Global economic trade-offs between wild nature and tropical agriculture.

ABSTRACT: Global demands for agricultural and forestry products provide economic incentives for deforestation across the tropics. Much of this deforestation occurs with a lack of information on the spatial distribution of benefits and costs of deforestation. To inform global sustainable land-use policies, we combine geographic information systems (GIS) with a meta-analysis of ecosystem services (ES) studies to perform a spatially explicit analysis of the trade-offs between agricultural benefits, carbon emissions, and losses of multiple ecosystem services because of tropical deforestation from 2000 to 2012. Even though the value of ecosystem services presents large inherent uncertainties, we find a pattern supporting the argument that the externalities of destroying tropical forests are greater than

SUBMITTER: Carrasco LR 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5521733 | biostudies-literature | 2017 Jul

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature