Deforestation Drivers: Population, Migration, and Tropical Land Use

Abstract

The tiny global minority residing in rural frontier areas--how long they remain there; the timing, magnitude, and characteristics of their consumption; and their demographic transitions--promises a vast impact on future tropical deforestation. It is here, not in cities and not in long settled rural areas, where fertility and native population growth is extremely high, rural migration is dynamic, and where land cover change remains extraordinarily expansive per capita. According to recent UN projections (United Nations 2011), the vast majority, indeed very likely all, the world’s net population growth over the next several decades will occur in the world’s poorest cities. Yet the direct imprint of this urbanization remains minute. Although urban food demand has a large and increasing impact on rural land change, less than 1% of the terrestrial surface is covered by urban settlements (Schneider et al. 2009). The highest population growth rates and old growth forest conversion will continue to occur in remote rural environments, with notable implications for land cover change research and policy (Turner et al 2007) specifically, and coupled human-environmental systems more broadly (An and Lopez-Carr 2012).