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The expansion of a given land use may affect deforestation directly if forests are cleared to free land for this use, or indirectly, via the displacement of other landuse activities from non-forest areas towards the forest frontier. Unlike direct land conversion, indirect land-use changes affecting deforestation are not immediately observable. They require the linking of changes occurring in different regions. This paper empirically estimates these indirect effects for the case of Brazil. It presents evidence of a positive relationship between sugarcane expansion in the south of the country and cattle ranching in the Amazon, suggesting that the former is indeed displacing the latter towards the forest frontier. This displacement effect is shown to be a dynamic process materializing over 10 to 15 years.

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ABSTRACT. In Namibia, as in many parts of Africa, households are highly dependent on forest resources for their livelihoods, including energy needs. Using data originally collected for Namibia's forest resource accounts and insights from a non-separable household model, this paper estimates household fuelwood demand. Specifically, the factors underlying the substitution between fuelwood collected from open access forest resources, cow dung, and fuelwood purchased from the market are analysed. Heckman two-step estimates show that households respond to economic scarcity, as measured by the opportunity costs of collecting fuelwood, by reducing energy consumption slightly more than by increasing labour input to collection. There is limited evidence for substitution from fuelwood to other energy sources, particularly with declining availability of forest stocks. Market participants may be more sensitive to price changes than non-participants. All estimated elasticities are low, similar to those observed in previous studies.

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