Proximate Causes and Underlying Driving Forces of Tropical Deforestation

作者：Helmut Geist, Éric F. Lambin · 发表于：BioScience · 年份：2002 · DOI：10.1641/0006-3568(2002)052[0143:pcaudf]2.0.co;2 · 被引用次数：3107 · 研究领域：Conservation, Biodiversity, and Resource Management、Rangeland Management and Livestock Ecology

One of the primary causes of global environmental change is tropical deforestation, but the question of what factors drive deforestation remains largely unanswered (NRC 1999). Various hypotheses have produced rich arguments, but empirical evidence on the causes of deforestation continues to be largely based on cross-national statistical analyses (Bilsborrow 1994, Brown and Pearce 1994, Williams 1994, Painter and Durham 1995, Sponsel et al. 1996, Murali and Hedge 1997, Rudel and Roper 1997, Fairhead and Leach 1998). In some cases, these analyses are based on debatable data on rates of forest cover change (Palo 1999). The two major, mutually exclusive—and still unsatisfactory—explanations for tropical deforestation are single-factor causation and irreducible complexity. On the one hand, proponents of single-factor causation suggest various primary causes, such as shifting cultivation (Amelung and Diehl 1992, Myers 1993, Rerkasem 1996, Ranjan and Upadhyay 1999) and population growth (Allen and Barnes 1985, Amelung and Diehl 1992, Cropper and Griffiths 1994, Ehrhardt-Martinez 1998, Mather and Needle 2000). On the other hand, correlations between deforestation and multiple causative factors are many and varied, revealing no distinct pattern (Rudel and Roper 1996, Bawa and Dayanandan 1997, Mather et al. 1998, Angelsen and Kaimowitz 1999). In addition to chronicling these attempts to identify general causes of deforestation through global-scale statistical analyses, the literature i...