Neotropical Forest Conservation, Agricultural Intensification, and Rural Out-migration: The Mexican Experience

Garcı́a-Barrios, Luis; Galván-Miyoshi, Yankuic; Valdivieso-Pérez, Ingrid Abril; Masera, Omar; Bocco, Gerardo; Vandermeer, John

doi:10.1525/bio.2009.59.10.8

Cited by 127 publications

(79 citation statements)

References 31 publications

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“…They further note that, especially when soil and other physical conditions are not limiting, rural-to-urban migration does little to prevent further agricultural penetration into natural habitat, as has been happening in the Atlantic forest of Brazil. (v) A recent review of 17 studies of rural population dynamics in Mexico (28) found little evidence that either intensification (in the form of eliminating peasant agriculture) or rural outmigration has had the result expected from the forest transition paradigm. Of the 17 studies, 16 exhibited net deforestation even though the background conditions correspond to the requisites for the FT model to be applicable.…”

Section: The Forest Transition Modelmentioning

confidence: 99%

The agroecological matrix as alternative to the land-sparing/agriculture intensification model

Perfecto

Vandermeer²

2010

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

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537

379

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Among the myriad complications involved in the current food crisis, the relationship between agriculture and the rest of nature is one of the most important yet remains only incompletely analyzed. Particularly in tropical areas, agriculture is frequently seen as the antithesis of the natural world, where the problem is framed as one of minimizing land devoted to agriculture so as to devote more to conservation of biodiversity and other ecosystem services. In particular, the "forest transition model" projects an overly optimistic vision of a future where increased agricultural intensification (to produce more per hectare) and/or increased rural-to-urban migration (to reduce the rural population that cuts forest for agriculture) suggests a near future of much tropical aforestation and higher agricultural production. Reviewing recent developments in ecological theory (showing the importance of migration between fragments and local extinction rates) coupled with empirical evidence, we argue that there is little to suggest that the forest transition model is useful for tropical areas, at least under current sociopolitical structures. A model that incorporates the agricultural matrix as an integral component of conservation programs is proposed. Furthermore, we suggest that this model will be most successful within a framework of small-scale agroecological production.food crisis | biodiversity | fragmented landscapes | matrix quality | smallscale farmers

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Section: The Forest Transition Modelmentioning

confidence: 99%

The agroecological matrix as alternative to the land-sparing/agriculture intensification model

Perfecto

Vandermeer²

2010

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

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537

379

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“…A globally important example of this can be seen in the broad geographical trend of greater concentrations of biodiversity in less developed, tropical countries (Cavender-Bares et al 2013). International conservation organizations use political pressure and incentives to encourage the protection of habitat for biodiversity conservation, whereas local communities, who in many cases are subsistence and small-scale agriculturalists, have strong preferences for increased agricultural productivity to meet minimum livelihood needs (Sunderlin et al 2005, García-Barrios et al 2009). Neglecting local preferences in larger policy decision making is an issue that arises repeatedly in struggles to achieve sustainable development (Muradian et al 2013).…”

Section: Challenging Situation 1: Stakeholder-dependent Variation In mentioning

confidence: 99%

Trade-offs in ecosystem services and varying stakeholder preferences: evaluating conflicts, obstacles, and opportunities

King¹,

Cavender‐Bares²,

Balvanera³

et al. 2015

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132

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ABSTRACT. In efforts to increase human well-being while maintaining the natural systems and processes upon which we depend, navigating the trade-offs that can arise between different ecosystem services is a profound challenge. We evaluated a recently developed simple analytic framework for assessing ecosystem service trade-offs, which characterizes such trade-offs in terms of their underlying biophysical constraints as well as divergences in stakeholders' values for the services in question. Through a workshop and subsequent discussions, we identified four different types of challenging situations under which the framework allows important insights to clarify the nature of stakeholder conflicts, obstacles to promoting more sustainable outcomes, and potential enabling factors to promote efficiency and sustainability of ecosystem service yields. We illustrated the framework's analytical steps by applying them to case studies representing three of the challenging situations. We explored the fourth challenging situation conceptually, using published literature for examples. We examined the potential utility and feasibility of using the framework as a participatory tool in resource management and conflict resolution. We concluded that the framework can be instrumental for promoting pluralism and insightful analysis of tradeoffs. The insights offered here may be viewed as hypotheses to be tested and refined as additional unforeseen challenges and benefits are revealed as the framework is put into practice.

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“…In countries like Mexico, the greater share of emissions from the land use, land use change and forestry sector may well stem from degradation, since so many forests are informally used by rural populations for grazing and for shifting cultivation, activities that result in lowered carbon levels, but not in long-run loss of forest cover. The reality is that much of Mexico's forest area is in the form of a mosaic, reflecting mixtures of small-scale human uses over space, which also means that individual patches are in a continuous state of flux between being CO 2 sources and sinks, as the locations of the human uses shift over time [34].…”

Section: Implications Of Using Mad-mex For Activity Data Monitoring Imentioning

confidence: 99%

Comment on Gebhardt et al. MAD-MEX: Automatic Wall-to-Wall Land Cover Monitoring for the Mexican REDD-MRV Program Using All Landsat Data. Remote Sens. 2014, 6, 3923–3943

et al. 2016

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Gebhardt et al. (2014) presented the Monitoring Activity Data for the Mexican REDD+ program (MAD-MEX), an automatic nation-wide land cover monitoring system for the Mexican REDD+ MRV. Though MAD-MEX represents a valuable first effort toward establishing a national reference emissions level for the implementation of REDD+ in Mexico, in this paper, we argue that this land cover system has important limitations that may prevent it from becoming operational for REDD+ MRV. Specifically, we show that (1) the accuracy assessment of MAD-MEX land cover maps is optimistically biased; (2) the ability of MAD-MEX to monitor land cover change, including deforestation and forest degradation; is poor and (3) the use of an entirely automatic classification approach, such as that followed by MAD-MEX, is highly problematic in the case of a large and heterogeneous country like Mexico. We discuss these limitations and call into question the ability of a land cover monitoring system, such as MAD-MEX, both to elaborate a national reference emissions level and to monitor future forest cover change, as part of a REDD+ MRV system. We provide some insights with the aim of improving the development of nation-wide land cover monitoring systems in Mexico and elsewhere.

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Neotropical Forest Conservation, Agricultural Intensification, and Rural Out-migration: The Mexican Experience

Cited by 127 publications

References 31 publications

The agroecological matrix as alternative to the land-sparing/agriculture intensification model

The agroecological matrix as alternative to the land-sparing/agriculture intensification model

Trade-offs in ecosystem services and varying stakeholder preferences: evaluating conflicts, obstacles, and opportunities

Comment on Gebhardt et al. MAD-MEX: Automatic Wall-to-Wall Land Cover Monitoring for the Mexican REDD-MRV Program Using All Landsat Data. Remote Sens. 2014, 6, 3923–3943

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