Understanding and modelling the ambiguous impact of off-farm income on tropical deforestation

Thomas Knoke, Elizabeth Gosling, Esther Reith

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

4 Scopus citations

Abstract

Few land-allocation models consider the impact of off-farm income on tropical deforestation. We provide a concept to integrate off-farm income in a mechanistic multiple-objective land-allocation model, while distinguishing between farms with and without re-allocation of on-farm labor to obtain off-farm income. On farms with re-allocation of labor we found that off-farm income reduced farmers’ financial dependency on deforestation-related agricultural income leading to less tropical deforestation. The influence of off-farm income covered two aspects: availability of additional income and re-allocation of on-farm labor to off-farm activities. The labor effect tended to reduce deforestation slightly more than the income effect. On farms without re-allocation of on-farm labor we showed how farmers can use off-farm income to purchase additional labor to accelerate deforestation. Our study highlights the importance of considering off-farm income in land-use models to better understand, model and possibly curb tropical deforestation.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)658-676
Number of pages19
JournalJournal of Land Use Science
Volume17
Issue number1
DOIs
StatePublished - 2022

Keywords

  • Smallholder farms
  • land allocation
  • multiple objective optimization
  • robust optimization

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