Forest-dependent people living across the Gran Chaco have been put on the map for the first time.
Forest-dependent people living across the Gran Chaco have been put on the map for the first time. As agribusiness expands into the dry forest on which they rely, the impact of that expansion on them has been difficult to document because their homesteads are dotted over 1 million km2. But now an international team of researchers, including a researcher from McGill University, has used high resolution satellite imagery to systematically identify these homesteads across this vast area for the first time. By looking at images taken over a period of 30 years, the researchers found that where agribusiness advanced, the livelihoods of forest-dependent people were threatened, resulting in their displacement and the disappearance of thousands of homesteads. The researchers believe that mapping forest-dependent people is a much-needed step to better consider them in future sustainability planning.
There are few places on the globe where tropical forests are disappearing as rapidly as in the South American Gran Chaco. This semiarid lowland covers over a million km2 and stretches across parts of Paraguay, Bolivia, Argentina, and Brazil. While it’s known that agricultural expansion into tropical forests leads to major environmental destruction, the social impacts of deforestation often remain hidden. A main reason for this is a lack of data on where people live inside tropical forests.
A new study, published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and involving an international team of researchers from Germany, Argentina, and the Netherlands, as well as from McGill University, puts these forest-dependent people on the map for the first time. By systematically using high-resolution satellite images, the team digitized individual homesteads of forest-dependent people across the Chaco and found that close to 20 per cent of these homesteads had disappeared over the period between 1985-2015.
Read more at: McGill University
Photo Credit: kareni via Pixabay
