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Household demographic change and land use/land cover change in the Brazilian Amazon

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Abstract

Demographic interest in population and environment has grown in recent decades. One of the most prominent research areas in this tradition addresses the impact of population on land use and land cover change. Building on this tradition, we examine the effects of household demographic composition on land use and land cover on small farms in two study areas in the Brazilian Amazon. Fixed effects regression models of used area and forested area show few consistent effects of changes in household demography on land use and land cover change. Effects are inconsistent with the household life cycle model that currently dominates the literature on household demographic effects in frontiers. Changes in the number of children and women, particularly young women, have the most significant effects on land use and land cover change. We conclude by arguing that households strategically access cash for investment in agriculture and that specific strategies are determined by economic and institutional context.

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Notes

  1. Sampled properties were not replaced with alternates because of owners refusing to participate. In this wave of data collection we had no farmers refuse to participate in our study.

  2. SS3 is the most advanced secondary growth, while SS1 is the least. In 1991, the classification also included a category for sugar cane, capturing a short-lived explosion of sugar cane cultivation during the operation of a factory for converting sugar cane to alcohol. These areas were subsequently abandoned or converted to other uses, primarily cocoa. We do not use this category in our analyses.

  3. The differences among the classifications reflect both differences in the ability of the research team to distinguish categories and differences in the initial uses of the classified imagery.

  4. For ease of analysis, we use the xtreg, fe command in Stata. We replicated the results using two other methods: using OLS regressions with dummy variables for all households and using OLS regressions of deviations in a given dependent variable from the household mean on deviations in the independent variables from their household means. These methods all produced the same coefficient estimates for the effects of household composition, though the OLS using deviations method produced smaller standard errors because it did not account for the degrees of freedom lost because of the household fixed effects.

  5. In these models and models of other dependent variables, we tested for collinearity and found no problems. The maximum variance inflation factor for any variable in any of the models was 2.94 in Santarém and 1.96 in Altamira.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Anthropological Center for Training and Research on Global Environmental Change, Department of Sociology, Indiana University, Bloomington, IN, USA

    Leah K. VanWey

  2. Anthropological Center for Training and Research on Global Environmental Change and NEPO, University of Campinas, Campinas, Sao Paulo, Brazil

    Álvaro O. D’Antona

  3. Anthropological Center for Training and Research on Global Environmental Change, Department of Anthropology , Indiana University, Bloomington, IN, USA

    Eduardo S. Brondízio

Authors
  1. Leah K. VanWey
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  2. Álvaro O. D’Antona
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  3. Eduardo S. Brondízio
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Correspondence to Leah K. VanWey.

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VanWey, L.K., D’Antona, Á.O. & Brondízio, E.S. Household demographic change and land use/land cover change in the Brazilian Amazon. Popul Environ 28, 163–185 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11111-007-0040-y

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