CRB: The Causes of Tropical Deforestation: Quantitative and Comparative Analyses

热带森林的砍伐被认为是造成生物多样性丧失和可能最终导致全球变暖的大气化学变化的主要因素之一。虽然人类活动已被确定为热带森林砍伐的主要原因，但相对较少注意个人和群体（无论是非正式地还是在更正式的组织单位中共同运作）实际作出导致森林砍伐的决定的过程。该项目将发展和检验一种理论，该理论确定了人类行动的两种形式，即人们采取行动消除热带森林的手段。一种行动形式是通过发展“增长联盟”，以相对协调的方式建立和运作旨在铲除树木和建立更“发达”的活动形式的基础设施。另一种形式的行动是某种程度上的临时行动，当个人资源有限的人跟随筑路工人进入新的地区，清理道路附近的小块土地时，就会发生这种行动。对这一理论的检验将通过对两个现有数据库的分析来进行，这两个数据库提供了关于若干不同国家森林砍伐的信息。粮食及农业组织在1980年和1990年收集了一个数据库，以便提供森林砍伐数量的数字估计。第二个数据库包括根据粮农组织和国际自然保护联盟编写的报告和其他科学研究报告对森林砍伐的具体国家说明。这些数据库中的理论相关变量将被组装成真值表，并通过使用布尔代数简化这些表。随后的分析应该对不同变量之间的因果关系提供更直接的见解，从而提高我们对生长联盟和个体行动者砍伐森林过程的理解。这个项目将通过许多不同的方式促进我们对热带森林砍伐的理解。它将开发和测试关于森林砍伐过程的新理论模型。经验数据的汇编和分析将为这些新模型提供有价值的检验，这些数据将可供调查人员用于其他相关研究。该项目还将能够评价一些相对较新的分析程序，以便确定它们在评价数量和质量资料方面的效力和局限性。

The clearance of tropical forests has been cited as one of the major factors contributing to the loss of biological diversity and to changes in atmospheric chemistry that may ultimately lead to global warming. While human activities have been identified as major causes of tropical deforestation, relatively little attention has been focused on the processes by which individuals and groups of people (whether functioning together informally or in more formal organizational units) actually make decisions that result in forest clearance. This project will develop and test a theory that identifies two forms of human action as means through which people act to remove tropical forests. One form of action is through the development of "growth coalitions" that act in a relatively coordinated manner to establish and operate an infrastructure aimed at removing trees and establishing more "developed" forms of activity. The other form of action is a somewhat ad hoc process that occurs when individuals with limited personal resources follow road- construction crews into new areas and clear small parcels near the roads. This tests of this theory will be undertaken through analyses of two extant databases that provide information about deforestation in a number of different countries. One database was gathered by the Food and Agriculture Organization in 1980 and 1990 in order to provide numerical estimates of amounts of deforestation. The second database consists of country-specific descriptions of deforestation based on reports prepared by FAO and the International Union on the Conservation of Nature and on other scientific studies. Theoretically relevant variables from these databases will be assembled into truth tables and the tables will be simplified through the use of Boolean algebra. Subsequent analyses should provide more direct insights into the causal links among different variables, thereby improving our understandings of the processes by which growth coalitions and individual actors clear forests. This project will make contributions to our understandings of tropical deforestation through a number of different means. It will develop and test new theoretical models about the processes of deforestation. Assembly and analysis of empirical data will provide valuable tests of these new models, and the data will become available for use by investigators for other related studies. The project also will enable some relatively new analytic procedures to be assessed in order to determine their efficacy and limitations for use in evaluating both quantitative and qualitative information.