last resort. But poor families also lack the capital to deforest large areas, and they must be present in large numbers to have a significant impact. Their lack of alternative sources of livelihood may make the poor more concerned with the local effects of deforestation and forest degradation.

3.3 Underlying Causes

The links between underlying causes and deforestation are highly complex, difficult to establish, and tend to be location-specific, making generalizations difficult. Indeed, the empirical foundation for much of the conventional wisdom of these causes is surprisingly weak (Angelsen and Kaimowitz 1999).

Excessive deforestation can—as with other environ-mental problems—be seen as a problem of market failure. The existence of negative externalities (alternatively, the public goods’ characteristics of many ecological services from forests) creates a conflict between individual and collective rationality. The land managers have little incentive to consider the implications of their actions on, for example, global warming. Although sketchy, calculations of such non-market values indicate that by far the largest potential lies in the carbon storage service of tropical forests (in the range of US $1,000–3,600 ha), comparable to the timber value. Interestingly, existing estimates of the pharmaceutical and ecotourism potential yield very small monetary values per ha (Pearce 1996).

The term policy failure parallels market failure in reference to government action (or inaction) leading to excessive deforestation. The reasons behind policy failures are many: inadequate government capacity to enforce regulations, and policies with unintended and unforeseen effects or with known effects yet lack of concern about them. Examples include agricultural subsidies and promotion of export crops leading to agricultural encroachment of forests. Moreover, a strong political economy dimension may reside in policy failure. Policies are often designed to benefit elite interests at the expense of marginal groups and the environment. Governments have also used forest rents to buy support from powerful groups or to gain popular support.

Historically, deforestation has been closely linked to population growth. ‘Men are a foe to the woods, in proportion as their numbers increase,’ argued J. Robertson (1808). But as the forest transition notion shows the link is conditioned by markets, technology, institutions, and policies. Globalization of markets will make international demand rather than local needs increasingly determine the rate and scale of forest clearing.

Another line of argument relates deforestation to declining terms of trade and international debt in developing countries, and their subsequent structural adjustment policies and economic liberalization. Countries are forced to exploit their forests to service their debt or compensate for a shortfall in export income, with environmental impacts determined by the characteristics of this use. The debt crisis and economic reforms have also led to changes in government investments and expenditures (e.g., less road building), whose net effects on forests are context specific. Angelsen and Kaimowitz (1999, p. 91) conclude that ‘any general claims about the relations among economic liberalization, structural adjustment, and deforestation is misleading.’ If anything, the evidence suggests that higher agricultural output and timber prices which normally follow as part of economic liberalization will lead to more pressure on forests.

Overall, the relative emphasis of different explanations has changed over the past decade, reflecting both changing political winds and new research, but also changes on the ground. Population (and poverty) related explanations have lost ground. ‘Policy failure’ remains a persuasive explanation, but probably less so now compared to the (late) 1980s and early 1990s. Many of the deforestation-inducing policies (e.g., subsidies for colonialization of the Brazilian Amazon) have been weakened or removed. There has also been a tendency to blame governments for everything that went wrong, including the destruction of rainforests, failing to recognize that some government interventions—although bad for the economic performance—probably slowed down deforestation (e.g., high taxation of agriculture). In summary, market and political economy explanations appear to be the more powerful for tropical deforestation presently. Deforestation occurs because it is profitable to some agents, and some groups have the capability to influence the policies to create or enlarge the economic opportunities for themselves.

4. Future Challenges

The forces driving tropical deforestation seem to outweigh those favoring forest conservation, a situation unlikely to change in the near future. One strategy to reduce losses in biotic diversity would be to concentrate conservation efforts on the most valuable sites from a biodiversity perspective. Sayer et al. (2000) argue that a set of about 100 strategically located sites or ‘hot spots’ covering 3–5 percent of the tropical forests might save most tropical biodiversity (also Myers et al. 2000).

The failure and impracticability of land managers to include all the costs in their decisions is the fundamental reason behind excessive deforestation. Payment for one of the most important environmental services standing forests provide—carbon storage— should serve as a strong incentive for forest conservation. The Kyoto Protocol of 1997 allows for carbon trade under the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM), including changes in greenhouse gas emissions due to direct human-induced land-use change and forestry activities. But many technical and political problems remain to be sorted out (e.g., Richards and Moura Costa 1999, IPCC 2000). It remains to be seen whether carbon trading related to forests will become the mechanism that slows the destruction of tropical forests, another form of neo-colonialism where rich countries buy large areas of tropical land and exclude local communities, or whether practical and political problems and high transaction costs will prevent beneficial effects on the fate of tropical forests.

Bibliography:

1. Angelsen A, Kaimowitz D 1999 Rethinking the causes of deforestation: Lessons from economic models. World Bank Research Observer 14 (1 (February)): 73–98
2. Angelsen A, Kaimowitz D (eds.) 2001 Agricultural Technologies and Tropical Deforestation. CAB International, Wallingford, UK
3. Barraclough S L, Ghimire K B 1995 Forests and Livelihoods, The Social Dynamics of Deforestation in De eloping Countries. St. Martins Press, New York
4. Botkin D B, Talbot M 1992 Biological diversity and forests. In: Sharma N P (ed.) Managing the World’s Forests. Kendall Hunt, Dubuque, IA
5. Contreras-Hermosilla 2000 The Underlying Causes of Forest Decline. Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR), Bogor, Indonesia
6. FAO 1997 State of the World’s Forests 1997. Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), Rome
7. FAO 1999 State of the World’s Forests, 1999. Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), Rome
8. Grainger A 1995 The forest transition: an alternative approach. Area 27: 242–51
9. Houghton R A 1993 The role of the world’s forests in global warming. In: Ramakrishna K, Woodwell G M (eds.) World Forests for the Future: Their Use and Conservation. Yale University Press, New Haven, CT
10. IPCC 2000 Land Use, Land-use Change, and Forestry. Inter-national Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK
11. Kaimowitz D, Byron N, Sunderlin W 1998 Public policies to reduce inappropriate deforestation. In: Lutz E (ed.) Agriculture and the Environment. World Bank, Washington, DC
12. Kremen C, Niles J O, Dalton M G, Daily C, Ehrlich P R, Fay J P, Grewal D, Guillery R P 2000 Economic incentives for rain forest conservation across scales. Science 288: 1828–32
13. Mather A, Needle C L 1998 The forest transition. A theoretical basis. Area 30: 117–24
14. Myers N, Mittermeier R A, Mittermeier C G, da Fonseca G A B, Kent J 2000 Biodiversity hotspots for biodiversity conservation. Nature 403 (24 (February)): 853–8
15. Pearce D 1996 Global environmental value and the tropical forests: Demonstration and capture. In: Adamowitz W L, Boxall P C, Luckert M K, Phillips W E, White W A (eds.) Forestry, Economics and the Environment. CAB International, Wallingford, UK
16. Perrings C, Maler K G, Folke C, Holling C S, Jansson B O (eds.) 1995 Biodiversity Loss: Economic and Ecological Issues. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK
17. Richards M, Moura Costa P 1999 Can tropical forestry be made profitable by ‘internalizing the externalities’? Natural Resource Perspectives 46 (October): 1–6
18. Robertson J 1808 General View of Agriculture in the County of Inverness. Board of Agriculture, London
19. Rudel T K 1998 Is there a forest transition? Deforestation, reforestation and development. Rural Sociology 63(4): 533– 52
20. Sayer J, Ishwaran N, Thorsell J, Sigaty T 2000 Tropical forest biodiversity and the World Heritage Convention. Ambio 29(6): 302–9
21. World Resources Institute 1998 World Resources 1998–1999: A Guide to the Global Environment. World Resources Institute (WRI), Washington, DC