Forest cover, development, and sustainability in Costa Rica: Can one policy fit all?
- Autores: Karen E. Allen, Steve Padgett Vásquez
- Localización: Land use policy: The International Journal Covering All Aspects of Land Use, ISSN 0264-8377, ISSN-e 1873-5754, Nº. 67, 2017, págs. 212-221
- Idioma: inglés
- Texto completo no disponible (Saber más ...)
-
Resumen
Forest Transition Theory offers the hope that global economic development can continue in tandem with forest recovery. Costa Rica has been lauded for its successful forest transition—once the fastest deforesting country in Central America, forests began to regrow in the 1980s and have had a steady trajectory of recovery since. This forest regrowth can be linked temporally to Costa Rican policies that have promoted tourism and discouraged small-scale agriculture. We use a case study from the Bellbird Biological Corridor (Corredor Biológico Pájaro Campana; CBPC), Costa Rica, combining remote sensing analysis with interviews and ethnography, to unravel the relationship between national policy, forest regrowth, and social-ecological sustainability. The forest cover change analysis between 1986 and 2014 indicates that, at the parcel-level, national policy has served to promote farm abandonment in favor of tourism and that this change has been critical to forest regrowth. However, these changes have occurred within a development framework that has created new social-ecological challenges that threaten future forest and economic sustainability. Examining the parcel-level impacts of the driving forces of landscape change highlights that forest cover is an insufficient proxy for conservation success, and conservation policy focused primarily on forest recovery may create new sustainability challenges
