Funded by a NASA ROSES research grant from the Land-Cover and Land-Cover Change (LCLUC) Program awarded to Pontus Olofsson, an interdisciplinary research team has for three years studied environmental changes in the country of Georgia following the collapse of the Soviet Union. A titled Exploring natural and social drivers of forest degradation in post-Soviet Georgia was recently published as part of this research. Previous studies by the team have shown that forest degradation – a reduction in forest biomass but not to the point of land-cover change – has been the largest land change process in Georgia over the last thirty years.
The prevailing narrative is that legal and illegal cutting of trees for fuelwood is primarily responsible for this process. The research team combined newly available remote sensing-based information, statistical data, and historical institutional change data to examine socioeconomic drivers of forest degradation. They found that higher winter temperature and drought are associated with higher degradation at the regional scale, while major institutional changes and drought are associated with higher forest degradation at the national level. Access to natural gas, the major energy alternative to fuelwood, had no significant association with degradation.
The results challenge the narrative that poverty and a lack of alternative energy infrastructure drive forest degradation and suggest that government policies banning household fuelwood cutting. The paper is an open access publication that is available for download here: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.gloenvcha.2023.102775.
