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The contours of the collective action necessary to limit climate change remain difficult to discern. In this context, societal corporatist political processes, fueled by crisis narratives, have shown some promise as political devices for mobilizing people. Corporatist processes have, historically, brought political competitors like employers and labor unions together to negotiate compacts that have advanced collective goods during times of crisis. In response to the climate crisis in the Global South, affluent donor groups, state officials, some farmers, and indigenous peoples have begun to assemble corporatist-like coalitions to pursue climate stabilization. A comparative case study of efforts to promote sustainable cattle ranching through the spread of silvopastoral landscapes in Colombia and Ecuador illustrates this political dynamic, its shortcomings, and its accomplishments., (© 2024. The Author(s).)

Forest transitions occur when net reforestation replaces net deforestation in places. Because forest transitions can increase biodiversity and augment carbon sequestration, they appeal to policymakers contending with the degrading effects of forest loss and climate change. What then can policymakers do to trigger forest transitions? The historical record over the last two centuries provides insights into the precipitating conditions. The early transitions often occurred passively, through the spontaneous regeneration of trees on abandoned agricultural lands. Later forest transitions occurred more frequently after large-scale crisis narratives emerged and spurred governments to take action, often by planting trees on degraded, sloped lands. To a greater degree than their predecessors, latecomer forest transitions exhibit centralized loci of power, leaders with clearly articulated goals, and rapid changes in forest cover. These historical shifts in forest transitions reflect our growing appreciation of their utility for countering droughts, floods, land degradation, and climate change.

The increased use of grain-based feed for livestock during the last two decades has contributed, along with other factors, to a rise in grain prices that has reduced human food security. This circumstance argues for feeding more forages to livestock, particularly in the tropics where many livestock are reared on small farms. Efforts to accomplish this end, referred to as the 'LivestockPlus' approach, intensify in sustainable ways the management of grasses, shrubs, trees, and animals. By decoupling the human food and livestock feed systems, these efforts would increase the resilience of the global food system. Effective LivestockPlus approaches take one of two forms: (1) simple improvements such as new forage varieties and animal management practices that spread from farmer to farmer by word of mouth, or (2) complex sets of new practices that integrate forage production more closely into farms' other agricultural activities and agro-ecologies.

For decades, the dynamics of tropical deforestation in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) have defied easy explanation. The rates of deforestation have been lower than elsewhere in the tropics, and the driving forces evident in other places, government new land settlement schemes and industrialized agriculture, have largely been absent in SSA. The context and causes for African deforestation become clearer through an analysis of new, national-level data on forest cover change for SSA countries for the 2000-2005 period. The recent dynamic in SSA varies from dry to wet biomes. Deforestation occurred at faster rates in nations with predominantly dry forests. The wetter Congo basin countries had lower rates of deforestation, in part because tax receipts from oil and mineral industries in this region spurred rural to urban migration, declines in agriculture and increased imports of cereals from abroad. In this respect, the Congo basin countries may be experiencing an oil and mineral fuelled forest transition. Small farmers play a more important role in African deforestation than they do in southeast Asia and Latin America, in part because small-scale agriculture remains one of the few livelihoods open to rural peoples.

Reducing tropical deforestation is an international priority, given its impacts on carbon emissions and biodiversity. We examined whether recent forest transitions--a shift from net deforestation to net reforestation--involved a geographic displacement of forest clearing across countries through trade in agricultural and forest products. In most of the seven developing countries that recently experienced a forest transition, displacement of land use abroad accompanied local reforestation. Additional global land-use change embodied in their net wood trade offset 74% of their total reforested area. Because the reforesting countries continued to export more agricultural goods than they imported, this net displacement offset 22% of their total reforested area when both agriculture and forestry sectors are included. However, this net displacement increased to 52% during the last 5 y. These countries thus have contributed to a net global reforestation and/or decrease in the pressure on forests, but this global environmental benefit has been shrinking during recent years. The net decrease in the pressure on forests does not account for differences in their ecological quality. Assessments of the impacts of international policies aimed at reducing global deforestation should integrate international trade in agricultural and forest commodities.

Does the intensification of agriculture reduce cultivated areas and, in so doing, spare some lands by concentrating production on other lands? Such sparing is important for many reasons, among them the enhanced abilities of released lands to sequester carbon and provide other environmental services. Difficulties measuring the extent of spared land make it impossible to investigate fully the hypothesized causal chain from agricultural intensification to declines in cultivated areas and then to increases in spared land. We analyze the historical circumstances in which rising yields have been accompanied by declines in cultivated areas, thereby leading to land-sparing. We use national-level United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization data on trends in cropland from 1970-2005, with particular emphasis on the 1990-2005 period, for 10 major crop types. Cropland has increased more slowly than population during this period, but paired increases in yields and declines in cropland occurred infrequently, both globally and nationally. Agricultural intensification was not generally accompanied by decline or stasis in cropland area at a national scale during this time period, except in countries with grain imports and conservation set-aside programs. Future projections of cropland abandonment and ensuing environmental services cannot be assumed without explicit policy intervention.

In recent decades the rate and geographic extent of land-use and land-cover change has increased throughout the world's humid tropical forests. The pan-tropical geography of forest change is a challenge to assess, and improved estimates of the human footprint in the tropics are critical to understanding potential changes in biodiversity. We combined recently published and new satellite observations, along with images from Google Earth and a literature review, to estimate the contemporary global extent of deforestation, selective logging, and secondary regrowth in humid tropical forests. Roughly 1.4% of the biome was deforested between 2000 and 2005. As of 2005, about half of the humid tropical forest biome contained 50% or less tree cover. Although not directly comparable to deforestation, geographic estimates of selective logging indicate that at least 20% of the humid tropical forest biome was undergoing some level of timber harvesting between 2000 and 2005. Forest recovery estimates are even less certain, but a compilation of available reports suggests that at least 1.2% of the humid tropical forest biome was in some stage of long-term secondary regrowth in 2000. Nearly 70% of the regrowth reports indicate forest regeneration in hilly, upland, and mountainous environments considered marginal for large-scale agriculture and ranching. Our estimates of the human footprint are conservative because they do not resolve very small-scale deforestation, low-intensity logging, and unreported secondary regrowth, nor do they incorporate other impacts on tropical forest ecosystems, such as fire and hunting. Our results highlight the enormous geographic extent of forest change throughout the humid tropics and the considerable limitations of the science and technology available for such a synthesis.

Over the past 50 years, human agents of deforestation have changed in ways that have potentially important implications for conservation efforts. We characterized these changes through a meta-analysis of case studies of land-cover change in the tropics. From the 1960s to the 1980s, small-scale farmers, with state assistance, deforested large areas of tropical forest in Southeast Asia and Latin America. As globalization and urbanization increased during the 1980s, the agents of deforestation changed in two important parts of the tropical biome, the lowland rainforests in Brazil and Indonesia. Well-capitalized ranchers, farmers, and loggers producing for consumers in distant markets became more prominent in these places and this globalization weakened the historically strong relationship between local population growth and forest cover. At the same time, forests have begun to regrow in some tropical uplands. These changing circumstances, we believe, suggest two new and differing strategies for biodiversity conservation in the tropics, one focused on conserving uplands and the other on promoting environmental stewardship in lowlands and other areas conducive to industrial agriculture.

Humans transformed landscapes at an unprecedented scale and pace during the 20th century, creating sprawling urban areas in affluent countries and large-scale agricultural expanses in tropics. To date, attempts to explain these processes in other disciplines have had a disembodied, a historical quality to them. A sociological account of these changes emphasizes the role of strategic actions by states and coalitions of interested parties in transforming landscapes. It identifies the agents of change and the timing of transformative events. Case studies of suburban sprawl and tropical deforestation illustrate the value of the sociological approach and the wide range of situations to which it applies.

An historical generalization about forest cover change in which rapid deforestation gives way over time to forest restoration is called "the forest transition." Prior research on the forest transition leaves three important questions unanswered: (1) How does forest loss influence an individual landowner's incentives to reforest? (2) How does the forest recovery rate affect the likelihood of forest transition? (3) What happens after the forest transition occurs? The purpose of this paper is to develop a minimum model of the forest transition to answer these questions. We assume that deforestation caused by landowners' decisions and forest regeneration initiated by agricultural abandonment have aggregated effects that characterize entire landscapes. These effects include feedback mechanisms called the "forest scarcity" and "ecosystem service" hypotheses. In the forest scarcity hypothesis, forest losses make forest products scarcer, which increases the economic value of forests. In the ecosystem service hypothesis, the environmental degradation that accompanies the loss of forests causes the value of ecosystem services provided by forests to decline. We examined the impact of each mechanism on the likelihood of forest transition through an investigation of the equilibrium and stability of landscape dynamics. We found that the forest transition occurs only when landowners employ a low rate of future discounting. After the forest transition, regenerated forests are protected in a sustainable way if forests regenerate slowly. When forests regenerate rapidly, the forest scarcity hypothesis expects instability in which cycles of large-scale deforestation followed by forest regeneration repeatedly characterize the landscape. In contrast, the ecosystem service hypothesis predicts a catastrophic shift from a forested to an abandoned landscape when the amount of deforestation exceeds the critical level, which can lead to a resource degrading poverty trap. These findings imply that incentives for forest conservation seem stronger in settings where forests regenerate slowly as well as when decision makers value the future.

Human agents of landscape transformation in the tropics affect forests differently as the forests decline in size. Five agents of change--road builders, corporate concession holders, community forest managers, park advocates, and urban consumers--have different effects on large forests in remote tropical regions than they do on remnant forests in settled agricultural regions. Because forests vary so much in size across tropical regions, these differences in the effects of agents on forests have important implications for regional conservation efforts. To make these implications explicit, I compared the effects of the five agents in regions with large forests with their effects in regions with small forests. The comparisons indicated that, as forests declined in size, new roads no longer destroyed forests, corporate loggers left the forests, community forest managers became more effective, parks became less feasible as a means of conservation, and urban consumers initiated tree planting. My results suggest that awareness about the changing effects of humans on landscapes with shrinking forests can serve as a useful tool in formulating regionally appropriate policies for conserving tropical forests.

"Like many developing countries Ecuador has experienced extensive ubanization in the past twenty-five years as well as a shift in the pattern of rural population change between the 1960s and 1970s. Rural places with difficult access to cities (without roads and located far from cities) gained population during the 1960s but lost population during the 1970s. Rural places with easy access to cities (i.e., located near cities or on all-weather roads) continued to gain population during the 1970s. The explanation for the differential ability of rural places to retain their population during the 1970s focuses on increases in labor circulation by peasants and growth in the numbers of small, urban-oriented manufacturing and agricultural enterprises in accessible rural areas. The article concludes with a discussion on the implications of these findings for policies to reduce rates of rural-urban migration.", (excerpt)