The role of land inequality in the poverty-forest loss nexus patterns: A case study from Chile

The predominant school of thought argues that poverty is a major cause of deforestation, but several studies have begun to contest this assumption by putting forward that a complex web of factors influences this connection and that multi-patterned nexuses can exist. We explore these nexuses taking southern Chile as a case study and using a Path Analysis for modelling. We relied on secondary data at the land property and municipality levels to construct the exogenous (land inequality, farm and forestry subsidies, and firewood consumption) and endogenous variables of the model (poverty, native forest loss, non-native tree afforestation, ecosystem services supply), which runs at the municipality scale (n = 147). We obtained a very good model adjustment as indicated by common goodness of fit measures. The model's path coefficients showed that land inequality (measured with the Gini coefficient) had a positive direct effect on poverty and forest loss. In turn, poverty had a negative direct effect on forest loss, whereas forest loss had a total negative effect on poverty. Thus, poverty per se does not cause forest loss or vice versa, and rather than a single poverty-forest loss nexus, "many-patterned" nexuses arise. We discus three of these patterns, namely i) development that aggravates poverty, ii) land inequality that aggravates forest loss and poverty, and iii) land inequality that "helps" the cause of forest conservation. These results suggest that policies that seek to solve poverty (e.g., farm subsidies) will not necessarily help prevent forest loss, but neither will neoliberal forest and conservation policies alone. As the SDGs state, solving inequality seems to be a necessary condition for both alleviating poverty and ensuring forest conservation.