A cross-border deforestation index to understand underlying drivers of deforestation
نویسنده
چکیده
This paper considers a preliminary investigation involving the development of a Cross-Border Deforestation Index (CBDI), which is an attempt to quantify the differences in deforestation between two countries or potentially any two administrative units. In this study, the focus was on countries. For each pair of bordering countries, a 50 km buffer zone was drawn and the average value of the Vegetation Continuous Field (VCF) was calculated for each country in the pair. The ratio of these two averages is the CBDI. Values of 1 indicate similar levels of forest cover but values greater than 1 point towards dissimilar land use policies within countries and/or sub-national administrative levels. This index was calculated for all pairs of bordering tropical countries in South and Central America, Asia and Africa. In addition, a visual analysis of the spatial variation of the VCF was undertaken to show how this can complement the CBDI. The results showed that countries such as Argentina, Brazil, Chile, El Salvador, Laos, Thailand and DR Congo, in combination with different neighbouring countries, all have CBDI values differing from 1. These areas are worth examining in greater detail in order to understand what types of drivers are behind these outlying CBDI values. These drivers could include land use policy, population pressure, accessibility, etc. Future work will i nclude the addition of environmental factors. By computing the CBDI for so called Homogeneous Response Units (HRU: areas of similar or identical environmental conditions in terms of soil, altitude and slope), we will be able to examine the changing effect on the CBDI. This work is still ongoing and will be expanded to consider HRU for all country pairs. In addition, regression of the CBDI with different drivers of deforestation will be attempted in order to help identify these underlying causes.
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