Background to this series of lecture notes 

The lecture notes were developed on the basis of the experiences of the Alternatives to Slash and Burn (ASB) consortium. This consortium was set up to gain a better understanding of the current land use decisions that lead to rapid conversion of tropical forests, shifting the forest margin, and of the slow process of rehabilitation and development of sustainable land use practices on lands deforested in the past. The consortium aims to relate local activities as they currently exist to the global concerns that they raise, and to explore ways by which these global concerns can be more effectively reflected in attempts to modify local activities that stabilise forest margins. 

The Rio de Janeiro Environment Conference of 1992 identified deforestation, desertification, ozone depletion, atmospheric CO2 emissions and biodiversity as the major global environmental issues of concern. In response to these concerns, the ASB consortium was formed as a system-wide initiative of the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR), involving national and international research institutes. ASB’s objectives are the development of improved land-use systems and policy recommendations capable of alleviating the pressures on forest resources that are associated with slash-and-burn agricultural techniques. Research has been mainly concentrated on the western Amazon (Brazil and Peru), the humid dipterocarp forests of Sumatra in Indonesia, the drier dipterocarp forests of northern Thailand in mainland Southeast Asia, the formerly forested island of Mindanao (the Philippines) and the Atlantic Congolese forests of southern Cameroon.

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