Forest-linked livelihoods in a globalized world

Abstract

orests provide essential livelihoods and environmental services. They harbour a disproportionate amount of the world's biodiversity, regulate key aspects of the global carbon cycle and weather patterns, and contribute directly to national incomes and the local livelihoods of millions of people worldwide. Their role in sustainability transitions is re-emphasized by multiple current international sustainability agendas. Forests can be linked to most-if not all-of the Sustainable Development Goals through contributions to ecosystem services, green economic opportunities, and social and environmental justice agendas 1,2. Forests are also essential to the Paris Climate Agreement, 3 the Aichi Biodiversity Targets and the Post-2020 Global Biodiversity Framework 4,5. Further, the Bonn Challenge aims to bring under restoration 350 Mha of degraded lands globally by 2030, and the New York Declaration on Forests identifies 10 specific global forest goals 6. Forests are a key mechanism for mitigating climate change through forest protection, restoration and afforestation 7,8. This prominent attention to forests, especially in human-dominated tropical and subtropical regions, creates a need for a comprehensive policy-oriented research agenda. Research on forests and livelihoods has typically focused on trying to understand how household-or community-level dynamics, including rights to resources and land-use decisions, affect local livelihoods and forests 9. However, new research on forests demonstrates the importance of links between human and natural systems at regional, inter-continental and global scales 10. For example, demand for commodity crops in Europe, North America and emerging economies is driving environmental degradation in the Amazon, Congo Basin and Indonesian peatlands 11. In turn, smoke from forest and peat fires in Indonesia affects human health in Southeast Asian countries 12. Identifying and understanding large-scale processes linked to forests and livelihoods with disproportionate effects on

Long- and Short-Run Forest Dynamics: An Empirical Assessment of Forest Transition, Environmental Kuznets Curve and Ecologically Unequal Exchange Theories

“…., T i }, µ i,t 0, σ 2 µ It has to be noted that these long-run coefficients are superconsistent, i.e., the distribution of the estimated coefficients converges to the real value as the sample size tends to infinity [36]. However, their standard errors are large and unreliable, and thus not robust, so statistical inference is not straightforward [3,49]. Thus, we have only used those estimates for our sample without performing statistical inference (see Appendix C for futher explanation).…”

“…The multiple implications of changes in forest cover for climate change and livelihoods have made deforestation a global problem of public concern [2]. As a result, several international sustainability agendas have emphasized the role of forest in transition to sustainability, with special attention to tropical and subtropical regions [3].…”

“…Yet, few of these works use statistical designs that can correct for these potential spurious relations and disentangle long-and short-run relations between forest cover and socio-economic variables. As a consequence, there is little emphasis on the causal analysis of forest dynamics [3]. Finally, several works explore the effects of a range of variables whose selection is informed by theories, but do not build on an explicit causal model linking these variables together.…”

“…Through this work, we have also contributed to overcome some of the current literature's limitations such the lack of a more systematic focus on causal analysis, a disentangling of long-and short-run dynamics, and a closer examination across different geographical and temporal scales [3]. Our contribution resides on the investigation of the long-and short-run cause relationships of forest dynamics through the use of an ECM and a cross-country panel dataset.…”

Frontier metrics for a process-based understanding of deforestation dynamics

“…Agricultural expansion into natural areas has helped to meet the growing global demand for food, feed, and fiber (Godfray et al, 2010), but has also produced unsustainable land-use outcomes. This is particularly the case where agricultural frontiers expand into tropical and subtropical forests, triggering globally-relevant greenhouse gas emissions (Carlson et al, 2017), biodiversity losses (Chaplin-Kramer et al, 2015), and major livelihood impacts on forestdependent people (Andersson & Agrawal, 2011;Oldekop et al, 2020). Yet, much of the agricultural expansion during the past decades has taken place in the tropics (Gibbs et al, 2010), where most of the last uncultivated, productive lands are found (Lambin et al, 2013;Ramankutty et al, 2002).…”