Luis Santamaría participates at MYEULINK.
Tropical deforestation is a major global driver of biodiversity loss and climate change. It leads to reductions in biodiversity, disturbed ecosystems services (e.g. water regulation, soil conservation) and the destruction of livelihoods for many of the world’s poorest. Deforestation also produces between 12 to 20% of global greenhouse gases, about equal to the emissions from the entire global transport sector.
The dichotomy between deforestation and conservation has been marked by the confrontation of two opposed ideologies that conceived forested tropical areas as empty spaces, which could be either developed for civilization, or maintained free of human influence as “pristine nature”. Both ideologies ignored the existence of a long tradition of forest use and management by local populations. The emergence of a “third way” (socio-environmentalism) that fostered the human use of forested conservation areas and the key role of the humanized matrix between forest fragments was vital for the reduction of clearing rates in the Amazon. There, the increase in deforestation rate has been halted during the last decade, owing to the confluence of social and policy processes at global, national and local scales; and, because secondary forests reasonably recover biodiversity and ecosystem function over reasonable time frames (years to decades), there are some reasons for optimism.
