Showing papers by "Alan Grainger published in 1998"

Modelling tropical land use change and deforestation

Abstract: Little attention was paid to modelling deforestation until the late 1980s, since it was viewed more as a problem to be curtailed than as a universal phenomenon to be understood. But this meant that policies to control deforestation were based on partial or anecdotal evidence, and so it was no surprise that they had little effect (Grainger, 1993a). Controlling deforestation will be difficult until we know more about the processes involved. Modelling is the key to this, for once a suitable theoretical framework has been devised it can form the basis for mathematical models that use empirical data to test hypotheses about deforestation. Models can also be used to predict alternative future scenarios for long-term trends in deforestation and its impacts, and test how these could be influenced by policy-makers (Lambin, 1994). This chapter looks in turn at theoretical and mathematical models of the causes of deforestation, long-term trends in forest cover, spatial trends in deforestation, and spatial trends in logging. It focuses on deforestation in tropical moist forests — the closed forests of the humid tropics — rather than forests in the montane or dry tropics where deforestation processes are rather different.