Land Tenure and Deforestation: Interactions and Environmental Implications

This paper identifies some of the linkages between various aspects of population dynamics and human behaviour and their detrimental consequences on the forestry resource; our primary focus is on how various land tenure régimes interact with population and behavioural variables and how these together influence deforestation. Given space limitations, we cannot treat all these consequences nor the prospective policy alternatives. The issues are extremely complex and intertwined. Reliable data on these various linkages and interactions are often unavailable. Much more field research and primary data collection are required to achieve a thorough understanding of these deforestation phenomena. But some information is at hand; our task is to draw the conclusions that seem warranted based on the existing literature.