Tropical rainforests are a globally and probably galactically important ecosystem, that provide benefits which tumble far beyond their edges. But, to put it bluntly, who owns the rainforest?
It would naive, untrue and in some cases downright harmful to say that the world’s tropical rainforests don’t belong to anybody at all, or that they belong to everybody equally.
While it’s nice to think of rainforests as a global commons–and they certainly do provide global benefits– this ignores the fact that vast swathes of tropical forest are relied upon, used, or else actually called home by indigenous peoples and communities. For instance, in Papua New Guinea, large areas of land are under customary ownership and legally belong to a distributed network of smallholders and tribes.
This is true too for large tracts of rainforest across the Amazon that fall under various forms of indigenous management. All the patches of yellow in map A, for example, are recognized indigenous territories within the biogeographic confines of the Amazon, with maps B and C showing how these correspond to regions of high carbon density and changes in carbon stocks through time. (The patches in green are under the status of Protected Natural Areas).
Figure from Walker et al. 2020
In many cases, indigenous people have played an outsized role in limiting atmospheric emissions from forest loss, though they often find themselves victims of political rollbacks of their borders, land grabs, and erosions of justice.
The below GIF shows shows nearly four decades of deforestation around Parque Do Xingu, an indigenous reserve in Matto Grosso, Brazil. The green patch of forest remaining today corresponds almost exactly to the borders of the reserve, showing just how important indigenous areas in the Amazon can be for fending off deforestation. (Check out this amazing time-series tool to make your own GIFs of land-use change.)
Other areas of rainforest are owned by governments as national parks and certain uninhabited protected areas.
But recent work has demonstrated a third actor that has emerged only recently as a largescale owner of the world’s tropical forests.
In what must surely be a signature of the Anthropocene, I was surprised recently to read of the exceptionally large tracts of rainforest which are “owned” to some degree or other by large, industrial corporations.
Take a quick look at the map below. Each one of the small dots you can see corresponds to a single land deal, where a company has invested in purchasing or leasing an area of land. (Each point corresponds to to the centroid of a georeferenced land deal).
The different colours show land acquisitions according to investment type. So the green colours are land bought or leased by mining industries, the orange shows parcels of land rented by logging companies, and purple through black show different types of agro-industrial purchases.
The first thing to note is the staggering number of industrial land deals.
For some countries, like Gabon, 79% of their entire national forest cover falls under private, industrial ownership, mainly under logging concessions. This portion varies massively between countries. Only 2% of Peru’s forest cover, for instance, falls within areas where known land deals have occurred.
The second thing to note is the complicated but instrumental role that these large scale land aquisitions have played in driving deforestation patterns around the tropics.
Below, each of these land deal points has been coloured to show how they relate to changes in forest cover. Areas covered from yellow-to-red have seen an uptick in forest loss compared to nearby areas not under private ownership.
You can see that over half of land deals have led to increased forest loss.
This forest loss is concentrated in certain investments. Companies buying forested land for the production of export-oriented commodities, like plantations, end up chopping down forest around the world.
For areas in blue, such industrial aquisitions may have actually contributed to reducing deforestation.
This is often associated with logging concessions and sometimes mining areas, and might be happening because active management has prevented incursion by smallholders, fended off illegal conversion, or batted away government-driven land-use reclassification.
It’s also important to note that some of the reduced deforestation in the blue areas might be because people have been kicked off their land–and that avoided deforestation says nothing about how these areas are being degraded in ways that satellites are not picking up.
All in all, take a few seconds to stand back and actually think about these maps.
The destruction of rainforest is rightly decried by most people, though it’s much more understandable when the drivers of forest loss are smallholder farmers or people struck by poverty.
As much as I love rainforests, if the choice is between eating or not, and resources are not readily avaialble, it’s easy to see why one might need to clear forests.
But what we have allowed to happen over the past few centuries is wholly unprecedented and bears dwelling on for a moment.
We have essentially decided or been led to believe that carving up and handing over enormous portions of one of Earth’s most important and diverse ecosystems to extractive industries is wise.
We have permitted industrial profiteering within forested landscapes, and worst yet, we have often allowed this to happen in way that is plagued by corruption and where the beneifts captured by extraction are unfairly concentrated in the hands of the few.
Seems a tad silly.
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