RedGage

Description

While infrastructure expansion has been broadly investigated as a driver of deforestation, the impacts of extractive industry and its interactions with infrastructure investment on forest cover are less well studied. These challenges are urgent given growing pressure for infrastructure investment and resource extraction. We use geospatial and qualitative data from Amazonia, Indonesia, and Mesoamerica to explain how infrastructure and extractive industry lead directly and indirectly to deforestation, forest degradation, and increasingly precarious rights for forest peoples. By engaging in explicit analyses of community rights, the politics of development policy, and institutions for transparency, anticorruption, and the defense of human rights, Sustainability Science could be more effective in examining deforestation and related climate-change impacts and in contributing to policy innovation.