Implications of changing national policies on land use in the Chittagong Hill Tracts of Bangladesh

Land use in the Chittagong Hill Tracts (CHT) of Bangladesh had undergone changes over the past several centuries. The landscape, which was mostly covered with forest with interspersed shifting cultivation plots until the beginning of the colonial period, has gradually changed into a landscape with a blend of land uses. Overall, the forest area has gradually declined, while the area under shifting cultivation and sedentary agriculture has expanded. The process of the change was multi-directional. National forestry, land use, land taxation, population migration policies, and development activities, such as construction of a hydroelectric dam and roads, played an important role in this process. Shifting cultivation had inflicted little damage on the forest until the beginning of the colonial period. The pace of deforestation accelerated with the nationalization of forests which abolished tribal people's customary use and management rights to the forest, and allowed large-scale commercial logging both legally and illegally. The pace was further intensified by the policy encouraging population migration to CHT and construction of a reservoir on the Karnafuli River. Efforts were made to replace shifting cultivation with more productive types of sedentary agriculture. However, much change could not take place in the absence of secure land rights, supportive trade policies, and the required support services and facilities, including infrastructure. Locationally suitable land use evolved in areas where transportation facilities were available and farmers were granted land title with the necessary extension services and credit facilities. These findings have important policy implications for the promotion of environmentally and economically sound land use in CHT.     

Resolving the Conflict Between Ecosystem Protection and Land Use in Protected Areas of the Sierra Madre de Chiapas,Mexico

Livelihoods of people living in many protected areas (PAs) around the world are in conflict with biodiversity conservation. In Mexico, the decrees of creation of biosphere reserves state that rural communities with the right to use buffer zones must avoid deforestation and their land uses must become sustainable, a task which is not easily accomplished. The objectives of this paper are: (a) to analyze the conflict between people’s livelihoods and ecosystem protection in the PAs of the Sierra Madre de Chiapas (SMC), paying special attention to the rates and causes of deforestation and (b) to review policy options to ensure forest and ecosystem conservation in these PAs, including the existing payments for environmental services system and improvements thereof as well as options for sustainable land management. We found that the three largest PAs in the SMC are still largely forested, and deforestation rates have decreased since 2000. Cases of forest conversion are located in specific zones and are related to agrarian and political conflicts as well as growing economic inequality and population numbers. These problems could cause an increase in forest loss in the near future. Payments for environmental services and access to carbon markets are identified as options to ensure forest permanence but still face problems. Challenges for the future are to integrate these incentive mechanisms with sustainable land management and a stronger involvement of land holders in conservation.     

BR-319: Brazil’s Manaus-Porto Velho Highway and the Potential Impact of Linking the Arc of Deforestation to Central Amazonia

Brazil’s BR-319 Highway linked Manaus, in the state of Amazonas, to Porto Velho, Rondônia, until it became impassable in 1988. Now it is proposed for reconstruction and paving, which would facilitate migration from the “Arc of Deforestation” in the southern part of the Amazon region to new frontiers farther north. The purpose of the highway, which is to facilitate transport to São Paulo of products from factories in the Manaus Free Trade Zone, would be better served by sending the containers by ship to the port of Santos. The lack of a land connection to Manaus currently represents a significant barrier to migration to central and northern Amazonia. Discourse regarding the highway systematically overestimates the highway’s benefits and underestimates its impacts. A variety of changes would be needed prior to paving the highway if these potential impacts are to be attenuated. These include zoning, reserve creation, and increased governance in various forms, including deforestation licensing and control programs. More fundamental changes are also needed, especially the abandonment of the long-standing tradition in Brazil of granting squatters’ rights to those who invade public land. Organizing Amazonian occupation in such a way that road construction and improvement cease to lead to explosive and uncontrolled deforestation should be a prerequisite for approval of the BR-319 and other road projects for which major impacts are expected. These projects could provide the impetus that is needed to achieve the transition away from appropriation of public land by both small squatters and by grileiros (large-scale illegal claimants). A delay in reconstructing the highway is advisable until appropriate changes can be effected.     

Human Rights Against Land Grabbing? A Reflection on Norms,Policies, and Power

Large-scale transnational land acquisition of agricultural land in the global south by rich corporations or countries raises challenging normative questions. In this article, the author critically examines and advocates a human rights approach to these questions. Mutually reinforcing, policies, governance and practice promote equitable and secure land tenure that in turn, strengthens other human rights, such as to employment, livelihood and food. Human rights therefore provide standards for evaluating processes and outcomes of transnational land acquisitions and, thus, for determining whether they are ethically unacceptable land grabs. A variety of recent policy initiatives on the issue have evoked human rights, most centrally through the consultation and negotiation of the Voluntary Guidelines on the Responsible Governance of Tenure of Land, Fisheries and Forests concluded in 2012. However, a case of transnational land appropriation illustrates weak host and investor state enforcement of human rights, leaving the parties to in interaction with local groups in charge of protecting human rights. Generally, we have so far seen limited direct application of human rights by states in their governance of transnational land acquisition. Normative responses to transnational land acquisition—codes of conduct, principles of responsible agricultural investment or voluntary guidelines—do not in themselves secure necessary action and change. Applying human rights approaches one must therefore also analyze the material conditions, power relations and political processes that determine whether and how women and men can secure the human rights accountability of the corporations and governments that promote large-scale, transnational land acquisition in the global south.

     

Economic Incentives to Conserve Wildlife on Private Lands: Analysis and Policy

Some believe that provision of private property rights in wildlife on private land provides a powerful economic incentive for nature conservation because it enables property owners to market such wildlife or its attributes. If such marketing is profitable, private landholders will conserve the wildlife concerned and its required habitat. But land is not always most profitably used for exploitation of wildlife, and many economic values of wildlife (such as non-use economic values) cannot be marketed. The mobility of some wildlife adds to the limitations of the private-property approach. While some species may be conserved by this approach, it is suboptimal as a single policy approach to nature conservation. Nevertheless, it is being experimented with, in the Northern Territory of Australia where landholders had a possibility of harvesting on their properties a quota of eggs and chicks of red-tailed black cockatoos for commercial sale. This scheme was expected to provide an incentive to private landholders to retain hollow trees essential for the nesting of these birds but failed. This case and others are analysed. Despite private-property failures, the long-term survival of some wildlife species depends on their ability to use private lands without severe harassment, either for their migration or to supplement their available resources, for example, the Asian elephant. Nature conservation on private land is often a useful, if not essential, supplement to conservation on public lands. Community and public incentives for such conservation are outlined.     

Environmental characteristics of urban-rural farming migrants in the Republic of Korea and their significance for rural sustainability

ABSTRACT

The number of households migrating to agricultural villages has sharply increased in the Republic of Korea (South Korea) since the late 1990s when the Asian economic crisis developed. This study investigates the environmental behaviour and the socio-economic characteristics of urban-rural migrant farming households and provides insights into their significance for rural sustainability in South Korea. The study is based on survey data collected in 2016 from a sample of 166 migrant farming households and 46 native farming households from the Namwon region in South Korea. The migrant farming households are divided into 29 return and 137 non-return farming households. It was found that most non-return migrants are organic farmers, and can be characterised as anti-urban, amenity-pursuing, green, and lifestyle migrants. It is no wonder that they have a strong intent to make their new home an environmentally, socially and economically sustainable place for their children. Thus, appropriate policy measures need to be designed in such a way to facilitate the synergy between the repopulation of rural areas by farming migrants, their uptake of organic farming, their active engagement in community rebuilding, and regional economic development.     

Property rights and governance of Africa's rangelands: A policy overview

Recent efforts at securing property rights in dryland Africa have generally involved several interrelated processes such as legal and policy reforms that recognize and strengthen customary rights or the seasonal rights of pastoralists, and the decentralization of land allocation and administration to lower governance levels. These solutions are in turn beset by new problems, key among them are establishing norms for local participation in decision making, preventing manipulation and capture by elites, lack of accountability of local level institutions and authorities, and the onset of a new generation of resource user conflicts. Increasing avenues through which dialogue and communication can occur among policy actors (including local communities) in order to mobilize multiple experiences, information, and to manage power relationships — a collaborative approach to policy governance — is one way of approaching the complexity paradox. This is anticipated to provide opportunity for learning, innovation and adaptability.     

Land rights in Darfur: Institutional flexibility,policy and adaptation to environmental change

With environmental change set to affect the developing world in significant ways, examination of the process of adaptation is increasingly being brought to the fore. Common to all forms of adaptation in rural livelihoods will be a process of change in resource use and the resource rights that will either facilitate or subvert adaptation. This paper looks at Darfur and the repercussions from the multi‐year drought and land degradation that led to forms of adaptation that involved change in relationships between groups over land resources. The analysis looks at how changes in land resource rights relationships have been dealt with historically, as adaptation developed. Approaches involving highly flexible customary institutions were used to effectively manage the change in land resource rights relationships inherent in adaptation, and considerable opportunity existed for positive interaction between customary and statutory law. Initial success at adaptation was followed by interventions by the Sudanese government to manage these relationships for specific objectives that worked against adaptation. This resulted in competition, animosity, confrontation and the subsequent collapse of the institutions, legitimacy, and trust necessary for successful management of land resource rights change. These national policies debilitated the adaptation opportunities and instead led to profoundly negative repercussions in relationships about land in Darfur, eventually becoming a primary driver in the current war. This highlights both the importance of land resource rights relationships to adaptation and how these relationships can be changed (positively and negatively) by specific practices and policies.     

How conservation and humanitarian groups respond to production of border security on the Arizona–Sonora border

US policies for securing the border with Mexico are driven by multiple political concerns, including the desire to control illegal trade and immigration in a way that conveys “border security” to a national audience. Highly visible border enforcement near urban centres and via the border fence has pushed migrants into far less visible and remote wilderness areas, driving both ecological degradation and a humanitarian crisis. This study employed ethnographic methods to explore how natural resource agency employees and humanitarian volunteers in Altar Valley Arizona perceived and responded to the production of border security. We found that both groups recognised human rights and environmental concerns, although they assigned different priorities and addressed them through conflicting means. As in other cases where consumers are separated from production practices, there was a general consensus among informants that it was important to raise the consciousness of the national audience about the negative externalities of producing border security.     

What Drives Accelerated Land Cover Change in Central Argentina? Synergistic Consequences of Climatic,Socioeconomic, and Technological Factors

Synergistic combinations of climatic and land use changes have the potential to produce the most dramatic impacts on land cover. Although this is widely accepted, empirical examples, particularly involving deforestation in Latin America, are still very few. The geographic extent and causes of deforestation in subtropical seasonally dry forests of the world have received very little attention. This is especially true for the Chaco forests in South America, which are being lost at an alarming rate, sometimes higher than those reported for tropical forests. On this basis, the aims of this study were to analyze the changes in land cover that have occurred during the last three decades of the 20th century in the Chaco forests of central Argentina, and to explain the factors that have driven those changes. Results show major land cover changes. Approximately 80% of the area that was originally undisturbed forest is now occupied by crops, pastures, and secondary scrub. The main proximate cause of deforestation has been agricultural expansion, soybean cultivation in particular. This appears as the result of the synergistic convergence of climatic, technological, and socioeconomic factors, supporting the hypothesis of a multiple-factor explanation for forest loss, while providing one of the very few existing analyses of changes in subtropical forests of the world.     

Australian natural resources policy: Water and land

This paper reviews the significance of water/soils management problems as they are perceived, identified or acted upon by a range of institutions in Australian society. Reference is made to state/Commonwealth perspectives or land degradation, the fragmented responsibility in institutional arrangements and the political aspects of current land use planning issues. There is a lack of broad consensus on environmental problems and how to solve them. Emergent issues in water planning include the increasing importance of environmental river flows, urban water demand management, and the sunderstanding of the changing mechanisms of water allocation. The importance of scientific knowledge in natural resource agency decision making is found contentious in view of the varying roles of technical experts in organizations and the base line of political expediency. Requirements of effective policy making and monitoring of implementation highlight some of the ‘intractable’ problems in water and land management.     

Economics at the fringe: Non-market valuation studies and their role in land use plans in the United States

Over the past fifty years, economists have developed methods for estimating the public benefits of green spaces, allowing such information to be incorporated into land use planning. But the extent to which it is ever used is unclear. This paper reviews the literature on public values for lands on urban outskirts, not just to survey their methods or empirical findings, but to evaluate the role they have played – or have the potential to play – in actual US land use plans.Based on interviews with authors and representatives of land trusts and governments, it appears that academic work has had a mixed reception in the policy world. Reasons include a lack of interest in making academic work accessible to policy makers, emphasizing revealed preference methods which ignore important non-use values, and emphasizing average values over distributions of values. Nevertheless, some success stories illustrate how such information can play a role in the design of conservation policies.     

Natural resources assessment in the Okavango Delta, Botswana: Case studies of some key resources

This article makes an assessment of the following key natural resources in the Okavango Delta: arable land, basket-making resources, fish stocks, and river reeds. Non-data-intensive socio-economic indicators (as opposed to conventional data-intensive indicators) of trends in resource prices, trends in labour time for resource extraction, substitution of less preferred commodities, maximum sustainable yield and perceived scarcity were utilized to assess the scarcity of the resources. The study reveals that basket-weaving resources, land for flood recession arable (molapo) agriculture, and river reeds are increasingly becoming scarce in the harvesting areas, whereas fish stocks are still abundant. It is recommended that appropriate policies should be introduced for the management of natural resources. Property rights could be granted to communities to manage natural resources such as fish and veld products in line with the wildlife model for community based natural resources management (CBNRM). In addition, the authors suggest that the Government of Botswana should take the responsibility for allocating land for molapo arable farming in order to make it more accessible.     

关于黄土高原陇东地区环境变化的回顾与思考

在近七八十年里,生态环境脆弱的陇东地区由于人口增加引起乱砍滥伐、过度放牧、陡坡开垦造成的水土流失和引起大量开垦坡地,广种薄收,形成“越穷越垦、越垦越穷”的恶性循环等等,出现了一系列人地矛盾.随着植树造林,退耕还林,禁止放牧等一系列政策措施的实施和社会经济的快速发展,使得这一矛盾得到了一定程度的缓解,可今后怎样保持和继续深化以及怎样在环境可承载下发展经济和提高人民的生活水平是我们要思考的问题.从环境变化的几个方面进行讨论并得出一些存在的问题及建议.     

The incidence of land tenure insecurity in Southern Africa: Policy implications for sustainable development

The study presented in this article used a combination of key informant interviews and a review and synthesis of existing country level literature to identify the major sources of land tenure insecurity in six Southern African countries: Botswana, Lesotho, Malawi, Mozambique, South Africa, and Zambia. Findings reveal that the main causes of land tenure insecurity experienced in Southern Africa include lack of land rights of minority groups, unclear or overlapping land rights, overcrowding, land alienation into leasehold, insecurity of farm workers and farm labour tenants, inappropriate and exploitative administrative practices, land encroachment and illegal settlers and limited women's land rights. The article presents a summary of land tenure security related initiatives that the study countries have or are in the process of adopting. Analysis of these initiatives shows that tenure reforms have focused on changing the law and rules but little has been done to translate new laws into implementable programs; capacity building; prioritization of resources to support tenure reform; provision of complementary policies and incentives; addressing HIV/AIDS‐land tenure related problems; and monitoring and evaluation. The paper contends that these policy issues should be addressed in order to ensure realization of land tenure security for all.     

Jamaica's disappearing forests: physical and human aspects

Jamaica is a small island that is losing its forest cover at a rapid rate. Due to the dependency of its largely poor population on the many services and functions its forests provide, this loss threatens to have substantial socioeconomic and ecological consequences for the country. Despite these basic facts, the problem of Jamaican deforestation has received very little attention from the scientific community. This article presents results of an island-wide, satellite-based study of forest change for Jamaica for the period 1987–1992, which was supplemented by a field trip to the island in 1999 to assess the overall accuracy of the estimate. Landsat MSS images, which are available only up until 1992, have proved to be an invaluable and cost-effective resource for mapping forest change in the tropics, particularly in large areas. A supervised classification indicates that Jamaica experienced an average annual deforestation rate of 3.9% for this period, a figure higher than existing estimates based on partial ground surveys but lower than the FAO's 1990 Tropical Forest Assessment of 5.3% for 1981–1990. Deforestation estimates for Jamaica's 14 parishes are also presented, based on the integration of satellite-derived forest classification maps with a parish administrative boundaries map of the island in a GIS. A correlation analysis between parish deforestation estimates and socioeconomic and land use/quality indicators derived from official sources suggests that deforestation is occurring most rapidly in highly populated areas possessing large numbers of small farmers who live and work under resource-poor conditions. By providing a sense of the magnitude of and main forest loss hotspots, it is hoped that these national and subnational level forest estimates will draw scientific attention to the problem of deforestation on the island. In addition, the socioeconomic analysis may provide policy-makers and planners with some sense of the relative contribution of underlying driving process in this deforestation as a first step toward the creation of effective social programs to combat the problem.     

Socioeconomic Drivers of Deforestation in the Northern Ecuadorian Amazon

Investigations of land use/land cover (LULC) change and forest management are limited by a lack of understanding of how socioeconomic factors affect land use. This lack also constrains the predictions of future deforestation, which is especially important in the Amazon basin, where large tracts of natural forest are being converted to managed uses. Research presented in this article was conducted to address this lack of understanding. Its objectives are (a) to quantify deforestation in the Northern Ecuadorian Amazon (NEA) during the periods 1986–1996 and 1996–2002; and (b) to determine the significance and magnitude of the effects of socioeconomic factors on deforestation rates at both the parroquia (parish) and finca (farm) levels. Annual deforestation rates were quantified via satellite image processing and geographic information systems. Linear spatial lag regression analyses were then used to explore relationships between socioeconomic factors and deforestation. Socioeconomic factors were obtained, at the finca level, from a detailed household survey carried out in 1990 and 1999, and at the parroquia level from data in the 1990 and 2001 Ecuadorian censuses of population. We found that the average annual deforestation rate was 2.5% and 1.8%/year for 1986–1996 and 1996–2002, respectively. At the parroquia level, variables representing demographic factors (i.e., population density) and accessibility factors (i.e., road density), among others, were found to be significantly related to deforestation. At the farm level, the factors related to deforestation were household size, distance by road to main cities, education, and hired labor. The findings of this research demonstrate both the severity of deforestation in the Northern Ecuadorian Amazon and the array of factors affecting deforestation in the tropics.     

Effects of climate and land use changes on groundwater resources in coastal aquifers

To estimate the freshwater loss in coastal aquifers due to salinisation, a numerical model based on the sharp interface assumption has been introduced. The developed methodology will be useful in areas where limited hydrological data are available. This model will elaborate on the changes in fresh groundwater loss with respect to climate change, land use pattern and hydrologic soil condition. The aridity index has been introduced to represent the variations in precipitation and temperature. The interesting finding is that the deforestation leads to increase groundwater recharge in arid areas, because deforestation leads to reduce evapotranspiration even though it favors runoff. The combined climate and land use scenarios show that when the aridity index is less than 60, the agricultural lands give higher groundwater recharge than other land use patterns for all hydrologic soil conditions. The calculated recharge was then used to estimate the freshwater-saltwater interface and percentage of freshwater loss due to salinity intrusion. We found that in arid areas, the fresh groundwater loss increases as the percentage of forest cover increases. The combined effects of deforestation and aridity index on fresh groundwater loss show that deforestation causes an increase in the recharge and existing fresh groundwater resource in areas having low precipitation and high temperature (arid climates).     

A rights foundation for ecological democracy

ABSTRACT

What would it mean to conceptualize some environmental relationships as bundles of rights, rather than as a good as generally defined by liberalism? Environmental rights are a category of human rights necessarily central to both democracy and global environmental protection and governance (ecological democracy). The world of democratic politics and governance since mid-twentieth century has been transformed by a rights revolution in which recognized rights have come to constitute a ‘global normative order.’ There are several policy spaces in which persuasive environmental rights discourses have been emerging from existing or foreseeable congruences of elite and popular environmental norms, including (1) rights involving access to information and decision-making processes; (2) rights ensuring access to food and water; and (3) rights providing environmental security to all. We analyze these three rights discourses and assess their current and necessary future trajectories. We identify next steps in achieving better understanding and more meaningful establishment of environmental rights and their integration into our thinking about human rights, with attention to how they can be reconciled with the social and cultural diversity of democratic environmental governance in coming turbulent times.     

Land Management Restrictions and Options for Change in Perpetual Conservation Easements

Conservation organizations rely on conservation easements for diverse purposes, including protection of species and natural communities, working forests, and open space. This research investigated how perpetual conservation easements incorporated property rights, responsibilities, and options for change over time in land management. We compared 34 conservation easements held by one federal, three state, and four nonprofit organizations in Wisconsin. They incorporated six mechanisms for ongoing land management decision-making: management plans (74 %), modifications to permitted landowner uses with discretionary consent (65 %), amendment clauses (53 %), easement holder rights to conduct land management (50 %), reference to laws or policies as compliance terms (47 %), and conditional use permits (12 %). Easements with purposes to protect species and natural communities had more ecological monitoring rights, organizational control over land management, and mechanisms for change than easements with general open space purposes. Forestry purposes were associated with mechanisms for change but not necessarily with ecological monitoring rights or organizational control over land management. The Natural Resources Conservation Service-Wetland Reserve Program had a particularly consistent approach with high control over land use and some discretion to modify uses through permits. Conservation staff perceived a need to respond to changing social and ecological conditions but were divided on whether climate change was likely to negatively impact their conservation easements. Many conservation easements involved significant constraints on easement holders’ options for altering land management to achieve conservation purposes over time. This study suggests the need for greater attention to easement drafting, monitoring, and ongoing decision processes to ensure the public benefits of land conservation in changing landscapes.