Forest Cover Change in Space and Time: Combining the Von Thunen and Forest Transition Theories

By A. Angelsen. 2007

208 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This paper presents a framework for analyzing tropical deforestation and reforestation using the von Thunen model as its starting point: land is allocated to the use which yields the highest rent, and the rents of various land uses are determined by location. Forest cover change therefore becomes a question of changes in rent of forest versus non-forest use. While this is a simple and powerful starting point, more intriguing issues arise when this is applied to analyze real cases. An initial shift in the rent of one particular land use generates feedbacks which affect the rent of all land uses. For example, a new technology in extensive agriculture should make this land use more profitable and lead to more forest clearing, but general equilibrium effects (changes in prices and local wages) can modify or even reverse this conclusion. Another issue is how a policy change or a shift in broader market, technological, and institutional forces will affect various land use rents. The paper deals with three such areas: technological progress in agriculture, land tenure regimes, and community forest management. The second part of the paper links the von Thunen framework to the forest transition theory. The forest transition theory describes a sequence over time where a forested region goes through a period of deforestation before the forest cover eventually stabilizes and starts to increase. This sequence can be seen as a systematic pattern of change in the agricultural and forest land rents over time. Increasing agricultural rent leads to high rates of deforestation. The slow-down of deforestation and eventual reforestation is due to lower agricultural rents (the economic development path) and higher forest rent (the forest scarcity path). Various forces leading to these changes are discussed and supported by empirical evidence from different tropical regions.

Subfields: Global and Planetary Change, Soil Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/e282fb60fbda231a3cf9acd54c2fc71e6bc9dfd2

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Citations in the corpus

The Architecture of Proposed REDD Schemes After Bali: Facing Critical Choices (2008, background): “Forest transition theory (Angelsen 2007), which often begins with massive deforestation, shows that’s it is unlikely that such high rates of deforestation are maintained over time.”
Exploring the Dynamic Mechanisms of Farmland Abandonment Based on a Spatially Explicit Economic Model for Environmental Sustainability: A Case Study in Jiangxi Province, China (2014, methodology): “The wage of farming labor is primarily determined by off-farm employment opportunities, migration, and economic development [40].”
The Restructuring of South American Soy and Beef Production and Trade Under Changing Environmental Regulations (2017, background): “In the first mechanism, called ‘‘activity leakage” (Atmadja & Verchot, 2012; Henders & Ostwald, 2012), unused capital is displaced directly out of the frontier affected by the new deforestation regulations, and redirected to areas with higher rents (Angelsen, 2007).”
Middle-range theories of land system change (2018, background): “, 2012; Filatova, 2015), and have been used extensively to explain agricultural change, deforestation (Angelsen, 2007; Walker, 2004), and urban expansion (Alonso, 1964; Sinclair, 1967).”
Property rights and deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon (2009, background): “Forest is considered as a natural capital that will generate future streams of output and income (Angelsen, 2007; Solow, 1992).”
Land-use Pressure and a Transition to Forest-cover Loss in the Eastern United States (2010, unknown): “…the abandonment of marginal land and the relocation and concentration of substantial amounts of cropland, industrial agriculture, and pasture to prime farmland following agricultural expansion (Mather and Needle 1998, Houghton and Hackler 2000, Rudel et al. 2005, Kauppi et al. 2006, Angelsen 2007).”