Monday, February 20, 2017

Roads, Land Use, and Deforestation: A Spatial Model Applied to Belize

The purpose of this article is to compare the (positive) economic and (negative) environmental impacts brought on by the creation of rural roads in southern Belize. Though the creation of these roads has economic benefits for emerging economies, they are also associated with environmental destruction. Some of the negative environmental impacts associated with rural roads are deforestation, loss of biodiversity, and changes to the climate. It is a tricky issue, because the creation of roads is a key aspect of “development”, according to the authors. If poorer areas create roads, this will take their economies in a positive direction, bringing more income to those within the area. The creation of roads sparks other economic pursuits, such as the clearing of areas for agriculture and logging. However, these economic benefits do not come without deforestation of important habitats. In order to compare these economic and environmental trade-offs and to closely examine the details (i.e. location, extent of destruction) of rural roads and their impacts (and who they impact i.e. the rural poor), the authors use a spatially explicit model of land use, using GIS. From their research the authors hoped to find better, less-destructive areas to locate these roads. Their research yielded a significant array of results, though the most significant finding was that “market distance, land quality, and tenure have strong interactive effects on the likelihood and type of cultivation”, in regards to roadswhich can be observed in Table 2 (Chomitz & Gray 501). They also found that  road extensions into many areas with poor or mediocre soil-which dominate tropical areas-could constitute a lose-lose strategy”; basically, in these cases, the environment is damaged and the people in the area do not benefit from economic growth brought on by the roads, because this growth is so minimal (Chomitz & Gray 507).






Chomitz, Kenneth M., and David A. Gray. "Roads, Land use, and Deforestation: A Spatial Model Applied to Belize." The World Bank Economic Review 10.3 (1996): 487-512.

4 comments:

  1. Its always a hard debate between economics and environmental issues. I wish they could develop land more cautiously before destroying forests and habitats. I wonder what this data would look like for the United States through industrialization.

    ReplyDelete
  2. I definitely think this is an issue that we are quick to forget about, and maybe if we saw data like this for the US, as the comment above suggests, then we would pay more attention to the issue of deforestation.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Thanks for sharing! I think this study is relevant and something easily overlooked.

    ReplyDelete
  4. This is interesting for many reasons, one of them being that people are often quick to assume the needs of others instead of thinking about all of the impacts our decisions can have. I wonder if there are potentially good economic moves to be made in places like this that wouldn't have such detrimental environmental impacts. It is also interesting that people with economic gain in mind are so willing to forget environmental impacts, and also so unable to see how in the long run bad choices for the environment are bad choices for the economy.

    ReplyDelete