Socio-economic factors and management regimes as drivers of tree cover change in Nepal

Despite the local and global importance of forests, deforestation is driven by various socio-economic and biophysical factors continues in many countries. In Nepal, in response to massive deforestation, the community forestry program has been implemented to reduce deforestation and support livelihoo...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:PeerJ (San Francisco, CA) CA), 2018-05, Vol.6, p.e4855-e4855, Article e4855
Main Authors: Shrestha, Sujata, Shrestha, Uttam B, Bawa, Kamal
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Agriculture
Biodiversity
Community forestry
Conservation Biology
Deforestation
Developing countries
Environmental aspects
Forest loss
Forest management
Forestry
Geographic information system
Land degradation
Laws, regulations and rules
LDCs
Methods
Natural Resource Management
Nepal
Temporal variations
Tree cover
Citations: Items that this one cites
Items that cite this one
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:Despite the local and global importance of forests, deforestation is driven by various socio-economic and biophysical factors continues in many countries. In Nepal, in response to massive deforestation, the community forestry program has been implemented to reduce deforestation and support livelihoods. After four decades of its inception, the effectiveness of this program on forest cover change remains mostly unknown. This study analyses the spatial and temporal patterns of tree cover change along with a few socio-economic drivers of tree cover change to examine the effectiveness of the community forestry program for conserving forests or in reducing deforestation. We also investigate the socio-economic factors and policy responses as manifested through the community forestry program responsible for the tree cover change at the district level. The total tree cover area in the year 2000 in Nepal was ∼4,746,000 hectares, and our analysis reveals that between 2001 and 2016, Nepal has lost ∼46,000 ha and gained ∼12,200 ha of areas covered by trees with a substantial spatial and temporal variations. After accounting socio-economic drivers of forest cover change, our analysis showed that districts with the larger number of community forests had a minimum loss in tree cover, while districts with the higher proportion of vegetation covered by community forests had a maximum gain in tree cover. This indicates a positive contribution of the community forestry program to reducing deforestation and increasing tree cover.
ISSN:2167-8359
2167-8359
DOI:10.7717/peerj.4855