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Whither the forest transition? Climate change, policy responses, and redistributed forests in the twenty-first century

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Abstract

Forest transitions occur when net reforestation replaces net deforestation in places. Because forest transitions can increase biodiversity and augment carbon sequestration, they appeal to policymakers contending with the degrading effects of forest loss and climate change. What then can policymakers do to trigger forest transitions? The historical record over the last two centuries provides insights into the precipitating conditions. The early transitions often occurred passively, through the spontaneous regeneration of trees on abandoned agricultural lands. Later forest transitions occurred more frequently after large-scale crisis narratives emerged and spurred governments to take action, often by planting trees on degraded, sloped lands. To a greater degree than their predecessors, latecomer forest transitions exhibit centralized loci of power, leaders with clearly articulated goals, and rapid changes in forest cover. These historical shifts in forest transitions reflect our growing appreciation of their utility for countering droughts, floods, land degradation, and climate change.

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Notes

  1. The dynamics of land abandonment have also followed some anomalous, alternative paths. For example, land abandonment also drove a transient forest transition in Eastern Europe after the 1989–1991 collapse of the Soviet Bloc regimes, but in these settings the differential loss of state subsidies after the collapse shaped land abandonment patterns. Agricultural collectives located on prime agricultural lands experienced the largest losses in subsidies with the regime change, so much of the land abandonment and reforestation occurred on these prime, machine-friendly agricultural lands (Taff et al. 2010). As with the adjustment-driven patterns of forest cover expansion in Western Europe described by Mather, these eastern European increases in forest cover stemmed from shifts in political–economic arrangements that led to a kind of passive reforestation in which forests regenerated spontaneously on abandoned agricultural lands. With economic recovery after the collapse of the eastern bloc, farmers have reclaimed some of these abandoned lands and put them back into production (Kuemmerle et al. 2015; Meyfroidt et al. 2016).

  2. The WRI-CAIT website (http://cait2.wri.org/pledges/#/profile) contains summary descriptions of each country’s plans for emissions reductions. These plans frequently describe reductions to be achieved through increases in carbon sequestration in expanding forests.

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Acknowledgements

This paper is a product of the PARTNERS Research Coordination Network Grant #DEB1313788 from the U.S. NSF Coupled Natural and Human Systems Program.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Human Ecology, School of Environmental and Biological Sciences, Rutgers University, 55 Dudley Road, New Brunswick, NJ, 08901, USA

    Thomas K. Rudel

  2. Universite Catholique de Louvain, Place Pasteur 3, Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium

    Patrick Meyfroidt

  3. Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, University of Connecticut, 75 N. Eagleville Road, Storrs, CT, 06269, USA

    Robin Chazdon

  4. Department of Environmental Sciences, Wageningen University, P.O. Box 47, 6700 AA, Wageningen, The Netherlands

    Frans Bongers

  5. James Cook University, 14-88 MacGregor Rd, Sir Robert Norman Building, Smithfield, QLD, Australia

    Sean Sloan

  6. Instituto de Ecología Regional, Universidad Nacional de Tucuman, Edificio las Cupulas, Tucumán, Argentina

    H. Ricardo Grau

  7. Academic Research, Center for Sustainable Business, Stern School of Business, New York University, 44 West Fourth Street, New York, NY, 10012, USA

    Tracy Van Holt

  8. Department of Geography, Lucy Stone Hall, Rutgers University, 54 Joyce Kilmer Road, Piscataway, NJ, 08854, USA

    Laura Schneider

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Rudel, T.K., Meyfroidt, P., Chazdon, R. et al. Whither the forest transition? Climate change, policy responses, and redistributed forests in the twenty-first century. Ambio 49, 74–84 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13280-018-01143-0

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