Integrating Forest Cover Change with Census Data: Drivers and Contexts from Bolivia and the Lao PDR

Land

Sébastien Boillat³  Hy Dao³  Patrick Bottazzi²  Yuri Sandoval⁴  Abraham Luna⁴  Sithong Thongmanivong⁵  Louca Lerch³  Joan Bastide³  Andreas Heinimann¹  Frédéric Giraut³ 

[1] Centre for Development and Environnment & Institute of Geography, University of Bern, Hallerstrasse 10, CH-3012 Bern, Switzerland; E-Mails:;Institut de Géographie et Durabilité, University of Lausanne, Mouline—Géopolis, CH-1015 Lausanne, Switzerland; E-Mail:;Department of Geography and Environment, University of Geneva, Uni Mail, 40 Bd du Pont-dʼArve, Genève 4, CH-1211 Geneva, Switzerland; E-Mails:;Instituto de Investigaciones Geográficas, Universidad Mayor de San Andrés, Cota Cota, Calle 27 La Paz, Bolivia; E-Mails:;Faculty of Forestry, National University of Laos, Dongdok, Xaythany District, Vientiane, Laos; E-Mail:

关键词: forest cover change;    deforestation;    integrative land change science;    social-ecological systems;    meso-scale;    forest transitions;    rural poverty;    Bolivia;    Laos;   

DOI  :  10.3390/land4010045

来源: mdpi

【 摘 要 】

The aim of this paper is to explore possible links between forest cover change and characteristics of social-ecological systems at sub-national scale based mainly on census data. We assessed relationships between population density, poverty, ethnicity, accessibility and forest cover change during the last decade for four regions of Bolivia and the Lao PDR, combining a parcel-based with a cell-based approach. We found that accessibility is a key driver of forest cover change, yet it has the effect of intensifying other economic and policy-related underlying drivers, like colonization policies, cash crop demand, but also policies that lead to forest gain in one case. Poverty does not appear as a driver of deforestation, but the co-occurrence of poverty and forest loss driven by external investments appears critical in terms of social-ecological development. Ethnicity was found to be a moderate explanatory of forest cover change, but appears as a cluster of converging socio-economic characteristics related with settlement history and land resource access. The identification of such clusters can help ordering communities into a typology of social-ecological systems, and discussing their possible outcomes in light of a critical view on forest transition theory, as well as the relevance and predictive power of the variables assessed.

【 授权许可】

CC BY   
© 2015 by the authors; licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland.