The Problem of Deforestation

Deforestation in Latin-America is the result of a very complex relationship between various social groups and disciplines. The most influential actors are private and multi-national firms who exploit forest resources for commercial gain. The most vulnerable actors are indigenous, ethnic groups living in areas of high biodiversity with poor economic conditions (Swallow et al., 2007). The current pace of forest conversion is causing severe dislocations and even extinctions of indigenous population groups (Laurance, 1999).

Forests naturally play an important role in mitigating climate change, since they are one of the world’s greatest sink of carbon dioxide. Therefore, deforestation is nowadays one of the biggest problems our earth has to face. According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the forestry sector is currently responsible for 17.4% of the global greenhouse gas emissions (Swallow et al., 2007).

For biologists, the most alarming aspect of tropical deforestation is the enourmous threat to biodiversity. After all, rainforests are the most diverse and ecologically complex land communities in the world; they probably sustain over half of all the planet’s life forms (Laurence, 1999). Moreover, the rapid clearing and burning of forests has consequences for soil activity. The loss of trees, which fix the soil with their roots, causes widespread erosion troughout the tropics. After the clearing of trees, soils are quickly washed away by heavy rains. This means that crop yields for local landowners and international firms decline and people are obliged to spend their incomes to import fertilizers or to clear additional forests for new agricultural lands.

As stated above, deforestation has detrimental environmental and geographical effects. However, the clearing of forests is also seen as beneficial from a socio-economic and political perspective. Forest management has to become sustainable to ensure a future with abundant forest resources. But what does the concept of ‘sustainability’ mean looking from different perspectives and disciplines? From an environmental perspective, sustainability might imply the conservation of for example ecosystems and biodiversity, while from a socio-economic perspective sustainable forest management focuses on long-term profits. Each discipline on its own thus sees sustainable forest management from a different perspective. These perspectives can be so diverse that they have to deal with conflicting interests, which makes a sustainable future hard to reach. Because of the many relevant disciplines regarding the problem of deforestation, it is necessary to conduct an interdisciplinary research to gain deeper insight in the problem and its possible solutions. The research question we are focusing on seeks to unravel the implications of sustainability from multiple relevant disciplines:

What is sustainable forestry in the case of Latin-America, taking into account social, environmental and geographical perspectives?