What drives clearing of old-growth forest over secondary forests in tropical shifting cultivation systems? Evidence from the Peruvian Amazon

Coomes, Oliver T.; Cheng, Yuanyu; Takasaki, Yoshito; Abizaid, Christian

doi:10.1016/j.ecolecon.2021.107170

Cited by 13 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 43 publications

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“…The reason that clearing rates of old-growth forest are so low is because farmers practicing customary shifting cultivation strongly prefer to clear secondary forest fallows, not only in Peru [23] and Brazil [9] but elsewhere in the tropical world [24,25]. Although fields from old-growth forest may have higher soil fertility, they require more labor to clear and are less accessible, and increasingly so as communities grow in size and expand their working area [9,26].…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Smallholder agriculture results in stable forest cover in riverine Amazonia

Coomes

Kalácska

Takasaki

et al. 2021

Environ. Res. Lett.

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Recent studies point to a rapid increase in small-scale deforestation in Amazonia. Where people live along the rivers of the basin, customary shifting cultivation creates a zone of secondary forest, orchards and crop fields around communities in what was once was old-growth terra firme forest. Visible from satellite imagery as a narrow but extensive band of forest disturbance along rivers, this zone is often considered as having been deforested. In this paper we assess forest disturbance and the dynamics of secondary forests around 275 communities along a 725 km transect on the Napo and Amazon rivers in the Peruvian Amazon. We used high-resolution satellite imagery to define the ‘working area’ around each community, based on the spatial distribution of forest/field patches and the visible boundary between old-growth and secondary forests. Land cover change was assessed between ca. 1989 and 2015 using CLASliteTM image classification. Statistical analyses using community and household-level data from the Peruvian Amazon Rural Livelihoods and Poverty (PARLAP) Project identified the predictors of the extent of forest disturbance and the dynamics of secondary forests around communities. Although shifting cultivation is the primary driver of old-growth forest loss, we find that secondary forest cover which replaces old-growth forests is stable through time, and that both the area and rate of expansion into old-growth forests are modest when compared to forest conversion in Peru for colonization and plantation development. Our findings challenge the notion that smallholder agriculture along rivers is an important threat to terra firme forests in Amazonia and point to the importance of protecting forests on community lands from loggers, colonists and other outsiders.

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