Reversing Deforestation in Latin America, with Brent Sohngen

Notable Quotes

• Demand for trees has encouraged tree-planting: “Trees are more often planted today than they were a century ago, and half a century ago, because prices for trees are higher now than they were back then … Those higher tree prices have basically encouraged tree-planting. There’s a significant area of trees that have been re-established in forestry, because people have put them there on purpose by planting them, and that’s simply a function of markets.” (13:52)
• Ownership and empowerment can motivate Indigenous communities to keep forests healthy: “Latin America … [has] a growing set of Indigenous and local communities that are empowered by the government to manage the landscape—something like 300 million hectares, or maybe up to 350 million hectares right now. Obviously, Brazil is the biggest, but it’s really all over Latin America where communities have been invested with the resources and are able to take ownership of them and manage them. And when they do that, by and large, we see that they’ve been successful at slowing deforestation compared to other places out there that are not so managed.” (18:52)
• Coinciding factors provide an opportunity for revitalizing forests worldwide: “Birth rates are dropping, and that’s happening everywhere … If you add that together with these market forces … it’s an exciting time for forests in the world. We’re trying to pay a little more attention to the institutions that affect forests … and trying to manage the property-right element of it by really going back and thinking about how we can engage local communities with their forest assets.” (27:36)

Top of the Stack

• Reversing Deforestation: How Market Forces and Local Ownership Are Saving Forests in Latin America by Brent Sohngen and Douglas Southgate
• A Wild Idea by Jonathan Franklin
• The Overstory by Richard Powers

The Full Transcript

Kristin Hayes: Hello, and welcome to Resources Radio, a weekly podcast from Resources for the Future (RFF). I'm your host, Kristin Hayes. Today, I'm talking with Brent Sohngen, a professor of environmental and resource economics at Ohio State University—and, I'm proud to say, an RFF University fellow—about his new book Reversing Deforestation: How Market Forces and Local Ownership are Saving Forests in Latin America.

This book came out from Stanford University Press in late 2024. It is now widely available, and I'm really pleased to have this opportunity to talk with Brent about the vision and the thesis that he and his coauthor, Douglas Southgate, who’s also at Ohio State and happens to be in the Center for Latin American Studies, put forward in this work. So stay with us.

Hi, Brent. Welcome to Resources Radio.

Brent Sohngen: Great. Thanks for having me.

Kristin Hayes: I feel like it's strange that we haven't had you on here before, but I'm really glad that we could talk now. And since we haven't had you on Resources Radio before, I would love to start with our usual introductions. Let me invite you to introduce yourself to our listeners, and maybe you can say a little bit about what initially drew you to work on forestry issues, which is your main area of focus.

Brent Sohngen: That's correct. It's interesting; people always ask that question. I'm at Ohio State in an agriculture-economics department, and people are always wondering, "Why are you doing forestry in an ag-econ department?" But they've let me do it here. I love it. It's been a fun career, but I'm happy to say that a lot of the reason I got into forestry had to do with RFF, actually, because I did a postdoc there in 1996, I think; maybe it covered over 1995. It's been so long. But Roger Sedjo was there, and I got the opportunity to work with him and start to work on forestry issues.

I had done it in my thesis. I wasn't set on that being the topic I'd focus on for the rest of my career, but as I was at RFF and started to engage in a lot of the policy issues that people there engaged with in the United States and globally, I got to realizing that, "Wow, this is a super interesting area and really important. And there's probably not enough economists engaged in it.” It was fun to jump in there and get engaged.

Kristin Hayes: Yeah. That's great. Well, I'm always—and I mean this quite sincerely—deeply impressed when people can put in the time and the effort to complete books. Nevermind the many other types of products that come out of the community, but actual books.

With that, let me start by asking—what's the motivation for this project? Where did it come from? And how did you and Douglas actually decide that pursuing a book, something of this length and depth and meat was the right path forward?

Brent Sohngen: It's funny you would say that and introduce it that way, because I'm sure Douglas, were he to listen to this podcast, and I'm sure he will—he'll probably say, "I probably had some worries about Brent getting the book done, as well." So, it was a fun experience. A lot of things motivated it. Douglas and I had … Well, he would say it was a conversation he and I had in 2018 here at Ohio State in my office.

He had already retired at the time. We were just chatting a little bit and hatched the idea. But I think it goes back further than that. He and I started to work together on some of these topics in 2010 or 2011. He asked me to teach a class. He was the head of our undergraduate program and asked me to teach a class called Food Population and the Environment, and I got engaged in those issues.

This undergraduate class was thinking through questions about how the demand for food, population growth, and demography influence environmental outcomes, especially in places where there are forests. That was super interesting. And then he and I got involved in a project in the Maya Biosphere Reserve, which I'm sure we'll talk about later. It's a big component of the book. But we worked on that project for a number of years. So, we have been talking about this book for a long time, but we really didn't get down to thinking about writing it until 2018 or so.

How do we settle on a book? He had written a few books, and he convinced me that this is a great medium for telling a long story, a story that arcs from beginning to end with an intro and a conclusion that are really important to write. He really guided that along in a great way. Props to him for thinking about that, because it allowed us to push a few topics in the book that we may not be able to push or pull together, that you can't do in a journal article or the typical journal space that we get today.

Kristin Hayes: Yeah. That's great. That's really helpful. And it does seem like … I mean, there is a tremendous amount of meat here, and pulling those themes together felt like it needed this level of depth. But I'm always curious how people decide to take on a project of that magnitude. So, thank you for sharing that.

A next question for you is about … I'm going to pull some pieces from the title here, but the focus of this book is on Latin America. I can think of at least two reasons why that geographic focus made sense. One is, of course, Douglas's particular expertise. As I mentioned, he's in the center for Latin American Studies. I'm sure that's a part of the world that he knows really well. And, of course, the fact that Latin America is home to some of the world's most important forest resources, like the one that we've all heard of, the Amazon, and many others, I'm assuming. Those are the two that I could come up with. I'm sure there are many others. So what were some of the other factors that led you to focus your research on that particular part of the world?

Brent Sohngen: Yeah. Well, Douglas's experience is a huge part of it, and that really kept us focused on Latin America. But also, he and I worked together on that project, as I mentioned, the Maya Biosphere Reserve. We had engaged in Mesoamerica and Central America on a particular issue related to property rights and how forests are used by community groups. We learned a lot from that. He knew a lot of it to begin with, but we got a lot of empirical evidence and data out of that, and that led to a lot of literature review about similar types of projects and things that were going on in Latin America. So, it was out of that this book grew. It's the idea that if you take the key themes of this book—that is, markets, demography, and property rights—those things are all critically important in Latin America.

You can really make a compelling story about what's happening there that's not just applicable for Latin America, but probably applicable to the rest of the world, as well. That's a key reason for that region being such an important part. Then, I'll say, as well, that Richard Houghton's data on deforestation was revealing. I have been aware of all this work, and I paid attention to it over the years, but I hadn't really looked at the long stretch of it. When you look at the 150- to 170-year period over which that data is used to assess deforestation, and you look in Latin America, you can see three periods in which big booms and busts and deforestations (or deforestation cycles) happening.

Relating those to economics is something we probably don't do strongly enough in the book, but it's clearly in there. When I looked at that, I thought, "Wow, this is a place where the economy really makes a big difference to what happens on deforestation." Obviously, technology is important on that, as well—and property rights, too. But it was just fun to go back and try to explain that, “This is why this happened in the '20s and '30s, didn't happen in the '30s and '40s, started again in the '50s and '60s, didn't happen in the '70s, and then ramped up again in the '90s. It's an interesting area to look at for the connection between economics and what's happening with our environment.

Kristin Hayes: I want to leave lots of space in our conversation for you to actually tell that story of the book. So, maybe I'll give you a sense of how I interpreted the central thesis, which is very much captured in the subtitles, so no great interpretation skills on my part. Then, I’ll just give you a chance to tell the story of what you were looking at in the book.

As indicated by the subtitle, it seems that several key factors really came together in recent years to reverse deforestation trends in Latin America, but key to this is that these factors are mutually reinforcing, and they really need each other for success. At this intersection of economics and the environment, you talk about the market-forces side of the equation, and then I noted that you suggest that the market forces are actually an underestimated contributor to forest renewal. That's a phrase that stuck with me.

Let me just turn it over to you. I realize this is a broad question, but I want to turn it over to you and let you talk us through the market-forces side of the equation and how you see that being this underestimated contributor to forest renewal.

Brent Sohngen: That's a great question. Part of it in our book was to go back in time a little bit and try to explain why deforestation had happened. Another key thing that we saw in the literature that wasn't widely discussed right now is, What really causes deforestation? What doesn't cause deforestation? What is deforestation? What isn't deforestation? Some of the book is just about trying to define all that. Things like logging and mining—how important are they for deforestation? Of course, those are driven by economic forces, as well.

We spend a decent amount of time in the book trying to explain a good bit of the history right from the 1850s to the present. A little bit of stuff from the 1500s to 1850s. But it turns out, during that time period, there were a lot of things happening in Latin America, but there wasn't a massive amount of economic growth.

The big growth and the big deforestation really happened after that and is really driven by the demography and the economic forces. That was really important to try to explain that from the historical perspective. Then, looking forward and thinking about those market forces, the key ones that are at play in deforestation.

The first few chapters, especially chapters two and three—those are chapters that Douglas was really able to dig into—focus on some of the critical economic factors driving just the economies in Latin America. Things like the import-substituting industrialization policies that Latin American countries engaged in during the post–World War II era. Those had a big impact in Latin America on market forces. You can see their impact in deforestation trends. Those are critically important, and we have a good discussion about those.

Then, the technological change, which is something we lump together with market forces there in the title. But in the book, it's really separated out—those technological factors that are driving land use trends. One of the most important ones is the Green Revolution, and a big chunk of the book is devoted to that, especially in chapter three. The Green Revolution is obviously the chemical and biological changes in the agricultural sector that really drove up rates of productivity in the agricultural sector.

If you look at the data, there's varying estimates of what the impact of the Green Revolution was on deforestation. But the estimates, as far as we can tell, are anywhere from 200 to 600 million fewer hectares have been deforested today because of those chemical and biological improvements that happened in the agricultural sector.

The Green Revolution is something really started in Latin America—in Mexico, specifically—then moved to Asia and has, probably, its biggest impact in Asia, but it's an important thing that is really driven by market forces. Obviously, it's technological in nature, as well, but we do lump those two things together. Maybe that's a little bit confusing, but we think that they're really correlated together. That had a big impact.

Beyond that, the other market forces that we talk about, and this is the other long-term influence of the Green Revolution, is the effect of those increases in yields on prices for food products, especially cereal grains. If you look over the last century, between 1900 and today, food prices—at least grain prices—are down dramatically on average. Scarcity in that sector has declined largely because of the improvement in the yields of crops that we grow for cereals.

That has had a big impact, and you can see the impact of that. Some of chapter five actually focuses on the impact of that in places like North America and Europe, where we had a forest transition emerge in the late 1800s and throughout the 1900s where, because of the technological gains in agriculture, our ability to grow more food on the existing land that we had in agricultural crops, and our ability to keep pace with demands, we needed less land for agriculture.

We were able to devote more of that land to forestry. Amazingly, when we look into Latin America, we can see some of these same trends emerging in places like Chile, Costa Rica, and even parts of Brazil, Argentina, and Mexico, etc. If you look for it, you can see where some of these same market and technological forces are already at play.

Tree-planting. You don't think about this. This is another underestimated force, but the reality is that trees are more often planted today than they were a century ago, and half a century ago, because prices for trees are higher now than they were back then. Basically, real prices for trees grew over the twentieth century from relatively low levels to relatively high levels, as they went from a relatively non-scarce to a fairly scarce commodity.

Those higher tree prices have basically encouraged tree-planting. There's a significant area of trees that have been reestablished in forestry, because people have put them there on purpose by planting them, and that's simply a function of markets. It's not as big as the Green Revolution in terms of total hectares, but it is a really important process that's happened in lots of parts of the world and is also happening in Latin America.

A final area that we think is emerging is this concept of payments for ecosystem services and private protection of land. That's a market force that I think is truly underestimated so far. In the United States, we see this. We know this. We know that organizations like the Nature Conservancy get people to donate money and then they funnel that money into privately protecting land that's out there. I don't know. There's like 30 to 40 million acres of conserved land through these private actions in the United States. A lot of it in the eastern United States. Huge areas of this.

Kristin Hayes: The idea here is that they're paying people to keep forests healthy, to not cut them down, to not change their uses, but to keep them in their original state so that the ecosystem services they do provide also remain intact. Is that the gist here?

Brent Sohngen: That's mostly it. It doesn't always have to be to just protect it. The Nature Conservancy, for example, buys land, and they do some timber harvesting and some forest management on that land in order to provide certain specific types of ecosystem services. Some places like New York City and the city of Boston have large watersheds outside of their cities that are forested, so they'll do forestry management specifically to maintain water flows. There's lots of ways in which payments for ecosystem services or ownership of land provides these other kinds of ecosystem services.

Where you have private land ownership like in the United States, it happens. We don't see it happening, but it's a pretty pervasive process. I mean, forest harvesting in the Eastern United States, especially in the Northeastern United States, is pretty minimal, yet there's lots of management for different kinds of ecosystem services that are happening. So, it's interesting. But then, if you go to Latin America, you find evidence that this is also happening.

A place like Chile … Douglas Tompkins, the person who started the North Face and Esprit used his fortune—particularly from selling Esprit, the clothing company—to go down and just start buying up land in Chile. He was on the market down there just buying up land. Ultimately, a lot of that land has become a national park, as a lot of it has been donated subsequent to his death in 2015—donated to the government and turned into national parkland.

A lot of that protection that happened in Chile may not have happened if it hadn't been for private interests—having the ability to take financial resources and protect land. We see this happening in Argentina. There's evidence of it happening throughout Brazil. It's not at the same scale as in Chile. Of course, the most famous place in Latin America is Costa Rica, where they actually use government money for protecting resources on private landscapes. That's probably the richest place where there's been a lot of survey work and data work to try to test whether the payment for ecosystem-services program in Costa Rica has been effective. But it's a place where we see the government taking its responsibility to protect resources and encourage private protection of land seriously.

So, I don't know. There's lots of market forces out there that are happening, and when you think of them in aggregate, they're having a big impact in Latin America, and we can see the evidence of that in the data.

Kristin Hayes: This is a great lead-in to my next question, because you've homed in on this question of local ownership and private ownership as an important factor here that's arguably been essential for the success of some of these, if not all of these, market-driven initiatives. I should clarify, too: Are you talking about private land ownership when you say local ownership? Local ownership is the term used in the book title, so I wanted to start there, but does that mean private land ownership?

Brent Sohngen: It does not. It means private or community land ownership. When I hear you say private, I think of private as in individual ownership like we have in the United States.

Kristin Hayes: So, it's not that. All right.

Brent Sohngen: That could be part of it.

Kristin Hayes: Okay, good. Well, I'm glad I asked the clarifying question and I'd invite you to say a little bit more about the different types and the current state of local ownership in Latin America.

Brent Sohngen: Yeah. Latin America, not surprisingly, has a little bit of everything, but one of the big things it does have is a growing set of Indigenous and local communities that are empowered by the government to manage the landscape—something like 300 million hectares, or maybe up to 350 million hectares right now. Obviously, Brazil is the biggest, but it's really all over Latin America where communities have been invested with the resources and are able to take ownership of them and manage them.

And when they do that, by and large, we see that they've been successful at slowing deforestation compared to other places out there that are not so managed. It's pretty impressive to see.

We think the lesson there is that, when individuals have a property right—and by individuals, I mean individual communities, as well as single individuals—but when people have a property, it's a really powerful institution.

When that property right is respected, and they're able to act on it and manage it, then more times than not, they'll protect the resource that's there and use it effectively to make money, but also to protect the actual resource itself. We see that time and time again, and one of the best examples for Douglas and me was the case in the Maya Biosphere Reserve, where we spent a significant amount of time conducting research on the communities there who were given property rights to protect the forest. They're limited property rights, right? They're not allowed to cut the whole forest down and convert it over to agriculture.

So, part of the sort of limitation on that property right is the government says, “We'll let you manage this forest as long as you manage it under a sustainable system, and you can take out both timber and non-timber forest products, and you can do that as long as you're willing to do that and not convert it over to agricultural land. Then, you can continue doing that for the next 20 years. Then, we'll reevaluate, and maybe you'll get another 20-year extension after that.”

It's a super interesting system, and the evidence that we were able to put together through surveys of the communities and also other folks who lived in the area, and also with some of the satellite data that we were able to find for the region was that those communities were super successful in reducing deforestation. Not only that, but when we were able to compare incomes for individuals in the communities that had the forestry rights versus individuals who lived in the same cities but weren't part of the community forestry operations, their incomes were higher.

Those who lived in the community forestry operations or were part of those organizations had higher incomes on average. So it did suggest that these were basically welfare-enhancing institutions. Not only did they slow down deforestation and provide a public good, but they also enhance the income and welfare of the individuals who are participating in them.

Kristin Hayes: This is great. I really appreciate the specific examples, too, and maybe I can ask you just one sort of follow-up question on that. I guess I want to make sure that our listeners and, frankly, myself, understand the shift that happened there, as well. Previously, this land that you mentioned in the most recent example that you mentioned was completely managed by the government. Is that right?

Brent Sohngen: Yeah. The Maya Biosphere Reserve is a super interesting area. It's the northern part of Guatemala. It's the Petén region. If you look at the Yucatan Peninsula, which is in part of Mexico, but there's a big chunk of Guatemala that juts up into the Yucatan. That area is historically a huge Maya civilization. They lived there in pre-Columbian times. It's an area with a massive amount of cultural history for the region, but it’s also the largest intact rainforest and the furthest-north intact rainforest area.

There’s a lot of biological diversity there. This is recognized and has been recognized by people in the environmental community and by the Guatemalans, the Mexicans, etc. It's a place that has been of avid interest to protect for years and years and years. But in the '90s, there was a lot of discussion about how to protect it. Some interests wanted to turn it into a protected reserve. That was much more popular back in the '80s and '90s.

But other interests recognized that, because there were at least three or four communities that have been living in that area for many, many years and managing the resource sustainably for many, many years, that maybe making a protected area would disadvantage them, and they'd already been successful. So, why not try this model more broadly?

So, the Guatemalans, with help from other countries; USAID development agencies; and, I think, Germany and Great Britain, there was an effort to create this Maya Biosphere Reserve. It's a really unique institution up there. They basically took some of the land and created national parks. They have one national park—Tikal is the most famous one. It has a lot of the Mayan temples that have been uncovered. When Europeans first came to the area, most of the temples and Mayan reserves and Mayan culture there was covered up by the rainforest.

It had not been used for 500 years or something like that. It's covered up. And there was a huge effort in that area to uncover it and make it accessible as a national park. It's an amazing national park that many, many people in Guatemala and from other parts of the world go and see every year, where you can walk through and see these massive temples that people built thousands of years ago.

They created these national parks. They also then took some of the land and created concessions for the communities that lived in the area to use. There were three types of concessions. One were these concessions for groups that had long inhabited the area. So, the Uaxactun and Carmelita were two groups that had been there for years and years and years. In fact, Uaxactun is famous for … It was a place where the Wrigley Company got its Chiclets; its original latex material for making gum for 30 or 40 years before they came up with synthetic alternatives to it.

These two areas were long-inhabited communities. Then, there were places that were uninhabited, but there were some towns nearby where they had a couple of lumber mills. What they did is work with a number of groups to give them rights to go up and manage those forests even though they wouldn't live in them. They were noninhabited community concessions on the eastern edge there, and then some other concessions were recently inhabited ones. These were groups that had come into the area more recently and migrated mainly as a result of the civil war for the south in Guatemala that was having a bigger effect for the south in Guatemala.

They had been recent migrants to the area. Some of those groups also got community concession rates. It turns out that the long-inhabited ones worked great. The concession model worked really well. The uninhabited areas also worked really well at keeping deforestation from happening. The recently inhabited ones worked a little less well. The concession model worked pretty well at reducing deforestation, but those groups had bigger troubles with just keeping together and managing themselves. It's taken longer to really make that system work in that area. It hasn’t been perfect, but there was a lot of learning that happened.

Then, the government had to make some hard decisions, too. They had a national park up on the northwestern part of the Petén, which is right along the border with Mexico, and that was the area that they just seemed to have ceded to the drug lords and to others to go in and just go do whatever they wanted.

The government said, "We're going to really work hard to protect these other places and help these communities work, and in this area, we're just not going to." But the local ownership there was just amazing to see. Douglas and I both spent some time with a number of these communities, and it's amazing to see how excited they were about the work that they were doing. You would go into a room with a group of them, the excitement and the willingness to explain what they were doing and how it was working … to take a walk through a lumber mill, and to recognize that this is really cool stuff that they're doing. Uaxactun—they’re talking about using that to redo the planking on the Brooklyn Bridge, because it is sustainable wood material. Pretty cool stuff.

Kristin Hayes: I know we're getting close to the end of our time here, and I feel like there are many other things that I could and should ask you, but I want to go back quickly to something you mentioned right at the beginning, which was about lessons to draw from the work that you've done in Latin America that might be transferable to other parts of the world. Can you say a little bit more about which lessons and how much you think that transferability applies?

Brent Sohngen: Sure. One of them is just that demography is the other understated thing besides the market forces. Demography is a story that's emerging everywhere, right, which is that—

Kristin Hayes: Birth rates are dropping.

Brent Sohngen: Yeah, birth rates are dropping, and that's happening everywhere; in Africa, a little slower than other places. But even in Africa, you can see strong evidence that birth rates have declined dramatically in the last few years and are on the downswing there. If you add that together with these market forces that we were talking about earlier, it's an exciting time for forests in the world. We’re trying to pay a little more attention to the institutions that affect forests, i.e., open access, and trying to manage the property-right element of it by really going back and thinking about how we can engage local communities with their forest assets.

That presents a really exciting opportunity, and it's already happening in other places. In Asia, in particular, we see lots of community forestry, especially South Asia being super successful: places like Nepal, Bhutan, etc, where there's a lot of good success with community forestry. Then, Southeast Asia is starting to merge there, as well.

So, I think it's an exciting time. Rather than focusing on a whole huge, broad set of issues, really getting back to the basics of thinking through the property-right question and trying to … Obviously, you can't have property rights in places where institutions aren't going to respect those, but where the institutions and the governmental institutions are going to be willing to accept the property rights of local communities, I think you can really take advantage of that.

There's huge opportunity worldwide for this. That's just my take. To me, the most exciting part of that is actually that, if we can do that—it's not an optimal solution, but a helpful solution—these payments for ecosystem services can really be used; that is, if local organizations and local groups have the property right to the system, why shouldn't they also have access to the capital markets to help make the management of the natural asset—in particular, the carbon asset—on those sites be used for carbon rather than for other purposes?

To me, what's really exciting is that if we can have more property rights, and we can get the link to these payments for ecosystem services, especially through private markets and private capital sources, I think it's an exciting time for forests.

Kristin Hayes: Thank you. I have to say, in a world where so much environmental news can be really disheartening and dismaying, I really appreciate the optimism and enthusiasm. Hopefully, that's a good encouragement for people to check out the book, as well, and learn a little bit more about what draws you to that enthusiastic conclusion.

Brent, this has been great. I really appreciate you taking the time to talk to me. I do want to close with our regular Top of the Stack feature and invite you to recommend some more good content that you think our listeners might be interested in, of any media type. It could be on this topic or otherwise. Brent, what's on the top of your stack?

Brent Sohngen: That's a great question. I just recently read A Wild Idea by Jonathan Franklin, which is about this guy, Douglas Tompkins, who went down to Chile and protected all this land. It was just a super interesting read. Jonathan Franklin is a fantastic writer, too, so I would encourage people to have a look at that one.

The other one is on my list, and people have told me it's a long read, but I have to read it: The Overstory by Richard Powers. That's been out for a few years. It's been something I've wanted to read, so I have it in my Kindle right now. I'm going to get on it if I find some time. But everyone has told me it's a pretty long one, so I got to set aside some time for that, I think.

Kristin Hayes: Yeah, agreed. It is a long one, and the complexity of the narratives weaving together is incredibly impressive, but it does take a little bit of focus, so that sounds great.

Brent, thank you again. I really appreciate it. Again, we'll encourage folks to take a look at the book, and I look forward to connecting again soon.

Brent Sohngen: Great. Thanks a lot.

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