Christian A Kull, Jennifer Bartmess, Wolfram Dressler, Simone Gingrich, Maciej Grodzicki, Katarzyna Jasikowska, Zofia Łapniewska, Stephanie Mansourian, Van Thi Hai Nguyen, Joel Persson, Melanie Pichler, Herimino Manoa Rajaonarivelo, Amélie Robert, Thang Nam Tran, Kevin Woods
{"title":"Pitfalls for the sustainability of forest transitions: evidence from Southeast Asia","authors":"Christian A Kull, Jennifer Bartmess, Wolfram Dressler, Simone Gingrich, Maciej Grodzicki, Katarzyna Jasikowska, Zofia Łapniewska, Stephanie Mansourian, Van Thi Hai Nguyen, Joel Persson, Melanie Pichler, Herimino Manoa Rajaonarivelo, Amélie Robert, Thang Nam Tran, Kevin Woods","doi":"10.1017/s0376892924000079","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"<p>The concept of a forest transition – a regional shift from deforestation to forest recovery – tends to equate forest area expansion with sustainability, assuming that more forest is good for people and the environment. To promote debate and more just and ecologically sustainable outcomes during this period of intense focus on forests (such as the United Nations’ Decade on Ecological Restoration, the Trillion Trees initiative and at the United Nations’ Climate Change Conferences), we synthesize recent nuanced and integrated research to inform forest management and restoration in the future. Our results reveal nine pitfalls to assuming forest transitions and sustainability are automatically linked. The pitfalls are as follows: (1) fixating on forest quantity instead of quality; (2) masking local diversity with large-scale trends; (3) expecting U-shaped temporal trends of forest change; (4) failing to account for irreversibility; (5) framing categories and concepts as universal/neutral; (6) diverting attention from the simplification of forestlands into single-purpose conservation forests or intensive production lands; (7) neglecting social power transitions and dispossessions; (8) neglecting productivism as the hidden driving force; and (9) ignoring local agency and sentiments. We develop and illustrate these pitfalls with local- and national-level evidence from Southeast Asia and outline forward-looking recommendations for research and policy to address them. Forest transition research that neglects these pitfalls risks legitimizing unsustainable and unjust policies and programmes of forest restoration or tree planting.</p>","PeriodicalId":50517,"journal":{"name":"Environmental Conservation","volume":"67 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.2000,"publicationDate":"2024-04-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Environmental Conservation","FirstCategoryId":"93","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1017/s0376892924000079","RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"环境科学与生态学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"Q2","JCRName":"BIODIVERSITY CONSERVATION","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
The concept of a forest transition – a regional shift from deforestation to forest recovery – tends to equate forest area expansion with sustainability, assuming that more forest is good for people and the environment. To promote debate and more just and ecologically sustainable outcomes during this period of intense focus on forests (such as the United Nations’ Decade on Ecological Restoration, the Trillion Trees initiative and at the United Nations’ Climate Change Conferences), we synthesize recent nuanced and integrated research to inform forest management and restoration in the future. Our results reveal nine pitfalls to assuming forest transitions and sustainability are automatically linked. The pitfalls are as follows: (1) fixating on forest quantity instead of quality; (2) masking local diversity with large-scale trends; (3) expecting U-shaped temporal trends of forest change; (4) failing to account for irreversibility; (5) framing categories and concepts as universal/neutral; (6) diverting attention from the simplification of forestlands into single-purpose conservation forests or intensive production lands; (7) neglecting social power transitions and dispossessions; (8) neglecting productivism as the hidden driving force; and (9) ignoring local agency and sentiments. We develop and illustrate these pitfalls with local- and national-level evidence from Southeast Asia and outline forward-looking recommendations for research and policy to address them. Forest transition research that neglects these pitfalls risks legitimizing unsustainable and unjust policies and programmes of forest restoration or tree planting.
期刊介绍:
Environmental Conservation is one of the longest-standing, most highly-cited of the interdisciplinary environmental science journals. It includes research papers, reports, comments, subject reviews, and book reviews addressing environmental policy, practice, and natural and social science of environmental concern at the global level, informed by rigorous local level case studies. The journal"s scope is very broad, including issues in human institutions, ecosystem change, resource utilisation, terrestrial biomes, aquatic systems, and coastal and land use management. Environmental Conservation is essential reading for all environmentalists, managers, consultants, agency workers and scientists wishing to keep abreast of current developments in environmental science.