Globally, there has been a continuous increase in forest degradation despite the existence of forest laws, treaties, and international conventions. This situation calls for the need to identify ...factors associated with individual forest law compliance behaviour. In this study, utilitarian value, legitimacy of forest laws, social norms as well demographic factors as determinants of compliance with forest laws have been examined. The study was conducted among 252 participants in communities within the statutory catchment of the Owabi reserve which has in it a forest reserve, Ramsar site and reservoir. Statistical Package for Social Science (SPSS) version 25, AMOS Graphics and Stata 14 were used to perform descriptive and inferential statistical analysis, confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) and fractional regression analysis with the data collected for the study. The study found below average level of compliance with forest law as shown by a forest law compliance index (FCI) of less than 0.5. The findings also show a positive effect of social norms (β = 0.091, p = 0.03) and education (β = 0.092, p = 0.02) on forest law compliance whereas being indigene (residential status) negatively affect forest law compliance (β = −0.101, p = 0.016) at 5%. The findings led to the conclusion that promoting compliance with forest laws requires enhancing and strengthening positive social norms regarding community interaction with forests as well as education and awareness creation. We, therefore, recommend public education and awareness creation on forest laws by relevant forest management agencies and the adoption of lateral, collaborative and co-management approaches in forest law enforcement to benefit from the positive effect of social norms and education on forest law compliance.
A legislação florestal brasileira, principal instrumento legal sobre proteção e restauração da vegetação natural, sofreu significativas mudanças nas últimas décadas. Tais mudanças afetam diretamente ...os biomas do país. Nesse contexto, o presente trabalho teve por objetivo avaliar se, com a edição da Lei Estadual nº 18.104, de 18/07/2013, houve alteração na composição da cobertura vegetal na região da Chapada dos Veadeiros – Goiás, no período de 2008 até 2018, que corresponde aos cinco anos anteriores e posteriores à promulgação da referida lei. Foi adotada uma metodologia quantitativa na qual as hipóteses são testadas a partir da coleta de dados, baseando-se em variáveis que possuem medição numérica. Buscou-se fazer uma análise estatística para configurar padrões de modo a comprovar ou refutar a hipótese de que a Lei Florestal afetou as diferentes tipologias vegetais na região da Chapada dos Veadeiros. Foi verificada uma tendência de redução das áreas de formação savânicas e campestre na região estudada e aumentos significativos das áreas cobertas por florestas plantadas, pastagens e agricultura. Não foram observadas diferenças significativas estatisticamente nas áreas com formação florestal. Esses resultados apontam que a edição da Lei nº 18.104/2013 pode ter favorecido alterações nas áreas cobertas por diferentes tipologias vegetais na região da Chapada dos Veadeiros – Goiás, reduzindo áreas de formação savânica e campestre e ampliando áreas cobertas por florestas plantadas, pastagens e agricultura.
The article provides a case study on the district Starkenburg of the Electorate of Mainz, demonstrating that order and jurisdiction in rural society was based on two different normativity regimes: ...local customary statutes and early modern police ordinances. The study uses the database of early modern police ordinances and digital methods as quantitative analysis and the application of the taxonomy/classification schema of police ordinances to compare the normativity of local customary statutes and police ordinances and to evince general trends and changes between the late Middle Ages and the EarlyModern Period.
Deforestation control is one of the major challenges worldwide. The aim of this study was to analyse deforestation under the Forest Law in the Argentine Dry Chaco ecoregion a decade after its ...enactment and to assess compliance with forest protection standards in this region. For this purpose, we overlapped the provincial land zoning maps with an annual plot level deforestation database and, for some provinces, with the rural cadastral cartography. Deforestation exceeding the values allowed by the Forest Law and the provincial zonings during this period totalized 722,782 ha (28% of the total deforested area in this period), of which 59,732 ha were deforested in high conservation value areas, 644,396 ha in medium conservation value areas and 18,654 ha in low conservation value areas. While Santiago del Estero was the province with the highest deforested area in medium conservation value areas, Córdoba was the province with the highest deforested area in high conservation value areas. Our results are an important step towards identifying discrepancies between the legal objectives and the observed results and represent an input to think about solutions to improve the environmental governance of the region.
•Forest Law defined conservation categories for the native forests in Argentina.•Deforestation is not allowed in areas of high and medium conservation value according to the Forest Law.•Illegal deforestation between 2008 and 2017 was about 722,782 ha in the Argentine Dry Chaco.•At least 28% of the total deforested area in this period breached the standards of protection provided by the Law.•Our results are useful to identify discrepancies between the legal objectives and the observed results.
Context
Land-use change is the main driver of habitat loss and fragmentation worldwide. The rate of dry forest loss in the South American Chaco is among the highest in the world, mainly due to the ...expansion of soybean production and cattle ranching. Argentina recently implemented a national zoning plan (i.e., the Forest Law) to reduce further forest loss. However, it is unclear how the effects of past deforestation and the implementation of the Forest Law will affect forest connectivity in the Chaco.
Objective
Our main goal was to evaluate the potential effect of the Forest Law on forest fragmentation and connectivity in the Argentine Chaco.
Methods
We studied changes in the extent, fragmentation, and connectivity of forests between 1977 and 2010, by combining agricultural expansion and forest cover maps, and for the future in a scenario analysis.
Results
Past agricultural expansion translated into an overall loss of 22.5 % of the Argentine Chaco’s forests, with deforestation rates in 2000–2010 up to three times higher than in the 1980s. Forest fragmentation and connectivity loss were highest in 1977–1992, when road construction fragmented large forest patches. Our future scenario analysis showed that if the Forest Law will be implemented as planned, forest area and connectivity in the region will decline drastically.
Conclusions
Land-use planning designed to protect stepping stones could substantially mitigate connectivity loss due to deforestation, with the co-benefit of preserving the greatest amount of biodiversity priority areas across all evaluated scenarios. Including scenario analyses that assess forest fragmentation and connectivity at the ecoregion scale is thus important in upcoming revisions of the Argentine Forest Law, and, more generally, in debates about sustainable resource use.
Agricultural expansion threatens biodiversity due to habitat loss and fragmentation. In the Gran Chaco, a global deforestation hotspot, rampant cropland and pasture expansion raise concerns about the ...sustainability of these land-use changes. Zoning policies were recently enacted in the Argentine Chaco to balance agriculture and conservation, yet the environmental outcomes of implementing these policies remain unclear. Here, we focused on the province of Formosa (Argentina) to evaluate how fully implementing zoning there would affect forest loss and connectivity, and how multiscale landscape planning could enhance environmental outcomes. Specifically, we simulated potential future forest cover for different spatial planning scenarios to assess the effect of (a) implementing regional corridors and (b) enacting additional policies to minimize forest fragmentation at the plot level, under both high and low deforestation rates. We then quantified forest connectivity and fragmentation using morphological image segmentation and landscape indices. Our results show that implementing regional corridors reduced the extent of potential deforestation by 650,000 ha (43%), and this alone strongly increased forest connectivity compared with scenarios without corridors. However, how deforestation would be carried out at the plot level was critically important. Plot-level spatial planning could have a strong and positive effect on mitigating fragmentation and on maintaining connectivity, even in scenarios with high deforestation rates (i.e., reducing the number of forest fragments by up to 35%, increasing the core forest by up to 6%). Moreover, under high deforestation rates, implementing regional corridors and plot-level design had a strong complementary effect on mitigating forest fragmentation (17% less forest fragments than when implementing either of the two strategies alone). Our analyses clearly highlight the opportunities of multiscale spatial planning and the need to complement broad-scale zoning with plot-level landscape design in order to mitigate the negative impacts of deforestation in the Chaco and other active agricultural frontiers.
In the history of any state, the forest domain played a great role. Russia, being a country with the richest forest resources, pays great attention to the state regulation of forest management and ...forest conservation. The history of the use of forest resources is part of the history of Russia. The relevance of the topic is due to the change in the concept of teaching the history of Russia for students studying in specialized historical and non-core specialties and areas of training in universities. The number of hours devoted to the study of national history is increasing; the history of Russia will be singled out from the course of world history as an independent academic discipline. Students will have the opportunity to study in more detail various aspects of the history of the Russian state. The article analyzes the measures of state regulation of the use of forest resources for the production of potash, resin and tar in Russia in the 17th century. — the first quarter of the XVIII century. and also questions of regulation of trade in the specified goods. The analysis of normative legal acts that determined the conditions and features of production and trade in products obtained from wood processing was carried out. It is concluded that the state’s focus only on administrative and legal measures to regulate the use of forests in Russia, without taking into account economic realities, demonstrates low efficiency and leads to crisis phenomena in the area under study.
One of the implementing decrees of the Italian national forest law no. 34 of 2018 deals with the interventions to be set in the woodlands protected by the art. 136 of the national landscape and ...cultural heritage code (legislative decree no. 42 of 2004) and considered in compliance with the provisions of the landscape protection measures. The present commentary provides a basis for analysing the impact that the implementing decree could have and make suggestions for writing the decree. The commentary reviews the meaning of the various types of landscape use constraints, giving concrete examples and analyzing them with a focus on forest management. It presents an example framework of the interventions that could be the subject of the decree. Finally, it provides a summary of the key points to be addressed for the preparation of the decree.
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