Land dynamics: forest transition & indirect land use change

Land dynamics that form from the human-environment relationship in land change science can be surprising.  The landscape and the anthropogenic impacts to its composition are a complex relationship.  For example global demands on the environment are rising and their accompany stresses on the environment are expected to grow (Grau and Aide, 2008), but the land use systems are more complex then this simple relationship and they seem to offer a degree of resilience in accommodating these new pressures. At the same time if human policies are design in faulty ways environmental stresses can be intensified. The goal is to understand land dynamics in order to amplify land system resilience which decreasing human impacts.  This summary outlines two processes on the landscape in which better understanding can lead to better-regulated human-environment systems.  These processes are forest transition and indirect land use change.

Forest transition in is simplest terms is when a region of the world experiences a shifts from net deforestation to net reforestation (Meyfroidt et al., 2010; Pfaff and Walker, 2010).  This processes is surprising in that it can be seen to be an analogue with development. When countries are transition from subsistence to a developing economy, there are high rates of deforestation using the natural capital to industrialize and shift to manufacturing economy. This is accompanied by agricultural intensification leading to abandoned lands and beginning of forest recovery.  There is a growth of population in urban areas that interact with the global markets to satisfy consumption. Examples of countries currently going through forest transition are Costa Rica, Chile, El Salvador, Bhutan, China, India, and Vietnam.  Developed nations like the United States (US), France, and other European countries have already underwent forest transition.  Rapidly developing countries like Brazil, Indonesia, Cameroon, and Peru have had no forest transition, and still deforest at high rates.  This can be an attractive story line, that development would save the forests, but countries that are having forest transitions is a result of exporting the resource demands to other countries (Meyfroidt et al., 2010; Pfaff and Walker, 2010).   This outsourcing of forest related lands is more then just timber demands, but can also be agricultural demands.  Food and other natural resources that are not being produced in developed countries like France and the US are one of the mechanisms leading the reforestation trends.  Further more the intensification of agriculture, concentrating the production is sparing more land for transition (Grau and Aide, 2008).  This can have social impact divorcing people from land production leaving them out of work.  Higher skill labor is required in these new economies where people are replaced by machinery.  Social programs and remittances are ways the society resilience forms in this new paradigm.   The question is how to transition forests without outsourcing environmental degradation, and how to transform economies without leaving whole groups of people behind.  Policy is the solution in constructing constraints into development.

Regions of the world under heavy deforestation are under rapid development, but are trying to design policies to encourage forest transition.  Land conversion restrictions are one popular policy that on face value looks at responsible development. Lapola et al. (2010) analyzed one such program in the manufacturing of biofuels from soy.  In this case land use restrictions where applied that production of soy could not take place on lands that were not already degraded.  This restriction looked to stop forest conversion that would be driven by the development of biofuels.  The plan is faulty in that they did not take into account indirect land use change.  Development of biofuel production does not take place in an isolated world, but in the context of the whole economy.  Pricing current lands became more valuable in supplying the demand needed for biofuel production.  Other land uses were not restricted, simply displacing land use to other parts of the country, which normally resulted in deforestation.  Without a comprehensive approach the development of biofuels lead to indirect land-use change that made the policy design have little net environmental benefit. Smarter policy is needed, but without a complete understanding of land dynamics it is hard to design.

Landscape change and human use of the land adapt not only to the natural systems but also the social system.  Understanding land dynamics is important in order to design better policy.  Some activities can have indirect benefits of consequences, and designing a constrained system that works toward benefits can help in solving environmental problems.  There is a need to research in human use of the world in order to develop sustainably.

Works Cited

Grau, H. R., & Aide, M. (2008). Globalization and land-use transitions in Latin America. Ecology and Society, 13(2), 16.

Lapola, D. M., Schaldach, R., Alcamo, J., Bondeau, A., Koch, J., Koelking, C., & Priess, J. A. (2010). Indirect land-use changes can overcome carbon savings from biofuels in Brazil. Proceedings of the national Academy of Sciences, 107(8), 3388-3393.

Meyfroidt, P., Rudel, T. K., & Lambin, E. F. (2010). Forest transitions, trade, and the global displacement of land use. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 107(49), 20917-20922.

Pfaff, A., & Walker, R. (2010). Regional interdependence and forest “transitions”: Substitute deforestation limits the relevance of local reversals.Land Use Policy, 27(2), 119-129.