Land use displacement and forest conservation : the cases of Bhutan and Costa Rica
(2016)
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- Abstract
- Tropical forests have been increasingly targeted by protection or restoration policies and programs. Yet, as a result of international trade, national territorial activities and policies may generate unintended environmental outcomes at various spatial scales, notably through land use displacement. This dissertation aims to answer three questions based on the two natural experiments of Bhutan and Costa Rica: (i) What are the interactions between the national-scale land use dynamics, the implementation of forest protection policies and the international trade of land-based products? (ii) To what extent is land use displaced abroad through international trade of land-based products? (iii) What are the multi-scale environmental outcomes of national forest protection policies and land use dynamics, taking into account the potential land use displacement? Over the past decades, the displacement of land use abroad by Bhutan and Costa Rica, along with the protection of their national forests, led overall to global environmental benefits. However, this masks mixed outcomes at the sub-national scale in Costa Rica, as export-oriented cultivation threatens forests through its demand for cropland and for packaging wood. This dissertation demonstrates the power of international markets in shaping national land use dynamics, and in generating unexpected feedbacks on different economic sectors at various spatial scales. It further highlights the crucial role to be played by institutions and governance in moderating the relations between economic development and its potential environmental impacts, as well as the need for integrated approaches to minimize inter-sectorial and multi-scale negative feedbacks.
- Affiliations
UCLouvain SST/ELI/ELIC - Earth & Climate
Citations
Jadin, I. (2016). Land use displacement and forest conservation : the cases of Bhutan and Costa Rica. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/181771