The social and ecological costs of reforestation. Territorialization and industrialization of land use accompany forest transitions in Southeast Asia

Background

This paper focuses on the phenomenon of forest transitions in five Southeast Asian countries: Thailand, Vietnam, Laos, the Philippines, and Malaysia. These countries shifted from net deforestation to net increases in forest area since the 1990s. While climate change mitigation policies like REDD+ actively promote this reforestation trend in the Global South, these efforts have been accompanied by exclusionary effects, alienating land from local users to benefit corporate and state interests in expanding tree plantations, plantation agriculture, and other extractive industries. This raises questions about the genuine ecological benefits of these forest transitions and the potential for shifting land-use emissions to other sectors.

Goals and Methods

This research analyzes the political and biophysical dimensions that accompany forest transitions in Thailand, Vietnam, Laos, the Philippines, and Malaysia, and interrogates the resulting spatial injustices. The authors take a regional, macro-scale approach to their analysis. They utilize data primarily from international databases such as FAOSTAT for agricultural and forest change and the IEA database for energy use. National reports to the Global Forest Resources Assessment (FRA) complement these quantitative data. The analysis also incorporates spatially explicit data of long-term tree cover change between 1990 and 2016 to assess the spatial dynamics and injustices of reforestation.

Conclusions and Takeaways

The study concludes that state territorialization intertwined with socio-ecological transitions has accompanied forest transitions in Southeast Asia since the 1990s, leading to the separation of agricultural and forest land and the marginalization of shifting cultivation. However, industrial tree plantations with potentially limited climate change mitigation and biodiversity benefits are responsible for a significant portion of this reforestation. These forest transitions exhibit spatial injustice, concentrated in the highlands and disproportionately impacting ethnic minority groups practicing shifting cultivation by restricting their access to land and traditional ecological benefits. The findings suggest that current climate change mitigation policies like REDD+ may inadvertently reproduce this separation of land uses and marginalization of shifting cultivation. The authors advocate for more detailed analyses of forest transition dynamics and the promotion of more integrated and equitable land-use systems like agroforestry, offering better outcomes for both climate and local populations. Future research should focus on national and sub-national level analyses of these transitions and policies that can support more sustainable and just land management practices.