Unsustainable development pathways caused by tropical deforestation.

ABSTRACT: Global sustainability strategies require assessing whether countries' development trajectories are sustainable over time. However, sustainability assessments are limited because losses of natural capital and its ecosystem services through deforestation have not been comprehensively incorporated into national accounts. We update the national accounts of 80 nations that underwent tropical deforestation from 2000 to 2012 and evaluate their development trajectories using weak and strong sustainability criteria. Weak sustainability requires that countries do not decrease their aggregate capital over time. We adopt a strong sustainability criterion that countries do not decrease the value of their forest ecosystem services with respect to the year 2000. We identify several groups of countries: c

SUBMITTER: Carrasco LR 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5507632 | biostudies-literature | 2017 Jul

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature