Assessing risks and opportunities for tropical forests in the face of sustainable development

Understanding how countries’ future development pathways could affect forests can help to avoid negative impacts and instead promote positive ones. Exploring this topic requires knowledge of which areas of the development agenda are likely to show the greatest progress, and how these expected changes relate to the drivers of deforestation and forest degradation that are currently affecting forests, or which may emerge as result of development-related changes. Based on this information, researchers, stakeholders and decisionmakers can engage in discussions to inform further research and interventions. We present an assessment framework that draws upon a range of data types to identify specific components of the development agenda that are likely to be of greatest relevance to forest conservation at the national level. We then assess the potential magnitude and likelihood of imminent changes in these areas over the short- to medium-term. We use this framework to assess 48 tropical countries, providing insights into the areas of sustainable development that are most likely to provide risks, opportunities or enabling conditions for forest conservation across much of the tropics. Our findings suggest that, across much of the tropics, ongoing risks to forests associated with agriculture, transport infrastructure and urban infrastructure could worsen, and that new risks from energy infrastructure could emerge. Opportunities relating to poverty reduction, tourism, and industry, among others, will require care to ensure that associated progress results in positive rather than negative forest impacts. Enabling conditions associated with, inter alia, improved education, inclusive decision-making, and effective governance, still have much room for improvement, and the anticipated likelihood of imminent progress in these areas varies between countries and regions. We discuss the implications of our findings for policymakers and development agencies, and consider potential future applications of our assessment protocol.Author summary: Forest conservation is a global priority that is affected by interactions with other areas of human progress. Some aspects of human development can hinder forest conservation, others can help to facilitate it, and yet others can have mixed (i.e. positive and/or negative) implications. For 48 tropical countries, we consider 24 Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) targets with previously documented implications for forest conservation. For each, we assess the amount of remaining progress to be made (a proxy for magnitude of potential impacts), and the likelihood that imminent progress will actually occur. We highlight agriculture and infrastructure as areas likely to exacerbate ongoing (or cause emerging) risks; poverty reduction, tourism and industry as areas that could provide mixed outcomes; and clean fuels, agricultural employment, migration management and settlement planning as areas that require greater efforts to ensure that forest conservation efforts are as effective as possible. However, as our findings vary between countries, we encourage national-level interpretation of our results to develop context-specific policies. This work is among the first efforts to assess potential SDG-forest interactions in an easy-to-interpret manner, and can aid policymakers to consider the forest-specific implications of anticipated national development trajectories, and to act accordingly.