Fixation on forest quantity as opposed to quality

States and conservation organizations often set quantitative goals for tree cover (Vietnam: 43% of national territory; Laos: 70% of national territory) or for trees planted (Vietnam’s Five Million Hectare programme; Brunei’s 500 000 trees planted by 2035; or the ‘Trillion Trees’ initiative of the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF), Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) and Birdlife International). Likewise, research on forest transitions frequently relies on relatively general forest cover statistics at broad scales and with insufficient distinctions of forest types (Riggs et al. Reference Riggs, Langston and Sayer2018, Cochard et al. Reference Cochard, Gravey, Rasera, Mariethoz and Kull2023). The areas of natural forests and tree plantations are generally reported up front in highly aggregate form as ‘total forest’ despite their drastically different ecosystem functions, as in the online Global Forest Watch data (WRI 2023) or the FAO’s 5-yearly Global Forest Resources Assessments (e.g., FAO 2020). In the FAO’s reports, after discussing ‘total forest’ area there is discussion of subtypes (‘naturally regenerating’ and two types of ‘planted’ forests) across regions, with further country data available online. However, the distinctions between forest types remain ambiguous (Matthews Reference Matthews2001, Mather Reference Mather2005, Chazdon et al. Reference Chazdon, Brancalion, Laestadius, Bennett-Curry, Buckingham and Kumar2016, Scheidel & Gingrich Reference Scheidel and Gingrich2020, p. 682).

Forest coverage does not speak to its quality. While quantity refers to surface cover or numbers of trees, quality refers to a forest’s socio-ecological characteristics such as species diversity and richness, size and age distribution of trees, flora and fauna populations, soil parameters and ecosystem functions, as well as the diverse values that humans attach to those characteristics (Dudley et al. Reference Dudley, Schaepfer, Jackson, Jeanrenaud and Stolton2006, Díaz et al. Reference Diaz, Pascual, Stenseke, Martin-Lopez, Watson and Molnar2018). Different forests provide qualitatively different ecosystem services:

• • Biodiversity. Monospecific exotic plantations provide neither the same habitat nor support the same species, biogeochemical flows or ecosystem processes from the canopy down to soils compared to biodiverse natural forests; indeed, that is not their purpose (Amat et al. Reference Amat, Phung Tuu, Robert and Tran Huu2010, Van Holt et al. Reference Van Holt, Binford, Portier and Vergara2016, Hua et al. Reference Hua, Bruijnzeel, Meli, Zhang, Nakagawa and Miao2022). Likewise, intact, structurally heterogeneous natural forests are more resilient in terms of biodiversity and ecosystem functioning than degraded or secondary ones, especially at altitude (Monge-González et al. Reference Monge-González, Guerrero-Ramírez, Krömer, Kreft and Craven2021).

• • Climate regulation. Forests play an important role in regulating regional and local climates (Watson et al. Reference Watson, Evans, Venter, Williams, Tulloch and Stewart2018). They can mitigate climate change through carbon sequestration, but they can also exacerbate it when they burn (Harris et al. Reference Harris, Gibbs, Baccini, Birdsey, De Bruin and Farina2021). Carbon sequestration and storage is affected by the type of forest and soils and the frequency and types of logging interventions (Mills et al. Reference Mills, Malhi, Ewers, Kho, Teh and Both2023).

• • Hydrology and erosion. Forests mitigate flooding and erosion and attenuate dry spells, but the hydrological impacts of less disturbed natural forests differ from those of intensively used forests and even more so forest plantations (Creed & van Noordwijk Reference Creed and van Noordwijk2018). For the latter, negative impacts are aggravated by cycles of bare soils and bulldozed access roads (Jones et al. Reference Jones, Ellison, Ferraz, Lara, Wei and Zhang2022).

• • Economic goods. Different forests provide different economic goods, from timber to diverse non-timber forest products (NTFPs), variably serving a broad range of users, including smallholders, labourers, subsistence households, people with forestry as a side activity, entrepreneurs, consumers, state entities and national and multinational corporations (Wunder et al. Reference Wunder, Angelsen and Belcher2014).

• • Cultural services. Different tree species and types of forests have varied aesthetic, socio-cultural and religious values (Ruelle et al. Reference Ruelle, Kassam and Asfaw2017, Santini & Miquelajauregui Reference Santini and Miquelajauregui2022).

The focus only on quantitative measures misses these crucial qualitative characteristics. Most claims of forest transitions in Southeast Asia appear to rely on the rapid expansion of industrial and smallholder tree plantations to compensate for natural forest decline that, despite slowing, continues (FAO 2020). Highlighting tree coverage can be explained by the proclivity for abstraction, ease of measurement, availability of statistics and fit to political or economic purpose but nonetheless obscures as much as it elucidates. Most current global targets for forests further encourage the emphasis on quantity (Mansourian et al. Reference Mansourian, Stanturf, Derkyi and Engel2017), although there are exceptions that complement quantitative with qualitative measures, such as the EU’s proposed Nature Restoration Law (EU 2023b).

Masking local diversity with large-scale trends

Academic analyses of forest transitions, just like governmental policy pronouncements, often focus on national and regional scales. Yet, changes aggregated at these scales often do not reflect changes in specific pixels, parcels or sub-regions. There is a diversity of patterns of forest change across Southeast Asia, and to adequately describe this diversity requires a contextual approach (Martin et al. Reference Martin, Llopis, Raveloaritiana, Coomes, Andriamihaja and Bruun2023). Places that do not fit the broad pattern – marginal places, borderlands, shifting cultivation landscapes, interstices – are important, whether for people or for nature. For instance, on Palawan Island (Philippines), pockets of forests occupied by deities help nourish cultural traditions and sense of place in landscapes otherwise converted to industrial monocropped systems that alienate and suppress social and agroecological diversity (Theriault Reference Theriault2017, Dressler et al. Reference Dressler, Smith and Montefrio2018). In central Vietnam, war generally damaged forest cover but also allowed for forest recovery around some abandoned villages (Robert Reference Robert2016). In war-torn Myanmar, deforestation trends in a single township varied widely according to the micro-politics of armed conflict actors (Woods et al. Reference Woods, Wang, Sexton, Leimgruber, Wong and Huang2021). Diverse local patterns are interrelated with and constitute large-scale patterns in a dialectic way (Peluso & Vandergeest Reference Peluso and Vandergeest2020). Often, positive changes in some locations take place at the cost of negative impacts elsewhere. This applies at the global scale as well, where protection and afforestation in some regions may exert deforestation pressure elsewhere (Winkler et al. Reference Winkler, Fuchs, Rounsevell and Herold2021).

Expecting U-shaped trends of forest change

The idea of a U-shaped trend in forest area over time (Fig. 1) may be a useful concept around which to organize retrospective analyses of forest dynamics, particularly at large spatiotemporal scales. However, in practice, an observed end of deforestation may not automatically turn into forest recovery. Trends are stochastic, not deterministic; stepping onto the U-shaped curve is no guarantee that forest change will continue along the projected path. Forest growth is a long-term process influenced by many short- and medium-term political, economic and even biophysical factors such as fire or drought (Cochard et al. Reference Cochard, Gravey, Rasera, Mariethoz and Kull2023). An iconic illustration from outside Southeast Asia is that the slowing of Amazonian deforestation in the early 2000s under Brazilian president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva accelerated again under the next president, Jair Bolsonaro, and has slowed again with Lula’s return to power (Machado Vilani et al. Reference Machado Vilani, Ferrante and Fearnside2023) – rather than continuing along a constant curve of regeneration. In Indonesia, a rise in global demand for cheap oil drove a resurgence of forest losses due to deforestation for oil palm plantations (Rulli et al. Reference Rulli, Casirati, Dell’Angelo, Davis, Passera and D’Odorico2019). Across Latin America, Sloan (Reference Sloan2022) has also identified numerous ‘hotspots’ of reversals of afforestation trends.

Failing to account for irreversible loss

It takes a long time to replace the original qualities of destroyed or degraded ‘natural’ forests (defined as self-seeded native species forest) and their flora, fauna and soils. There may be tipping points beyond which a regime shift is difficult to reverse (Leadley et al. Reference Leadley, Proença, Fernández-Manjarrés, Pereira, Alkemade and Biggs2014, De Alban et al. Reference De Alban, Prescott, Woods, Lim, Maung, Latt and Webb2019), and what may be lost along the way, such as certain keystone species, may have major repercussions for nature (Sodhi et al. Reference Sodhi, Koh, Brook and Ng2004) and people (Reyes-Garcia et al. Reference Reyes-Garcia, Camara-Leret, Halpern, O’Hara, Renard, Zafra-Calvo and Diaz2023). In central Vietnam, some areas deforested in the twentieth century due to war, logging or cultivation have not regenerated due to soil impoverishment or domination by persistent vine and bamboo thickets (Amat et al. Reference Amat, Phung Tuu, Robert and Tran Huu2010, Cochard et al. Reference Cochard, Gravey, Rasera, Mariethoz and Kull2023).

Framing categories and concepts as universal or neutral

Forests and their definitions are inherently political (McElwee Reference McElwee2016, Peluso & Vandergeest Reference Peluso and Vandergeest2020). How one defines, categorizes and counts forests and forest types can be contested terrain (Lund Reference Lund2018). The common-sense or vernacular definition of forest as a relatively dense and large stand of trees is a good place to start for everyday communication. But for statistical and policy reasons, forest limits must be defined: which areas count, who defines the boundary and to which land does a forest policy apply? Diverse thresholds for counting land cover as forest may become contentious, including minimum size, tree height, density (canopy cover), species composition and land-use purpose (habitat, orchards, plantations, etc.). The FAO has famously updated its definition numerous times, affecting global statistics (Chazdon et al. Reference Chazdon, Brancalion, Laestadius, Bennett-Curry, Buckingham and Kumar2016). Areas designated as forestland are not necessarily the same as lands counted as forest based on forest cover maps; indeed, land institutionally categorized as forests may in reality have no trees, and trees may grow on non-forest land (Lund Reference Lund2002, Chazdon et al. Reference Chazdon, Brancalion, Laestadius, Bennett-Curry, Buckingham and Kumar2016).

In Laos, for example, the categories ‘forest’ and ‘forestland’ can mean many things, ranging from old growth conservation forests to industrial tree plantations, from state forest estates for timber extraction to multifunctional landscapes that integrate local livelihoods with ecosystem services, to landscapes without trees (MRLG 2019). Whereas the FAO defines forests as land area with a tree canopy cover of more than 10%, national statistics in Laos set a minimum of 20% tree canopy cover. The latter seems to function mainly to exclude fallows from shifting cultivation counting as forests (Pichler & Ingalls Reference Pichler and Ingalls2021). The forest transition in Laos, like elsewhere, depends on politics and power relations that shape the prioritization, categorization and actual transformation of forest landscapes (Pichler & Ingalls Reference Pichler and Ingalls2021). A change in how forests are counted in Laos changed the overall statistical trend from deforestation to afforestation in 2015 (de Jong et al. Reference De Jong, Liu, Park and Camacho2017).

Diverting attention from the simplification of forestlands into two categories

A focus on the forest transition may divert attention from a related transition in which ‘lived forests’ bifurcate into either ‘conservation’ or ‘production’ lands. ‘Lived forests’, in this sense, encompass ancestral territory, are actively managed and are used for swidden agriculture, NTFP collection and as riverine habitat. Historically, forests across Southeast Asia covered large areas and were managed as lived forests. In recent decades, swidden agriculture has declined whilst perennial and annual cash cropping has intensified (Cramb et al. Reference Cramb, Colfer, Dressler, Laungaramsri, Le and Mulyoutami2009, Mertz et al. Reference Mertz, Leisz, Heinimann, Rerkasem and Thiha2009, van Vliet et al. Reference van Vliet, Mertz, Heinimann, Langanke, Pascual, Schmook and Adams2012, Dressler et al. Reference Dressler, Wilson, Clendenning, Cramb, Keenan and Mahanty2017, Martin et al. Reference Martin, Llopis, Raveloaritiana, Coomes, Andriamihaja and Bruun2023). Such land-use intensification makes possible the forest transition but with hidden ecological and social impacts (Cramb Reference Cramb, De Koninck, Bernard and Bissonnette2011, Gingrich et al. Reference Gingrich, Lauk, Niedertscheider, Pichler, Schaffartzik and Schmid2019, Pichler et al. Reference Pichler, Bhan and Gingrich2021, Elias et al. Reference Elias, Kandel, Mansourian, Meinzen-Dick, Crossland and Joshi2022). Land classified as forest no longer includes many swidden forests and has moved to largely falling into one of two categories: conservation forests in which human land uses may be highly restricted and production forests organized around economic goals.

From the perspective of government officials, this simplification facilitates oversight, planning and modern economic development, but there can be diverse consequences (Scott Reference Scott1998, Robbins Reference Robbins2001). The two new categories leave little space for locally based agroforestry livelihoods, for example. Mixed-use forest territories have become separate categories visible to state planners on national maps and orientated towards national and global goals, such as for global conservation or national hydropower interests in the case of protected forests or intensified forest land use for markets as in production forests. This constrains livelihood security and conservation objectives in multifunctional landscapes, as shown in the Philippines (Dressler et al. Reference Dressler, De Koning, Montefrio and Firn2016). In Laos, land-use policies that favour the intensification of agricultural production have failed to end forest loss and food insecurity and have led to as much greenhouse gas emissions as continued shifting cultivation (Bauernschuster et al. Reference Bauernschuster, Pichler, Ingalls, Thongmanivong and Gingrich2022a).

Neglecting social power transitions and dispossessions

From conversion of tree cover to changes in classifications, forest dynamics are interconnected with who has the rights to access and use forestlands, who controls the decisions about how forestlands are used and who controls the stream of benefits from them (Phelps et al. Reference Phelps, Webb and Agrawal2010, Kull Reference Kull2017, Pichler et al. Reference Pichler, Schmid and Gingrich2022). These power dynamics may be gendered or related to ethnicity, wealth or other socio-economic and cultural differences. Notably, the bifurcation of lived forest into production and conservation forest (see above) often excludes local people from both forest types (Nguyen & Kull Reference Nguyen and Kull2023, Pichler et al. Reference Pichler, Schmid and Gingrich2022). There are winners and losers, and often widening disparities, in such transitions. This results in a transfer of power from a broader swath of local people to either state institutions for conservation or watershed forest management (perhaps with links to international environmental NGOs) or to industrial forestry or agribusiness actors (whether state and private forestry companies or local entrepreneurs and woodlot owners), as has been illustrated in Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia and Myanmar (To et al. Reference To, Mahanty and Dressler2015, Riggs et al. Reference Riggs, Langston and Sayer2018, Pichler et al. Reference Pichler, Bhan and Gingrich2021, Woods Reference Woods2021, Vu et al. Reference Vu, Cochard and Ngo2023). Such changes come with profound impacts on people, communities, cultures, ways of provisioning and social relations.

State forest and environmental bureaucracies of diverse types – from classical ‘forest services’ to state forest companies, parks agencies or ecosystem service funds – have become important in diverse regions where they did not previously act, exerting new sorts of rights and controls. Policies seeking to reduce deforestation, conserve forests and increase tree cover and forest restoration also achieve other goals, such as enrolling more people and land in a national economy or exerting control over national territory (Peluso & Vandergeest Reference Peluso and Vandergeest2001, Fairhead et al. Reference Fairhead, Leach and Scoones2012, McElwee Reference McElwee2016) or Indigenous lands. Indeed, support for tree planting and forest protection – whether for nature conservation, carbon capture, economic development or general environmental improvements – can have political consequences, for example, by hiding or legitimizing displacement of villages for military control (Woods Reference Woods2019, Woods & Naimark Reference Woods and Naimark2020, Nguyen & Kull Reference Nguyen and Kull2023).

Social power transitions and exclusions often take place through mechanisms linked to land tenure, property systems and resource access (Ostrom Reference Ostrom1990, Ribot & Peluso Reference Ribot and Peluso2003). Forest transitions often involve a shift from customary, informal, common-pool governance institutions to different types and degrees of formalized property rights for states or private actors, like leases for large corporations or land titles to elite households (Youn et al. Reference Youn, Choi, De Jong, Liu, Park and Camacho2017, Pichler et al. Reference Pichler, Schmid and Gingrich2022). The collective, customary land and resource rights of local communities often get trampled in this process (Hall et al. Reference Hall, Hirsch and Li2011, McElwee Reference McElwee2016, Pichler & Brad Reference Pichler and Brad2016).

Neglecting productivism as the hidden driving force

Forest transition theory has identified several ‘pathways’ to forest transitions, including economic development, state policy, forest scarcity, globalization and smallholder farming (Rudel et al. Reference Rudel, Coomes, Moran, Achard, Angelsen, Xu and Lambin2005, Lambin & Meyfroidt Reference Lambin and Meyfroidt2010, Riggs et al. Reference Riggs, Langston and Sayer2018). However, in Southeast Asia, the dominant underlying driving force of forest changes is probably best characterized as ‘productivism’, or intensive, industrial, output-orientated economic activity (Mather Reference Mather2001a, Neimark et al. Reference Neimark, Mahanty and Dressler2016). This productivism operates across multiple pathways. For instance, the economic development pathway, which historically meant urbanization, industrialization and resulting rural land abandonment, is characterized in contemporary Southeast Asia by rapid transitions to capitalist and export-orientated cash crops (Hall Reference Hall2011, Kröger Reference Kröger2014, Hirsch et al. Reference Hirsch, Woods, Scurra and Dwyer2022). In Laos, for example, 12% of the domestic land surface has been converted to agricultural and tree plantations or mining sites through large-scale land acquisitions since 2001, with diverse ecological and community impacts (Bauernschuster et al. Reference Bauernschuster, Pichler, Nanhthavong, Bernhard, Epprecht and Gingrich2022b, Magliocca et al. Reference Magliocca, Ellicott, Ingalls, Epprecht, Hett, Nanhthavong and De Bremond2022). The state policy pathway – where governments push for a forest transition for wood supply and conservation goals – is also clearly partially productivist. For instance, Vietnam aggressively supports a growing export-orientated wood industry (Cochard et al. Reference Cochard, Nguyen, Ngo and Kull2020) or voluntary market-based instruments for forest conservation that are based on offsetting productivist consumption elsewhere (Fisher et al. Reference Fisher, Cavanagh, Sikor and Mwayafu2018). The smallholder pathway – which focuses on the role of small-scale farm households in promoting forested landscapes – can also become productivist. This is notably the case in Vietnam, where the acacia plantation boom is led by hundreds of thousands of smallholders keenly producing for profit (Nguyen & Kull Reference Nguyen and Kull2023, Vu et al. Reference Vu, Cochard and Ngo2023).

The consequences of productivism are multiple and diverse. On the one hand, productivism is tied to national economic development and rising incomes, at least for some. On the other hand, it is linked with the reordering of land tenure and social relations, social differentiation, excessive consumption, environmental degradation and notably an energy transition to fossil fuels and diverse hidden emissions (Gingrich et al. Reference Gingrich, Lauk, Niedertscheider, Pichler, Schaffartzik and Schmid2019, Pichler et al. Reference Pichler, Bhan and Gingrich2021).

Ignoring local agency and sentiments

Action by people who inhabit forestlands and who have a political stake in land-use and forest policy is crucial to implementing, modifying, negotiating and reinterpreting state policy, and more broadly to forest change. The story of forest transitions cannot be told without understanding such people – often smallholder farmers (Rigg et al. Reference Rigg, Salamanca and Thompson2016), but also part-time investors, labourers, local associations and NGOs – and their actions, constraints and wishes (Garcia et al. Reference Garcia, Savilaakso, Verburg, Gutierrez, Wilson and Krug2020). This includes paying attention to how people feel about changes in forests, forest livelihoods and forest policies and how people communicate and react to those changes from within their own worldviews. At a global level, the spiritual value of forests has changed its characteristics in concert with forest transitions (Roux et al. Reference Roux, Konczal, Bernasconi, Bhagwat, De Vreese and Doimo2022). Such sentiments matter because they are part of human experience and influence how transformations are talked about, engaged with and ultimately acted upon. Exclusion of local communities and Indigenous people from thinking about and managing forest change can lead to conflicts and exacerbate deforestation (Fairhead et al. Reference Fairhead, Leach and Scoones2012, Sze et al. Reference Sze, Carrasco, Childs and Edwards2021), whereas their inclusion can yield not only positive social but also ecological benefits (Dawson et al. Reference Dawson, Coolsaet, Sterling, Loveridge, Gross-Camp and Wongbusarakum2021).

In central Vietnam, the rural villagers who have become widespread acacia farmers have sometimes even been pushing into state-designated ‘protection’ forests to convert land to acacia plantations, but they have also been earning money by patrolling and managing natural forests. Through daily practices of growing acacia as well as caring for the forest, villagers not only interpret and apply state policy goals (and thus transform landscapes) but also cultivate plans and hopes for the future and a new sense of identity (Kull et al. Reference Kull, Nguyen, Cochard, Ngo, Pham, Shackleton, Richardson, Le Roux and Marchante2023, Nguyen & Kull Reference Nguyen and Kull2023, Vu et al. Reference Vu, Cochard and Ngo2023). In the Philippines, upland farmers maintain swidden practices and forest livelihoods in ways that reflect, on the one hand, negotiations with state authorities and their representatives and, on the other hand, reciprocal relations with the community, deities and nature (Theriault Reference Theriault2017, Dressler et al. Reference Dressler, Smith and Montefrio2018, Reference Dressler, Smith, Kull, Carmenta and JM2021). Local sentiments, knowledge and practices are central to fostering sustainable forest transitions – not only because local people are most directly affected by forest changes, but also because their sentiments and knowledge about the forest may actively contribute to fostering sustainable forest solutions (Shumi et al. Reference Shumi, Wahler, Riechers, Senbeta, Abson, Schultner and Fischer2023).