Deforestation:
Pressure State Response Indicators

Pressure The mismanagement of forest lands and forest resources over centuries, mainly due to the need to provide land on which to grow food, has led to a situation where the forest is now in rapid retreat. Pressures for deforestation arise from a combination of factors, largely rooted in causes of an economic nature, and include: | Pressure State Response Further reading

new land for agricultural purposes new land for livestock purposes clearance of forests for timber extraction clearance of forests for other wood products, including pulp used in paper manufacture increased human population pressure an increasing demand for fuelwood forest fires |  | This image was collected on the 13th September 1997 by the UK's Along Track Scanning Radiometer-2 (ATSR-2) on board the European Space Agency's ERS-2 Satellite.

The situation is also agravated by the practice of slash and burn cultivation. As a result, fire is used extensively in the tropics for the destruction of forests. The objectives of this burning are site clearing for shifting cultivation, bush and weed control, hunting, grazing. Malicious burning is also recorded. Burning is a simple and effective method of land clearing but it has serious consequences for the ecosystem which is being burnt and for its surroundings. .

State

Indicators of state can be largely reduced to the relatively simple ones concerned with the area of forest and its rate of loss. However, whilst these may be conceptually simple, obtaining accurate statistics on rates of forest loss is problematic. The best estimates are probably those dertived from the use of time series of satellite imagery. However, these area-based indicators do not give any indication of the actual causes of deforestation in individual cases. These causative factors are diverse and are considered in more detail in the discussion of policy pressures related to deforestation.

Response

The most serious form of deforestion is currently recognised to be that which has an impact on previously untouched natural forests (e.g. "old-growth" forests in North America, Tropical Forests such as those found in the Amazon Basin, forest clearance in Indonesia, etc.). Deforestation in these areas may attract considerable media coverage. A less obvious or less well covered form of deforestation concerns the gradual removal of woodland and small forest patches in semi-arid, sub-humid and humid areas where human settlement is an important part of the landscape. Important causative factors here are usually centred on a lack of access to alternatives, resulting for example the widespread use of wood for cooking and other power/heating requirements (fuelwood).

Responses to deforestation can be considered under several categoies:

- Attempts to halt deforestation through protective legislation, e.g. creation of Forest Reserves, with either complete protection or controlled and limited forms of forest expolitation. However, to to be successful, these measures need to take into consideration the causative factors that are responsible for the deforestation in the first place.

- Rehabilitation of degraded or cleared forest through replanting. This can be achieved through policy reforms aimed at improved land management. Forest policy reform, for instance, strengthening land tenure or lengthening commercial forest concessions to promote replanting, is an obvious priority in many cases.

- Planting of new forest areas to partially compensate for deforestation in other areas. This course of action as well as the previous (rehabilitation/replanting) will, however, be largely limited to the creation of planted forests that are normally composed of a single or small number of species. As such they can not be expected to in any way compensate for the removal of the very high levels of biodiversity found in the majority of natural forests in both tropical and temperate areas.

- Use of forests as a Carbon Sink for Carbon Sequestration.

- Measures to provide alternatives to the products obtained through deforestation. For this approach to succeed there needs to be an understanding of the social, environmental and economic factors involved in creating the pressure for deforestation, and of the ways in which these pressures are changing.

Therefore, the most important responses are to:

- Conduct social, environmental and economic studies to determine the real causative factors involved in deforestation.
- Create or strengthen institutions with a mandate for monitoring these factors
- Develop mechanisms for communication within and between government departments and between these and NGOs to facilitate the translation of information from these surveys/studies into policy actions.

Further Reading

Deforestation - Policy Pressures and Options

Carbon Sinks

Carbon Sequestration

Using remote sensing to estimate tree cover and carbon stocks in forests. http://www.geog.umd.edu/landcover/tree-cover-poster.html |

Interactive Forest Maps. http://www.wri.org/ffi/maps/

CEISIN. The Contribution of Deforestation to Global Climate Change. http://www.ciesin.org/TG/LU/climate.html

CEISIN. The Causes and Processes of Deforestation. http://www.ciesin.org/TG/LU/defcause.html

Global Deforestation, Timber, and the Struggle For Sustainability: Making the Label Stick. By Stephan Schwartzman and Molly Kingston. http://www.edf.org/pubs/Reports/Timber_Report/ (click here to view in Acrobat format).

Detwiler, R. P., and C. A. S. Hall. 1988. Tropical forests and the global carbon cycle. Science 239: 42-47. http://www.ciesin.org/docs/002-123/002-123.html

Meher-Homji, V. M. 1991. Probable impact of deforestation on hydrological processes. Climatic Change 19: 163-73. http://www.ciesin.org/docs/002-159/002-159.html

World resources Institute. Mitigating climate change through forest management. http://www.wri.org/climate/mitigate.html

World resources Institute. Climate, Biodiversity, and Forests: Issues and Opportunities Emerging from the Kyoto Protocol (1998). http://www.wri.org/ffi/climate/

Mission to Planet Earth picture showing a deforested area |

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