During the second half of the twentieth century, southern Brazil underwent rapid industrialization and urbanization. In earlier historical periods in Europe and North America, these trends have contributed to a forest transition in which deforestation gives way to forestation. In a developing country, like Brazil, with a more skewed income distribution and a larger rural underclass, industrialization and urbanization may not give rise to a forest transition. These competing theoretical expectations were tested with data on forest cover change from the Brazilian censuses of 1970 through 1995/1996 for the state of Santa Catarina in southern Brazil. The analyses show forestation replacing deforestation between 1975 and 1980. An increase in the extent of planted forests close to urban areas explains the turnaround in forest cover trends. Because the planted forests contain relatively few native plant species, the expansion of these forests does not ease the biodiversity crisis. The re-emerging second Atlantic forest represents a smaller, less diverse and degraded version of the first Atlantic forest.
Authors' Personal Statement:This is a collaborative community essay, written by ten postdoctoral research fellows who had the opportunity to come together at Columbia University's interdisciplinary Earth Institute. In many ways, we were different: our disciplinary backgrounds run the gamut in physical and social sciences; we study in different parts of the world, from sub-Saharan Africa to Latin America; we approach our work differently-some of us spend our days in the field collecting and analyzing soil samples, others conduct in-depth interviews in rural communities, while still others spend time in the lab elaborating formulas and crunching numbers. Yet, we found common ground: all of us are committed to addressing issues of sustainability in complex environments. As such, we wanted to harness our diversity and various strengths to bring together scientific, political, economic, demographic, geographic, ecological, and ethical perspectives on the challenges and opportunities of sustainable development. We remain ambitious in our aims. Nonetheless, we realized that our first task was figuring out how to communicate effectively across often disparate disciplines. This community essay chronicles that part of our journey. We hope it will be of use to others who endeavor to work across and beyond traditional academic disciplines.
Within the contexts of globalization and the Atlantic Forest ecoregion, I present a multiscale analysis of anthropogenic landscape dynamics in the Florianópolis city-region, Santa Catarina, southern Brazil. Drawing on field research conducted between 2000 and 2004 and a review of the literature, I examined Brazilian demographic and agricultural census data for the period of 1970 to 1995-1996. I hypothesized that economic restructuring, new institutional arrangements, and the valuation of environmental amenities and ecosystem services have contributed to forest recovery trends and thus a forest transition in the city-region. My results indicate that along with rapid urbanization, in-migration, socioeconomic polarization, and segregation, the city-region has experienced the contraction of private agricultural land area, expansion of protected areas, recovery of forests, and conversion of coastal plain ecosystems to built environments. Future analyses of forest transition dynamics should consider the spatial configurations of socioeconomic inequality in city-regions.
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