Deforestation disrupts hydrological processes, climate, biogeochemical cycling, and socioenvironmental dynamics. It can lead to irreversible losses of biodiversity, natural capital, and rural livelihoods, while favoring an unsustainable use of natural resources and enhancing unbalanced relationships between private benefits and public losses associated with land clearance. Deforestation is a disturbance because it leads to biomass losses over timescales much shorter than those needed for forest regeneration. In some cases recovery is not possible because the disturbance induces a shift in forest ecosystems to a permanently deforested state by impacting the availability of resources and environmental conditions that are necessary for forest regeneration.

According to the 2010 Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) Forest Resource Assessment, forests cover 41 billion hectares, or 31% of the global land surface, yet used to cover nearly 50% of the global land surface 8,000 years ago. While the current rate of deforestation has decreased since the 1990s from 16 million ha yr−1 to 13 million ha yr−1, it remains relatively high. Deforestation alters the coupled natural and human systems with important impacts on the potential for forests to regenerate. Understanding these impacts is also important in light of international programs that seek to provide financial incentives for reduced deforestation and have an estimated market potential of U.S. $10 billion.

This book is motivated by the need for a comprehensive cross-disciplinary analysis of the existing literature on global deforestation. We review the geography of deforestation, analyze the major drivers and effects of forest loss, and examine theories as well as empirical evidence on how forests affect their natural environment. We stress how forest removal may cause the loss of important ecosystem functions, leading to a permanent and nearly irreversible shift to a treeless state. We investigate the biotic-abiotic feedbacks that determine the stability and resilience of forest ecosystems and analyze the socioeconomic processes underlying current patterns of deforestation. While doing so, we review a large number of recent studies on this body of literature and synthesize information across disciplines, thereby bridging the physical and biological sciences with the social sciences.

This analysis addresses a broad readership of ecologists, hydrologists, economists, biogeochemists, geographers, resource analysts, and policy makers whose work is related to deforestation. As such, it was written with the goals of readability and accessibility by both social and natural scientists.