Using Jamaica as a case study, this thesis investigates the role played by poverty and population in driving deforestation in the tropics. It argues that Jamaica provides a good middle ground or "meso-level" perspective from which to study these scarcity-forest interactions. Like many developing countries, Jamaica has experienced serious socio-economic dislocations since the late 1970s, which have had negative repercussions for the island's poor. Declining living standards and a deterioration in social welfare have in turn worsened long-standing problems of unemployment and production on the island, and thereby increased the immediate dependency of the poor on the natural resource base. Forest data for the quantitative analysis of these interactions is derived from an analysis of these interactions is derived from an analysis of Landsat MSS data from 1987 to 1992. Using a GIS (geographic information system) the study estimates that during this period, Jamaica experienced a national average deforestation rate of 3.9% per annum. Classification maps based on the original satellite images used to calculate this rate are combined with a political boundaries map of the island in a GIS to derive sub-national forest estimates at parish and constituency levels. The contributions of several scarcity-related land use and social variables to the calculated parish-level deforestation rates are presented and briefly discussed, before "going one level down" to the constituency unit. At this level, forest constituency data is used to quantitatively assess a conceptual model of scarcity-driven land use for the island. The model includes a variety of population/poverty measures reflecting key socio-economic and land-related features of the island. Simple correlation and OLS regression results for both parish- and constituency-levels support the importance of scarcity in driving the destruction of Jamaica's forests, and the relative contribution of its various population/poverty measures are noted and discussed.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bl.uk/oai:ethos.bl.uk:662984 |
| Date | January 1999 |
| Creators | Tole, Lise |
| Publisher | University of Edinburgh |
| Source Sets | Ethos UK |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Source | http://hdl.handle.net/1842/14545 |
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