Question

how was forest conservation carried out by the asian & african countries later on ?

Answer 1

Alteration of land use is one of the major causes of global environmental change which is driving species to extinction and emitting increasing amount of green-house gases. In particular, global deforestation rate is still alarmingly high[1], and the tropics are the only biome to exhibit an increasing trend of forest cover loss in the 21st-century[2]. Deforestation and forest degradation in the tropics are responsible for 7–14% of anthropogenic carbon emissions[3] and pose one of the greatest threats to global biodiversity[4]. Therefore, reducing tropical deforestation and even reversing the trend to net forest gain are top priorities of global environmental policy.

While many tropical countries are experiencing ongoing deforestation, some have gone through a transition from net deforestation to net reforestation, as known as “forest transition (FT)”[5]. The FT hypothesis explains forest recovery as a result of abandonment of marginal agricultural land followed by forest regeneration, as well as tree plantation[6][7][8]. Economic development is almost a prerequisite of FT[9][10][11][12][13][14][15], but different pathways have been suggested on how it affects forest recovery. The wealth brought by economic development would enable tropical countries to be financially comfortable enough to invest in reforestation schemes[16] or import wood and food products from other countries while preserving its own forest[13][14][17][18] [19][20]. Economic development may also change the demographic pattern of a country (decrease in rural population with the increase in urban population) through the increase in off-farm employment, which leads to cropland abandonment[5]. Improvement in agricultural productivity is also suggested to encourage abandonment of marginal croplands[21]. Although it may not be a direct result of economic development, democratic societies[22][23][24] or countries with better governance[15][25][26] are suggested to show less deforestation and/or more forest recovery. Despite the diversity of socio-economic factors that have been suggested to be related to FT, most studies have employed a limited number of factors in their analysis. Additionally, various environmental conditions, such as precipitation, temperature, vegetation, and topography, are known to affect forest area change at the local to subnational scales[27][28][29], but their effects have rarely been incorporated in national-scale studies.

Exhaustion of forest resources is also considered as a prerequisite of a country to experience FT. When forests become scarce, the need for forest conservation is realized with rising price of forest products, or forest protection is promoted in order to restore the deteriorated forest ecosystem services[30][31][32]. Rudel et al. (2005)[31] pointed out that this “forest scarcity pathway” could be more prominent in densely populated Asian countries, compared to less populous Latin American countries. In southeast Asia, forest area stopped to decline in Thailand and increased in the Philippines and Viet Nam since 1990, but the other five SE Asian countries experienced forest loss during 1980–2010 (Fig 1)[1][33]. The three FT countries (Philippines, Thailand and Viet Nam) exhibited lower remaining forest area (30±8%, mean±SD) compared to the other five SE Asian countries (68±6%, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, and Myanmar) as of 1990