Tropical Asian Deforestation and Sustainability Prospects

The purpose of this paper is to review tropical Asian forest resources, to find out the underlying causes of deforestation in the region and to analyze prospects for deforestation and sustainable forest management. Asia has 48% of all tropical rainforests, but also other moist closed forests, such as teak and sal forests, open forests and some mangrove and bamboo forests. In 1981–1990 the annual average tropical deforestation rate in Asia was 3.9 million hectares. We estimated eight models in order to explain deforestation. We found empirical evidence that increasing population pressure and income are expanding deforestation, and that increasing deforestation costs and risks are decreasing deforestation. We made three simple scenario models. According to our scenario prospect deforestation will reduce the total tropical Asian forest area by about 38% until 2020.