Biodiversity Loss Through Tropical Deforestation: The Role of Timber Production and Trade

Abstract

Biological diversity, or biodiversity for short, is essential to the provision of a wide array of biological resources and ecological services. Some level of biodiversity is therefore necessary to ensure the functioning and resilience of ecosystems on which not only human production and consumption, but also existence, depends. Concern over the rapid depletion and degradation of the world’s biological resources, and the implications of this loss for the global biosphere and human welfare, has been growing in recent years. As much as 25% of the world’s species present in the mid-1980’s may be extinct by the year 2015 or soon thereafter [UNEP, 1992]. A major danger is that the continuing loss of our biological wealth will leave us with not only a smaller, but also a much less varied, stock of global biological resources.³

¹ This paper is based on Burgess [1993].

² I would like to thank Edward Barbier and Charles Perrings for their comments and advice on this paper. I also wish to thank two anonymous referees for comments on an earlier draft of this paper.