This working paper constitutes the final report from Rutgers University for a project to review literature on tropical deforestation. The project is a contribution to the Global Forest Resources Assessment 2000.
The literature on tropical deforestation has grown at such a rapid rate over the past ten years that it has become difficult for concerned parties to ‘keep up’ with it. This problem manifests itself in two, somewhat separate dimensions. First, while the output of information about changes in forest cover has been prodigious over past ten years, the uncoordinated ways in which the studies are conducted and the disparate outlets in which they are published creates a challenge for organizations like FAO which might want to integrate these data into its overall efforts to monitor the tropical deforestation problem more closely. Second, the uncoordinated pattern of research and publication which prevents analysts from using the literature to monitor the deforestation also prevents them from using the literature to develop policy initiatives to combat deforestation. Agencies and conservation organizations have had a difficult time ascertaining what actions they might take to address the problem because the ‘big picture’ is obscured. Under these circumstances overviews of what we know and analyses which use this information to spell out what we might do about the problem have some value (Gober, 2000). The following report summarizes the findings from our effort to inventory the literature on tropical deforestation. It describes our methods, summarizes the pattern of information about tropical deforestation, and outlines of the pattern of causation presented in the literature. We begin with an account of our methods.
