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京都大学 / 新制・課程博士 / 博士(地球環境学) / 甲第24305号 / 地環博第236号 / 新制||地環||45(附属図書館) / 京都大学大学院地球環境学舎環境マネジメント専攻 / (主査)准教授 森 晶寿, 教授 竹内 憲司, 教授 西前 出, 教授 水野 広祐 / 学位規則第4条第1項該当 / Doctor of Global Environmental Studies / Kyoto University / DFAM

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This thesis examines the relationship between the Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK) of Amazonian communities and their sustainable indigenous architecture. Over centuries, these communities have profoundly influenced the Amazon rainforests through their distinctive lifestyles, cultural practices, and ancestral knowledge. My research delves into their nomadic traditions, cultural significance, farming techniques, and understanding of life cycles. By exploring these elements and advocating for the restoration of their traditional ways of living, we can foster forest regrowth and biodiversity, ultimately enhancing the health and purpose of our forested areas. This study seeks to identify commonalities among different communities and understand how their ecological knowledge can aid the modern world in addressing deforestation and maintaining ecological balance. By integrating this traditional wisdom with contemporary practices, we can develop strategies to combat environmental degradation and support sustainable development. The insights gained from this research can contribute to more effective conservation efforts and promote a deeper appreciation of the invaluable role that indigenous knowledge plays in preserving our natural environment. / Master of Architecture / Every minute on our planet, approximately 2,800 trees are lost. This alarming rate of deforestation has serious consequences for our environment. Forests play a crucial role in maintaining the water cycle, storing carbon, and providing habitats for countless species. If we don't address deforestation, we could lose all the trees on Earth within the next 50 to 60 years. Among the deforested land around the globe, the amazon region has the highest percentage of destruction. The factors include illegal mining, logging, poaching, commercial plantation etc. Over centuries, the Amazonian Indigenous communities have shaped the Amazon rainforests through their unique lifestyles, cultural practices, and ancestral knowledge. My research aims to delve into various aspects of their lives and the connection, role between the communities and the ecosystem around them. By gaining insight into these aspects and working to restore their traditional ways of living, we can promote forest regrowth and biodiversity, ultimately improving the overall health and purpose of our forests. There is also scientific evidence explaining the phenomenon of cloud formation in the Amazon basin, referred to as the "Flying River." The indigenous communities of amazon created a type of soil which is dark, anthropogenic soil which is called Black soil. The black soil or Terra Preta is the most fertile soil on the planet today and surprisingly it is man made. Similarly, researchers believe that TPA of amazon region is achieved by the intervention of indigenous communities rather than natural agents like insects and birds that would help in formation of forest lands. This thesis talks about the correlation between different environmental phenomenon that occurs in the forest and the communities protecting them.

This dissertation analyses the impact of political and macroeconomic uncertainties on environmental outcomes and design of policy instruments.  The first essay examines how the rate of agricultural land expansion in tropical countries depends on the nature and persistence of new political regimes.  We use a novel panel data method that extends previous studies.  We find that both new autocratic and democratic regimes have accelerated the expansion of agricultural land, thus yielding support to some of the findings in the earlier literature.  Interesting differences emerge between regions, with the impact being most pronounced in Latin America.  The analysis is developed more formally using a simple competitive land use model with political regime dependent confiscation risk and agricultural subsidy policy.  The second essay evaluates the effectiveness of performance bonding for tropical forest concession management in achieving first and second best outcomes concerning reduced impact logging (RIL) standards.  As a novel contribution, this essay introduces a simple model of two-stage concession design, and focus on the impact of three complications: harvester participation constraints, government repayment risk, and imperfect enforcement.  We find several new and interesting results, in particular, imperfect enforcement and bond risk may deter implementation of bonding schemes as either the bond payment has to be set higher or the penalty mapping has to become more punitive.  Policy implications, including potential for mechanisms such as REDD+ in improving the bonding outcomes, and the degree of financial support required to guarantee full implementation of RIL, are also examined.  The third essay focuses on the relative performance of fixed versus intensity allowances in the presence of both productivity and energy price uncertainties.  Both allowance instruments achieve the same steady-state emissions reduction target of 20%, which is similar to the current policy proposals, and the regulator then chooses the allowance policy that has the lowest expected abatement cost.  We use a standard real business cycle (RBC) model to solve for the expected abatement cost under both policies.  Unlike previous studies, our results show that under a reasonable model calibration, fixed allowances outperform intensity allowances with as much as 30% cost difference. / Ph. D.

This research takes elements of the scholarship on environmentalism -- political theory and ethical philosophy -- and evaluates them together in the context of the conflict over salvage logging in the Rogue-Siskiyou National Forest in Oregon. I tell the story of the conflict through a history of land and fire management in the U.S. Through a closely detailed account of the anti-salvage logging activism, I explore the gap between ethics and political responsibility and how they unfold in this battle against deforestation. This research offers an in-depth look into how the environmental movement struggled internally to identify goals, and to challenge powerful economic and political systems that prevent significant change from taking root. I argue that the environmental movement needs a theory of environmental responsibility as a framework by which to better understand the strategies and complexities of environmental conflicts. The task of environmental responsibility is to confront the challenge of how to make the environmental movement responsive to the political and economic conditions that produce conflicts, and how environmentalism can overcome the limits of liberal individualism. As forests continue to dwindle, and as activists across the nation mobilize to stop the Keystone XL pipeline that will carry Canadian tar sands to the Gulf of Mexico, the future of environmentalism has never been more critical. / Ph. D.

The increasing rate of deforestation, which began decades ago, has significantly impacted on ecosystem services. In this context, secondary forests have emerged as crucial elements in mitigating environmental degradation and restoration. This study is motivated by the need to understand the reforestation management in secondary forests to prevent irreversible ecosystem damage. We begin by setting the drift and volatility in stochastic primary forests. However, it is more manageable to take control of replantation. We employ a dynamic programing approach, integrating ecological and economic perspectives to assess ecosystem services. To simulate a real-world case, we investigate the model in the Brazil Amazon Basin. Special attention is given to the outcome at the turning point, tipping point, and transition point, considering a critical threshold beyond which recovery becomes implausible. Our findings suggest that reducing tenure costs has advantages, while substitution between primary and secondary forests is not necessarily effective in postponing ecosystem collapse. This research contributes to a broader goal of sustainable forest management and offers strategic guidance for future reforestation initiatives in the Amazon Basin and similar ecosystems worldwide. / Master of Science / Deforestation has been drawing attention from institutions since the 1940s, and this global issue has been discussed for its negative impacts and the ways to restore what has been lost. Reforestation initiatives introduced by global environmental organizations consider forest plantations essential in re-establishing trees and the natural ecosystem. This study aims to investigate how different techniques target the growth of secondary forests to mitigate the irreversible damage of ecosystem services. Our research begins by defining the uncertain primary forests. Primary forests and deforestation face long-term climate changes and immediate shocks like fires, droughts, and human activities, meanwhile, policymakers have difficulties predicting and fully controlling them. We integrate considerations of ecology and economy to the ecosystem functioning, introducing stochasticity in deforestation into our dynamic optimization problem. We apply our models to the Brazil Amazon Basin, a region known for its diverse tropical forests and vast cases of deforestation. We pay close attention to the timing of tipping point that leads to ecosystem collapse, the turning point where reforestation rate catches up with deforestation rate, and the moment of forest type transition. Through simulation and sensitivity analysis, we gain a better grasp on guiding the management of secondary forests under uncertain conditions. Our results indicate that reforestation approaches that lower tenure costs can be beneficial, but merely substituting primary forests cannot necessarily delay an ecosystem collapse. This paper provides practical insights for policymakers, local communities, and international organizations.

Changes in land use and land cover are associated with many environmental issues observed on the earth’s surface. In the last decades, these changes were unprece-dented, mainly in tropical forest areas. The Brazilian Amazon, the world’s largest tropical forest, lost around 200.000 km² of primary forest in the last ten years (INPE, 2005). Considering this, and the consequences caused by this deforestation, it is important to know and define correctly the responsible agents, aiming at better pub-lic policies that can help preserve the forest. Searching for indicators that could help to identify the deforestation agents, some studies, such as Mertens and Lambin (1997), suggest that every deforestation process shapes the forest land in a specific way, producing a spatial pattern that can be interpreted as indicative of the agents with specific economic activities. Based on this hypothesis, the objective of this study was to contribute to a better understanding of land change processes in the Amazon forest, investigating the linkages between spatial patterns of deforestation, as visualized in satellite images, and different agents and their specific economic activities. To reach this objective, our methodological approach was based on socio-economic data acquired at a household level combined with data from satellite im-ages. First, different spatial patterns of deforestation were identified on the satellite images, based on the typologies proposed by Husson et al. (1995). Then, some of the identified spatial patterns were isolated and analyzed for specific aspects, such as, the deforestation rate calculated through satellite images. socio-economic character-istics based on household survey data and evolution of land use and land cover based on thematic maps derived from satellite images. In addition, cluster analysis was applied using the socio-economic data (household survey) and land use and land cover data (satellite images) in a search for homogeneous groups related to the spa-tial pattern. In the end, an Analysis of Variance (ANOVA) was applied to confirm the differences between spatial patterns. The results suggested that the different spatial patterns of deforestation found in the study area can be related to specific economic activities. Nevertheless, the re-sults have indicated that the spatial configuration is not a consequence of its main economic activity. They suggest that the spatial configuration is linked to the settle-ment project, and the main economic activity in the spatial patterns is a consequence of a set of factors such as: size of property, location and disposition of the property, presence or absence of infrastructure (road, market, transportation, economic and technical).