Investigating the Impact of Agricultural Land Losses on Deforestation: Evidence From a Peri-urban Area in Canada

Although deforestation has been studied extensively in tropical regions and developing countries, research focusing on developed countries in a peri-urban setting is scarce. This study helps to fill this gap in the literature by investigating the drivers of forest-to-agriculture conversion in one of the largest metropolitan areas and its surrounding peri-urban regions in Canada, focusing on the effect of farmland losses to development. A unique contribution of this study is that we take into account the heterogeneous forestland availability in the empirical investigation, which makes the estimation more realistic and accurate. Generalized spatial two-stage least square (GS2SLS) models are adopted to control for spillover effects from deforestation activities in neighboring areas and also to solve the potential endogeneity problem resulted from simultaneous land-use changes. Key findings include the following: agricultural land losses are an important driver for deforestation, and the magnitude of impact increases as the availability of forest-cover increases; population growth hinders the process of deforestation; high road density encourages forestland conversion to agriculture. Future policy-design shall find it helpful to incorporate the agricultural land expansion onto forestland due to land development when evaluating the social, economic, and environmental consequences of urbanization. (C) 2017 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.