暂无摘要。

This paper contributes to the debate on the determinants of deforestation, a menace that is posing threat to sustainable development particularly in tropical developing regions. Specifically, the paper focuses on the effect of energy justice and democratization. The main contribution to the literature hinges on the emphasis on energy justice - operationalized as rural-urban equality in access to electricity and clean fuels and technologies for cooking - and its interaction with democracy. Using a panel data of 47 sub-Saharan African countries over the period 2000-2020 and the dynamic two-step generalized method of moment estimator, the results generally indicate that improvement in rural-urban equality in access to electricity and clean fuels and technologies for cooking is associated with a reduction in deforestation. Democracy is similarly found to be associated with reduction in deforestation. The conditional effect analysis largely depicts an intensified reducing effect of energy justice on deforestation in the presence of improved democratic practices. The results though robust to an alternative estimator, the Driscoll-Kraay estimator, differ when sub-regional analysis is considered. The paper aligns with the Sustainable Development Goals, particularly Goals 7, 13, 15 and 16.

Climate change results in the habitat loss of many conifer tree species and jeopardizes species biodiversity and forest ecological functions. Delineating suitable habitats for tree species via climate niche model (CNM) is widely used to predict the impact of climate change and develop conservation and management strategies. However, the robustness of CNM is broadly debated as it usually does not consider soil and competition factors. Here we developed a new approach to combine soil variables with CNM and evaluate interspecific competition potential in the niche overlapping areas. We used an endangered conifer species - Chamaecyparis formosensis (red cypress) - as a case study to predict the impact of climate change. We developed a novel approach to integrate the climate niche model and soil niche model predictions and considered interspecific competition to predict the impacts of climate change on tree species. Our results show that the suitable habitat for red cypress would decrease significantly in the future with an additional threat from the competition of an oak tree species. Our approach and results may represent significant implications in making conservation strategies and evaluating the impacts of climate change, and providing the direction of the refinement of the ecological niche model.

Forest ecosystem conservation practice frequently sacrifices human livelihood, since there exists a structural conflict between both aspects in the degraded forest ecosystem. To reconcile the conflict has been widely viewed as a core issue, in which the payment of ecosystem service (PES) may play a critical role in solving this issue. In order to better understand the practical effectiveness of PES and explore the solution to reconcile the contradiction between conservation and livelihood, we investigated the decadal changes in the Sloping Land Conversion Program as a PES strategy in the Qilian Mountains, a degraded forest ecosystem of northwest China, and its effects on natural and social systems across the 10-year implementation period (2001-2011). The regional NDVI of study site was promoted from 46.24% to 61.28%, showing that vegetation cover had a massive increase during the whole implementation period. Also, the PES strategy had impelled more labor forces as migrant workers into the non-agricultural industries or urban areas. The migration dynamics in three industries demonstrated that the population of primary industry followed a gradually declining trend, and its percentage in total population was lowered from 33.44% to 19.82%. According to our household survey, local farmers reduced the economic investment in agriculture, and this enabled more labor forces to be released from agricultural industry. Interestingly, the attitudes towards the PES program for local inhabitants were gradually shifted from negative at initial stage to acceptable at middle stage, and finally to positive at late stage, as a consequence of PES application. In such case, the PES-led vegetation restoration strategy has been effectively implemented, which can reconcile the contradiction between conservation and livelihood, and ultimately achieve a win-win consequence. Our study provided a successful practical paradigm of coupled human and natural system (CHANS) in forest ecosystem restoration.