Search

In 2023, Brazil achieved positive environmental strides in the Amazon, with a 22% reduction in deforestation rates and a 16% decline in total fire counts compared with 2022, attributed to renewed environmental policy implementation. However, despite progress, deforestation remains above the target, and forest wildfires in old‐growth Amazonian forests surged by 152% in 2023 versus 2022, threatening biodiversity and carbon stocks. The rise in fires poses challenges for traditional farmers, impacts urban areas' air quality, and necessitates urgent measures like enhanced firefighting capabilities and long‐term strategies for fire‐free production chains to protect the Amazonian standing forests—a global socio‐environmental asset. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Artisanal and small‐scale gold mining (ASGM), a wealth‐generating industry in many regions, is nonetheless a global challenge for governance and a threat to biodiversity, public health, and ecosystem integrity. In 2019, the Peruvian government mobilized a targeted, large‐scale armed intervention against illegal ASGM, which has caused deforestation and water resource degradation in this Tropical Biodiversity Hotspot. Before the intervention, the extent of waterbodies created by mining (mining ponds) was increasing by 33%–90%/year; after, they decreased by 4%–5%/year in targeted zones. Mining activity indicators showed 70%–90% abandonment. New mining activity accelerated in nearby areas outside the targeted area (pond area increases: 42%–83%; deforestation increases +3–5 km2/year). Far from intervention zones, mining remained stable during the study period. Our analysis demonstrates that targeted, large‐scale government intervention can have positive effects on conservation by stopping illegal mining activity and shifting it to permitted areas, thereby setting the stage for governance. Continued conservation efforts must further address the impacts of informal mining while (1) limiting environmental degradation by legal mining; (2) remediating former mining areas to reduce erosion and enable reforestation or alternative uses of the landscape; and (3) sustaining such efforts, as some miners began to return to intervention areas when enforcement relaxed in 2022. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The idea of 'equity', largely grounded in Western legal tradition, has come to permeate evaluations of what is fair and just within environmental governance programmes. But what constitutes equity in climate change and conservation projects? And does everyone affected by such projects see equity as desirable? Local encounters with global environmental governance interventions in Suau, Milne Bay Province of Papua New Guinea, provide an entry point to explore these questions. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork with communities implicated in the Central Suau Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD+) Pilot Project and in Save the Forest conservation projects, we examine tensions around conceptions of equity and equality between project proponents and local communities, as well as between individuals within those communities. By paying attention to talk about pigs in Suau, and tracing the intersections between reciprocity and trade, we explore how people negotiate equity and equality. We emphasize that this negotiation is central to Suau ideas of fairness. While the REDD+ and Save the Forest projects work to ensure 'equitable' distribution of benefits among supposedly equivalent actors, we show how this may actually close down possibilities for negotiation of outcomes that local people consider fair. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While Brazil publicly committed to reduce deforestation in Amazonia at the 26th Conference of the Parties (COP26), the Brazilian parliament is moving toward weakening environmental laws. Deforestation rates continue ascending, reaching in 2021 the highest value since 2006 (13,235 km2). To overcome this paradox, strategies to curb deforestation are mandatory. The current strategy, "Plano Amazônia 21/22," prioritizes law enforcement actions to curb illegal deforestation in only 11 Amazonian municipalities. Here, we show that this prioritization is likely to be insufficient since these municipalities account for just 37% of the current deforestation rate. This strategy may also be undermined by the leakage of deforestation actions to unmonitored municipalities. Using a set of spatially explicit datasets integrated into a deforestation‐prediction modeling approach, we propose a science‐based alternative method for ranking deforestation hotspots to be prioritized by law enforcement actions. Our prioritization method accounts for more than 60% of the deforestation, detecting larger deforested areas in both private and public lands, while covering 27% less territory than "Plano Amazônia 21/22." Optimizing the detection of priority areas for curbing deforestation, as proposed here, is the first step to reducing deforestation rates and comply with the Brazilian legal commitment of 3925 km2 year−1. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ecotourism is developing rapidly in biodiversity hotspots worldwide, but there is limited and mixed empirical evidence that ecotourism achieves positive biodiversity outcomes. We assessed whether ecotourism influenced forest loss rates and trajectories from 2000 to 2017 in Himalayan temperate forests. We compared forest loss in 15 ecotourism hubs with nonecotourism areas in 4 Himalayan countries. We used matching statistics to control for local‐level determinants of forest loss, for example, population density, market access, and topography. None of the ecotourism hubs was free of forest loss, and we found limited evidence that forest‐loss trajectories in ecotourism hubs were different from those in nonecotourism areas. In Nepal and Bhutan, differences in forest loss rates between ecotourism hubs and matched nonecotourism areas did not differ significantly, and the magnitude of the estimated effect was small. In India, where overall forest loss rates were the lowest of any country in our analysis, forest loss rates were higher in ecotourism hubs than in matched nonecotourism areas. In contrast, in China, where overall forest loss rates were highest, forest loss rates were lower in ecotourism hubs than where there was no ecotourism. Our results suggest that the success of ecotourism as a forest conservation strategy, as it is currently practiced in the Himalaya, is context dependent. In a region with high deforestation pressures, ecotourism may be a relatively environmentally friendly form of economic development relative to other development strategies. However, ecotourism may stimulate forest loss in regions where deforestation rates are low. Article impact statement: Whether ecotourism protects forests is context dependent, and an important factor is the deforestation pressure overall on the landscape. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cooperation between environmentalists, scientists, and governmental actors was a crucial driver behind Brazil's efforts to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from the forest sector from 2004 onward. The same climate coalition's advocacy work to reduce emissions in the energy sector, Brazil's second-most emitting sector, has been unsuccessful. Why has climate-policy development been so different in the two sectors? Building on the advocacy coalition framework, this paper analyzes the climate coalition's role, systematically comparing how the coalition has worked to influence policy development in the two key sectors for Brazilian GHG emissions between 2003 and 2015. The paper finds that strong climate-coalition unity, unambiguous scientific knowledge, economic growth, and international pressure functioned as a constellation of factors that enhanced the climate coalition's ability to take advantage of a climate-policy window and frame deforestation as a core climate concern. The same constellation of factors was missing in the energy sector. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: In striking contrast to heartening events in the adjacent Amazon, Brazil's Cerrado biome has seen continued deforestation over the past decade. Though approved in 2012, no study evaluated the impacts of new Brazilian Forest Code (FC) revision on biodiversity and ecosystem services. Here, we report the first assessment of the likely loss and gain in biodiversity and ecosystem services expected if the FC is properly enforced across 200 million hectares of the Cerrado. We also discuss the challenges associated to compliance with the law and present opportunities for conservation. Establishing restoration programmes in private properties with currently less native vegetation than required by the FC could create habitat for 25% more threatened species than now found in these places and could also increase water security and carbon stock in 56.6 MtC. More important, trading environmental reserve quotas coupled with the strategic expansion of protected areas on private and public land could definitely rescue the Cerrado from the brink. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Globally, deforestation continues, and although protected areas effectively protect forests, the majority of forests are not in protected areas. Thus, how effective are different management regimes to avoid deforestation in non-protected forests? We sought to assess the effectiveness of different national forest-management regimes to safeguard forests outside protected areas. We compared 2000-2014 deforestation rates across the temperate forests of 5 countries in the Himalaya (Bhutan, Nepal, China, India, and Myanmar) of which 13% are protected. We reviewed the literature to characterize forest management regimes in each country and conducted a quasi-experimental analysis to measure differences in deforestation of unprotected forests among countries and states in India. Countries varied in both overarching forest-management goals and specific tenure arrangements and policies for unprotected forests, from policies emphasizing economic development to those focused on forest conservation. Deforestation rates differed up to 1.4% between countries, even after accounting for local determinants of deforestation, such as human population density, market access, and topography. The highest deforestation rates were associated with forest policies aimed at maximizing profits and unstable tenure regimes. Deforestation in national forest-management regimes that emphasized conservation and community management were relatively low. In India results were consistent with the national-level results. We interpreted our results in the context of the broader literature on decentralized, community-based natural resource management, and our findings emphasize that the type and quality of community-based forestry programs and the degree to which they are oriented toward sustainable use rather than economic development are important for forest protection. Our cross-national results are consistent with results from site- and regional-scale studies that show forest-management regimes that ensure stable land tenure and integrate local-livelihood benefits with forest conservation result in the best forest outcomes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Though wetlands are vital for the proper functioning of terrestrial ecosystems and provisioning of a wide range of goods and services, their sustainability is being threatened by inappropriate human resource use practices due to our limited understanding of how these systems operate and lack of appropriately informed interventions. We attempt to address these limitations by using historical CORONA photographs of 1967, Landsat imagery of 1989, 1994 and 2001 and information from the literature to investigate the role of natural and human factors in influencing the direction of environmental change in the proximal reaches of Botswana's Okavango Delta. Results of this investigation point to fragmentation of natural habitats, localised degradation of areas close to perennial water supplies, significant increase in woody cover, significant decrease in open grassland, increase in scrub and shrubs, deterioration in the quality of grazing and depletion of specific woody species. With the direction of change pointing to persistent decrease in the environment's supporting potentials, there is urgent need to adopt intervention strategies potentially capable of enhancing sustainable utilisation of natural resources in this sub-region. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Protected areas are leading tools in efforts to slow global species loss and appear also to have a role in climate change policy. Understanding their impacts on deforestation informs environmental policies. We review several approaches to evaluating protection's impact on deforestation, given three hurdles to empirical evaluation, and note that “matching” techniques from economic impact evaluation address those hurdles. The central hurdle derives from the fact that protected areas are distributed nonrandomly across landscapes. Nonrandom location can be intentional, and for good reasons, including biological and political ones. Yet even so, when protected areas are biased in their locations toward less-threatened areas, many methods for impact evaluation will overestimate protection's effect. The use of matching techniques allows one to control for known landscape biases when inferring the impact of protection. Applications of matching have revealed considerably lower impact estimates of forest protection than produced by other methods. A reduction in the estimated impact from existing parks does not suggest, however, that protection is unable to lower clearing. Rather, it indicates the importance of variation across locations in how much impact protection could possibly have on rates of deforestation. Matching, then, bundles improved estimates of the average impact of protection with guidance on where new parks’ impacts will be highest. While many factors will determine where new protected areas will be sited in the future, we claim that the variation across space in protection's impact on deforestation rates should inform site choice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This research builds upon previous cross-national studies of deforestation. In doing so, I examine how various world-systems indicators interact with political conditions within a nation. I test the hypothesis that repressive nations create a “good business climate” for multinational capital, which, in turn, affects deforestation. This “good business climate” consists of economic incentives (e.g., tax holidays), regulatory concessions (e.g., environmental law exemptions), and imposed political stability (e.g., outlawing strikes, protests, and unions). The results indicate that export partner concentration, commodity concentration, multinational corporate penetration, and International Monetary Fund conditionality increase deforestation more at higher rather than at lower levels of repression. I also confirm previous findings that gross domestic product per capita decreases deforestation, indicating that richer nations are able to externalize their environmental costs onto poorer nations. I conclude with the theoretical implications of this research, policy implications, and possible directions for future research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objective . We draw on ecological modernization theory and international political economy arguments to examine the sources of an environmental Kuznets curve (or EKC) that produces an inverted U-shaped rate of deforestation relative to economic development. Method . We use ordinary least squares regression with White's (1978) correction for possible heteroskedasticity to examine the rate of deforestation (1980–1995) in less developed countries. Results . Net of controls for initial forest stock and the quality of deforestation estimates, we find strong evidence for an EKC driven by (1) agglomeration effects linked to the level of urbanization, (2) rural-to-urban migration that partially offsets rural population pressure, (3) the growth of services-dominated urban economies, and (4) strong democratic states. We find little evidence that foreign debt or export dependence influence the deforestation rate. Conclusions . Although deforestation continues to pose pressing and potentially irreversible environmental risks, there is evidence of self-corrective ecological and modernization processes inherent in development that act to mitigate these risks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objective. This article reviews changes in the social contexts of deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon from the 1970s to the 1990s, moving from the household to the global level. Methods. I draw on satellite imagery, state publications, farm surveys, ethnographic field work, and policy analyses for a comparative analysis that shows how land cover, agriculture, demographics, politics, and markets have changed over time. Results. Alterations in the social contexts of deforestation appear on all levels considered, from household demographic evolution and new land use strategies to a regional demographic transition and the emergence of cattle and timber economies, to a “greening” of Brazilian development policy and changes in national land markets, to multilateral bank loans for new infrastructure and local-international alliances between grassroots and environmental organizations. Conclusions. The social contexts of deforestation are very complex and changing and call for greater attention by social scientists to land cover and land use change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite its widely publicized efforts in environmental conservation, Costa Rica continues to experience severe deforestation due to entrenched deforestation interests in the country. These interests are created by existing legislation which unintentionally favors deforestation, and by the longstanding nonapplication of positive legislation. Costa Rica's newest strategy involves the mobilization of a broad-based conservation constituency through environmental education and the development of a "conservation area" strategy which helps distribute responsibilities and benefits of conservation among populations adjacent to protected areas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Presents figures and statistics on Japan and its environmental policies. Commercial whaling; Destruction of tropical forest; Hardwood usage; Nuclear power needs; Emissions from fossil fuels; More.