Search Results (2)

Indigenous territories in Amazonia sustain forest cover through the practice of swidden-fallow agriculture, yet declining land availability threatens both the ecological sustainability of this agricultural system and its contributions to community livelihoods. While scholars recognize land scarcity’s potential to drive transformations in shifting cultivation systems, we lack a systematic understanding of how local institutional frameworks shape heterogeneous responses to resource constraints. This study examines how land access mechanisms, distribution dynamics and property regimes among Indigenous communities mediate experiences of and adaptations to land scarcity in the Peruvian Amazon. We conducted a comparative case study of Solidaridad and Tamboruna, two land-scarce Indigenous communities in Peru’s Napo River basin, employing mixed methods including household surveys (n = 74), plot-level assessments, and qualitative interviews with community leaders. Our findings reveal three critical pathways through which institutions mediate scarcity outcomes. First, land access mechanisms determine whether scarce resources produce equitable constraint or acute land inequality. Second, land use intensification emerges not from scarcity alone but from accumulated inequality and household labor capacity, with land accumulated over lifecycles showing stronger associations with management practices than initial endowments. Third, where scarcity manifests as extreme polarization, it precipitates renegotiation of land property norms shaped by Indigenous sociability and moral economies, defying straightforward trajectories toward either resource privatization or collective governance. These results demonstrate that land scarcity produces divergent trajectories mediated by community-specific institutions, with swidden-fallow systems likely diminishing their capacity to sustain forest regeneration in Indigenous communities where scarcity leads to acute land inequality. Rather than uniform solutions, sustainability policy must therefore tailor interventions to local institutional contexts—prioritizing territorial expansion, facilitating communities’ own governance development, and supporting household adaptive capacity to resource scarcity. Full article

Information on the distribution, area and extent of swidden agriculture landscape is necessary for implementing the program of Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD), biodiversity conservation and local livelihood improvement. To our knowledge, explicit spatial maps and accurate area data on swidden agriculture remain surprisingly lacking. However, this traditional farming practice has been transforming into other profit-driven land use, like tree plantations and permanent cash agriculture. Swidden agriculture is characterized by a rotational and dynamic nature of agroforestry, with land cover changing from natural forests, newly-cleared swiddens to different-aged fallows. The Operational Land Imager (OLI) onboard the Landsat-8 satellite has visible, near-infrared and shortwave infrared bands, which are sensitive to the changes in vegetation cover, land surface moisture content and soil exposure, and therefore, four vegetation indices (VIs) were calculated, including the Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI), the Normalized Difference Moisture Index (NDMI), the Normalized Burn Ratio (NBR) and the Soil Adjusted Vegetation Index (SAVI). In this study, we developed a multi-step threshold approach that uses a combination of thresholds of four VIs and local elevation range (LER) and applied it to detect and map newly-opened swiddens and different-aged fallows using OLI imagery acquired between 2013 and 2015. The resultant Landsat-derived swidden agriculture maps have high accuracy with an overall accuracy of 86.9% and a Kappa coefficient of 0.864. The results of this study indicated that the Landsat-based multi-step threshold algorithms could potentially be applied to monitor the long-term change pattern of swidden agriculture in montane mainland Southeast Asia since the late 1980s and also in other tropical regions, like insular Southeast Asia, South Asia, Latin America and Central Africa, where swidden agriculture is still common. Full article