Stopping and reversing deforestation is a top priority across the tropics. Numerous policies and programs try to stem forest clearance, encourage tree planting, and restore forest landscapes. The hope is to repeat the pattern of “forest transitions” that occurred historically in many wealthy temperate countries, where initial clearance was succeeded by regrowth and recovery as economies urbanized and developed. Such efforts have become all the more urgent given the climate and biodiversity crises.

However, it is often assumed that more forests are better and more sustainable, without careful consideration of how and where it happens, who wins and who loses, and what kinds of forests. In a recent paper, Christian Kull and colleagues working across Southeast Asia identify nine “pitfalls” to such assumptions.

The pitfalls include such problems as focusing on forest quantity (area of coverage of trees, any trees) rather than forest quality; neglecting to pay attention to changes in local peoples’ rights and resource access as strong state and commercial actors promote reforestation; and failing to account for irreversibility.

The incredible surge of efforts to stop deforestation, plant trees, and restore forests may be aiming for a U-shaped curve in forest cover, yet it also involves major social and ecological changes.  The paper highlights case studies in Southeast Asia, where what used to be a diversity of “lived forests”, actively managed by local people as swidden lands, forest product harvesting zones, hunting grounds, and ancestral territory.  From being diverse lived forests, these areas increasingly reframed into just one of two categories: “conservation forests” (where locals are largely kept out) and “production forests” (increasingly organised around industrial monoculture tree crops). Local people lose control to the state, international, and economic actors.

The authors of the paper hope to inspire researchers, policymakers, and leaders to promote more diverse transitions to sustainable forest use and management.  Research and policy would attend to local trends and consequences, to the integrity of social-ecological forest systems, to the safeguarding of rights and justice for forest stewarding people, and to the attenuation and channelling of the strong productivist economic pressures driving many transitions. 

The paper is a capstone output from the FT Viet project funded by the R4D program (Swiss Programme for Research on Global Issues for Development).

The paper ‘Pitfalls for the sustainability of forest transitions: evidence from Southeast Asia‘, is available as part of the Environmental Conservation Editors’ Choice collection.