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Land Use Competition pp 111–123Cite as

Nuts About Gold: Competition for Land in Madre de Dios, Peru

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Part of the Human-Environment Interactions book series (HUEN,volume 6)

Abstract

Natural forests are being lost at unsustainable rates as frontiers of development advance and global demand for natural resources increases. This chapter examines two challenges to tropical forest conservation—the demand for use of land for multiple and continuous spatially and temporally linked purposes, and the gaps in our knowledge to fully understand and characterize resulting land cover change dynamics. This chapter uses the case of the biodiversity hot spot of Madre de Dios in Peru as an example. Here, land-use competition is largely resultant from mutually exclusive activities of Brazil nut harvesting, which depends on intact primary forest, development through construction of the Interoceanic Highway and legal and illegal mining of gold. The analysis compares areas with authorized land-use allocations against remotely sensed satellite data to identify past land cover change events and areas of potential land-use competition and conflict. Based on the case study, this chapter illustrates the increasing importance of distal and transnational commodity demands as a driver for land-use change. Further, it discusses the advantages and caveats of spatially and temporally explicit quantification of change using remote sensing techniques. For the latter, it focusses on issues of simplicity and system boundary definitions that may overlook relevant connections to distal drivers and forest/non-forest functions. This chapter concludes that teleconnected systems that drive local land-use and land cover change (LULCC) must be accounted for when mapping land disturbance dynamics, and discusses the potential paths that remote sensing analysis may take to understand and address these challenges.

Keywords

  • Natural resources
  • Biodiversity
  • Conflict
  • Remote sensing
  • Radar
  • Telecoupling

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Acknowledgments

The author would like to thank DigitalGlobe for providing the high-resolution WorldView-2 image; Natalia Woo and Jorge Torres from Bosques Amazonicos (http://www.bosques-amazonicos.com/) for providing valuable insights into the land-use and land cover changes in Madre de Dios; and Dr. Edward Mitchard (University of Edinburgh) and Prof. Dr. Patrick Hostert (IRI THESys, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin) for reviewing this chapter.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of GeoSciences and Natural Resource Management, University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Denmark

    Neha Joshi

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  1. Neha Joshi
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Correspondence to Neha Joshi .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Inst. of European Ethnology & Integrativ, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Berlin, Berlin, Germany

    Jörg Niewöhner

  2. Governance and Sustainability Lab, Trier University, Berlin, Germany

    Antje Bruns

  3. Dept. of Geography & IRI THESys, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Berlin, Berlin, Germany

    Patrick Hostert

  4. Dept. of Geography & IRI THESys, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Berlin, Berlin, Germany

    Tobias Krueger

  5. Dept. of Geography & IRI THESys, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Berlin, Germany

    Jonas Ø. Nielsen

  6. Institute of Social Ecology, Alpen-Adria University, Vienna, Austria

    Helmut Haberl

  7. Institute of Social Ecology, Alpen-Adria University, Vienna, Austria

    Christian Lauk

  8. Institute of Social Ecology, Alpen-Adria University, Vienna, Austria

    Juliana Lutz

  9. Halle (Saale) & IRI THESys, Leibniz Ins. for Agri. Devel. Trans. Eco, Berlin, Germany

    Daniel Müller

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Joshi, N. (2016). Nuts About Gold: Competition for Land in Madre de Dios, Peru. In: , et al. Land Use Competition. Human-Environment Interactions, vol 6. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-33628-2_7

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