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Tropical forests lost to land grabbing

Nature Geoscience volume 13, pages 460–461 (2020)Cite this article

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Large-scale land acquisitions accelerate tropical deforestation, suggests an analysis of two decades of land-deal and forest-cover data. Such exploitation will threaten the future of these globally crucial carbon sinks and biodiversity hotspots.

Tropical forests are of global environmental and socio-economic importance, yet every year, vast areas are lost to deforestation. Some governments have accused smallholder and migratory agriculture, and even environmental groups, of being behind the deforestation1. Meanwhile, more plausible allegations are directed at international large-scale land investments, for example for agro-industrial plantations, logging or mining activities2. Until the drivers of tropical deforestation are better understood, the opportunity remains to inaccurately apportion blame and to continue to employ overly simplistic policy measures. While there is growing evidence that many land acquisitions occur in tropical forests, globally it remains unclear as to whether these investments deliberately target forests or if deforestation is a by-product of other industries. Writing in Nature Geoscience, Davis and colleagues3 analyse land-acquisition records and forest-cover data covering 15 countries in the tropics to disentangle the relationships between deals, industry type and deforestation on a global scale.

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Fig. 1: Tropical forest in Alto Mayo, Peru.

A. Neef

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  1. Development Studies, School of Social Sciences, University of Auckland, Auckland, New Zealand

    Andreas Neef

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Correspondence to Andreas Neef.

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Neef, A. Tropical forests lost to land grabbing. Nat. Geosci. 13, 460–461 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41561-020-0604-3

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