Forests

The Anthropocene draws attention to how humans have increasingly shaped forests in the past, how forest loss and forest planting play a key role in today’s climate emergency, and how we think about forests and forest stewardship in the future. In this handbook entry I review the human moulding of forests, both constructive and destructive, since prehistoric times and suggest a conceptualization that explicitly incorporates human elements among the many processes constituting forests

Forest transitions: a new conceptual scheme

“Forest transitions” have recently received much attention, particularly in the hope that the historical transitions from net deforestation to forest recovery documented in several temperate countries might be repro- duced in tropical countries. The analysis of forest transitions, however, has struggled with questions of forest definition and has at times focussed purely on tree cover, irrespective of tree types (e.g. native forest or exotic plantations). Furthermore, it has paid little attention to how categories and definitions of forest are used to polit- ical effect or shape how forest change is viewed. In this paper, I propose a new heuristic model to address these lacunae, building on a conception of forests as distinct socio-ecological relationships between people, trees, and other actors that maintain and threaten the forest. The model draws on selected work in the forest transition, land change science, and critical social science literatures. It explicitly forces analysts to see forests as much more than a land cover statistic, particularly as it internalizes consideration of forest characteristics and the dif- ferential ways in which forests are produced and thought about. The new heuristic model distinguishes between four component forest transitions: transitions in quantitative forest cover (FT1); in characteristics like species composition or density (FT2); in the ecological, socio-economic, and political processes and relationships that constitute particular forests (FT3); and in forest ideologies, discourses, and stories (FT4). The four are inter- linked; the third category emerges as the linchpin. An analysis of forest transformations requires attention to diverse social and ecological processes, to power-laden official categories and classifications, and to the dis- courses and tropes by which people interpret these changes. Diverse examples are used to illustrate the model components and highlight the utility of considering the four categories of forest transitions

Refining historical burned area data from satellite observations

• The burned area reported by global satellite products is largely biased. •We aimed to correct burned area biases before Sentinel-2 era. •A solution is to combine coarse resolution burned area with environmental data. •Validations in independent sites and years demonstrate that our tool is operational. Sentinel-2 imagery has revealed a substantial underestimation of burned area (BA) compared with earlier satellite products with coarser spatial resolution. In this context, we investigate the predictability of biases between the reference Sentinel-2 BA product developed for Sub-Saharan Africa (FireCCISFD) in 2019 and commonly used global coarse resolution BA products (MCD64, Fire CCI and C3S), providing tools to refine historical annual BA data before the Sentinel-2 era. To do so, we built a comprehensive dataset of environmental predictors of BA biases, with variables or proxies of (I) the annual BA estimated from the coarse-resolution product, (II) BA sizes, (III) the persistence and strength of BA signals, (IV) the maximum potential BA, and (V) the obstruction of land surface observation from satellites. Full and parsimonious random forest models were performed and validated through out-of-bag (OOB) estimations, and reconstructed BAs were validated with external data over space, and over time. The explained variance in BA biases was ≥78.58% (OOB) for all full and parsimonious models. The reconstructed BA data showed a high correspondence with the reference BA in the validation sites over space (≥91.15% var. explained) and time (≥90.37% var. explained), notably reducing biases of coarse resolution products. As an example of the model applicability, the spatial patterns of Madagascar’s BA were reconstructed for 2005, 2010, 2015 and 2020, revealing a burned extent between two and four times higher than previous estimations. The proposed models are operational solutions to obtain regional and global virtually unbiased BA estimates since 2000

Materializing the blue economy: tuna fisheries and the theory of access in the Western Indian Ocean

Many African countries are progressively embracing the blue economy. African islands of the western Indian Ocean, however, have been involved in it for more than twenty years through the exploitation of their 'blue gold': tuna. In this article, we use Ribot and Peluso's (2003) "theory of access" to map the different ways actors access tuna under diverse socio-economic contexts and how power relations are created through different mechanisms of access. We show that rights-based mechanisms such as fishing access agreements are highly questionable for their fairness and sustainability but bring benefits such as funding for fisheries-related infrastructures and projects. We also show that access to the resource is dependent on knowledge held by fishers, on technological advances as well as on diverse labor relations. These mechanisms significantly impact the quantity of fish that can be accessed by artisanal versus industrial market sectors, and generate narratives of unequal access to tuna. Furthermore, we take into consideration the materiality of tuna as a highly mobile resource in a space of fluid boundaries, to show how the fish can be an actant in shaping access but also how fishing practices can produce new materialities. Based on the above evidence, we propose an enhancement of the theory of access to consider the role of materiality of the resources and the sea. We conclude that to ensure that tuna fisheries continue to contribute to the blue economy of African islands, stakeholders need to balance between the diverse benefits produced by the fisheries and the uneven power relations that can arise, and to integrate the impact of a material sea and fish in this reflection

L’environnement dans les géographies anglophone et française : émergence, transformations et circulations de la political ecology

The purpose of this chapter is to trace the historical and socio-political context of “environment-in-geography”, including key moments as well as epistemological and institutional debates. We highlight in particular a sub-field called “political ecology”. In doing so, we transgress geography’s disciplinary boundaries, as the roots of this approach are found as much in anthropology as in geography, and the current political ecology community of practice spans the social sciences and beyond. But as this book addresses a Francophone audience, and given the important role of political ecology in recent developments in French environmental geography, this disciplinary focus is justified. We conclude with a section on geography in France

Living with Alien invasives

Un certain nombre d’arbres australiens - en particulier acacias et eucalyptus - ont été cultivés dans de vastes zones de l’Afrique du Sud pour l’industrie forestière. Au cours des dernières années, ces plantations ont été beaucoup discutées en raison de leur impact supposé sur les ressources en eau et sur la biodiversité autochtone. Dans l’ère post-apartheid, les politiques gouvernementales de lutte contre la pauvreté ont de manière paradoxale poussé les Noirs pauvres des zones rurales à se livrer à la fois à l’arrachage de ces arbres exotiques envahissants avides d’eau, tout en encourageant les gens à les planter dans de petites plantations dans le cadre de programmes d’émancipation économique de ces mêmes Noirs. Cet article étudie comment une telle situation paradoxale s’est mise en place, et quels sont ses impacts sur les paysages ruraux comme sur les moyens de subsistance campagnards en utilisant le cas de l’acacia noir (Acacia mearnsii De Wild.), dans le highveld de l’Est de la province de Mpumalanga. Il retrace l’évolution de discours stratégiques entrant en concurrence les uns avec les autres (environnementaux, industriels forestiers, économiques paysans) et présente une étude de cas de leurs impacts sur les paysages locaux et sur les moyens de subsistance des populations locales.A number of Australian trees – particularly acacias (’wattles’ or ’mimosas’) and eucalypts – have been cultivated over large areas of South Africa for the forest industry. They have become quite controversial in recent years for their alleged impacts on water resources and native biodiversity. In post-Apartheid South Africa, government poverty alleviation policies paradoxically engage poor rural blacks to both rip out these water-hungry ‘alien invasive’ trees while also encouraging people to plant them in small-scale plantations as part of black economic empowerment. This paper investigates how such a paradoxical situation arises and its impacts on specific rural landscapes and livelihoods, using the case of the black wattle (Acacia mearnsii) in the eastern highveld of Mpumalanga province. It traces the development of competing policy discourses (environmental, forest industry, rural livelihoods) and presents a case study of their impacts on local landscapes and livelihoods