Integrating Pixels, People, and Political Economy to Understand the Role of Armed Conflict and Geopolitics in Driving Deforestation: The Case of Myanmar (original) (raw)
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Armed conflicts trigger region-specific mechanisms that affect land use change. Deforestation is presented as one of the most common negative environmental impacts resulting from armed conflicts, with relevant consequences in terms of greenhouse gas emissions and loss of ecosystem services. However, the impact of armed conflict on forests is complex and may simultaneously lead to positive and negative environmental outcomes, i.e. forest regrowth and deforestation, in different regions even within a country. We investigate the impact that armed conflict exerted over forest dynamics at different spatial scales in Colombia and for the global tropics during the period 1992-2015. Through the analysis of its internally displaced population (departures) our results suggest that, albeit finding forest regrowth in some municipalities, the Colombian conflict predominantly exerted a negative impact on its forests. A further examination of georeferenced fighting locations in Colombia and across the globe shows that conflict areas were 8 and 4 times more likely to undergo deforestation, respectively, in the following years in relation to average deforestation rates. This study represents a municipality level, long-term spatial analysis of the diverging effects the Colombian conflict exerted over its forest dynamics over two distinct periods of increasing and decreasing conflict intensity. Moreover, it presents the first quantified estimate of conflict's negative impact on forest ecosystems across the globe. The relationship between armed conflict and land use change is of global relevance given the recent increase of armed conflicts across the world and the importance of a possible exacerbation of armed conflicts and migration as climate change impacts increase.
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2015
This report reviews and straightens methodologies to explore functional forms of man-landcover interrelations**. Tanaka and Nishii[7, 8, 9, 10, 12, 13], Nishii and Tanaka[4, 6], Nishii, Miyata, and Tanaka[5] have engaged in the analysis of deforestation by human population interactions. The basic strategy has been to use landcover data mashed up with cell-formed population density data. Two factors – human population size (N) and relief energy (R: difference of minimum altitude from the maximum in a sampled area) – were picked up firstly to make elucidation of forest coverage ratio (F) on the same site. The functional forms with sigmoidal shape were suggested by step functions fitted to one-kilometer square high precision grid-cell data in Japan. By calculating relative appropriateness to data, Akaike’s 広島経済大学研究論集 第38巻第 3号 2015年12月
Dramatic cropland expansion in Myanmar following political reforms threatens biodiversity
Scientific Reports, 2018
Effective conservation planning needs to consider the threats of cropland expansion to biodiversity. We used Myanmar as a case study to devise a modeling framework to identify which Key Biodiversity Areas (KBAs) are most vulnerable to cropland expansion in a context of increasingly resolved armed conflict. We studied 13 major crops with the potential to expand into KBAs. We used mixed-effects models and an agricultural versus forest rent framework to model current land use and conversion of forests to cropland for each crop. We found that the current cropland distribution is explained by higher agricultural value, lower transportation costs and lower elevation. We also found that protected areas and socio-political instability are effective in slowing down deforestation with conflicts in Myanmar damaging farmland and displacing farmers elsewhere. Under plausible economic development and socio-political stability scenarios, the models forecast 48.5% of land to be converted. We identified export crops such as maize, and pigeon pea as key deforestation drivers. This cropland expansion would pose a major threat to Myanmar's freshwater KBAs. We highlight the importance of considering rapid land-use transitions in the tropics to devise robust conservation plans. Cropland expansion is a major global driver of deforestation 1. With global crop demand projected to increase from between 25% to 70% (by mass) by 2050 2-4 and increasing world market integration, demand for new land is likely to be concentrated in tropical developing nations. Countries that are particularly vulnerable have large areas suitable for agriculture covered by forests and are in the early stages of their forest transition 5. Examples of regions that have recently passed through this stage include Peninsular Malaysia, Indonesian Papua, and Papua New Guinea, where oil palm expansion was responsible for the majority of deforestation between 1990-2010 6. While deforestation rates remain high in these countries, other highly-forested countries and regions where cropland expansion has been hindered by conflict, like Myanmar, Congo and Colombia, may go through the same process of rapid, agriculture-driven deforestation 7. A modelling framework is required to respond to agricultural pressures that are both temporally and spatially heterogeneous. Ignoring such variability could lead to reduced cost-effectiveness, efficiency or even complete failure 8 in conservation planning. Previous conservation work has tended to assume that conservation threats do not change over time 9. In particular, the establishment of protected areas (PAs) is commonly identified using static information, and assumes that the system is at equilibrium. Given the rapid pace of tropical land use transition, analyses that assume static threats may not be applicable to this region. Threats with changing intensity over time and space should therefore be assessed by carrying out temporal and spatial predictions, before identifying corresponding conservation actions 10. This is especially relevant in the context of increasing global crop demand. It is important to foresee where cropland expansion may occur and the implications for this expansion on forests and biodiversity 11,12. Another source of uncertainty is the joint presence of weak institutions and armed conflict within some tropical nations. Conflict can potentially increase or decrease the risk of forest loss. The political, economic, and social environment of a country can be major and complex determinants of deforestation via levels of authoritarianism, market openness and internal conflict 6,13. For example, authoritarian governments have historically